Inquiry into eminent psychologist failed to list many unsafe papers, biographer claims

A report from King’s College London that listed 26 papers coauthored by the eminent psychologist Hans Eysenck as “unsafe” fell well short of the true target, Eysenck’s biographer has said.

The real total should be at least 88, said Rod Buchanan, an Australian writer and teacher whose 2010 biography of Eysenck is the most comprehensive study of the controversial figure whose personality and ideas dominated British psychology for so long.1

Eysenck’s critics have been calling for decades for the retraction of a series of papers he wrote that used data collected by the German sociologist Ronald Grossarth-Maticek. The King’s College report, compiled by an anonymous group at the college’s Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, singled out 26 papers coauthored by the two men, agreeing that …