I write this article as a long-term investigator into psychology, health-related behavior, and claims of the paranormal. The article concerns an orchestrated saga of intellectual dishonesty by Professor Hans J. Eysenck, late of King’s College London, and two of his acolytes: medical sociologist and therapist Ronald Grossarth-Maticek and the late Cambridge University psychologist Carl L. Sargent. This story will send shudders down the spines of many other Eysenck acolytes, but it is a story that must be told. The scientific record needs to be corrected and Eysenck’s false claims excised.

Dramatis Personae

At the time of his death in 1997, Eysenck was the third most cited psychologist in the world—only slightly behind Sigmund Freud and Jean Piaget. Eysenck’s career was mired in controversy for his racist views on the genetics of intelligence, his acceptance of tobacco company funding to support his claim that personality is a more significant cause of cancer and heart disease than smoking, his advocacy of the tenuous scientific evidence on astrology, and his one-sided, credulous defense of parapsychology.

The three parties to this story practiced wishful thinking, bias, and willful deceit in equal measure. The main actor, Hans J. Eysenck, today stands accused of dozens of “unsafe” publications (more on that presently) and of fake science on an industrial scale. The second, Ronald Grossarth-Maticek, served as a kind of “sorceror’s apprentice,” providing Eysenck with copious quantities of impossible data; he remains in practice in Heidelberg, Germany. In return, Eysenck provided Grossarth-Maticek with an unvalidated certificate of qualification in behavior therapy (see https://www.ruprecht.de/2020/01/28/documents-from-the-property-of-ronald-grossarth-maticek/). The third, Carl L. Sargent, hero-worshipped Eysenck but, following credible accusations of fraud, had to leave his post at Cambridge University to seek another career in role-playing computer games. Meanwhile, Sargent had written four coffee-table books with Eysenck acclaiming the wonders of parapsychology and psychic powers.

Before we get to Eysenck’s and Sargent’s support of parapsychology, a much greater scandal has hit the headlines: allegations of data manipulation and fake scientific and medical claims in multiple dozens of “unsafe” publications. The journal that I edit, the Journal of Health Psychology, published Anthony Pelosi’s (2019) exposé of a series of impossible findings that had been reported by Eysenck in the 1980s. My supporting editorial included an Open Letter to the Principal of King’s College London, Professor Byrne, seeking a full investigation into H.J. Eysenck (Marks 2019). King’s College responded by running an enquiry that reached the conclusion that twenty-six of Eysenck’s publications were “unsafe” (King’s College London 2019). To date, there have been fourteen retractions and seventy-one “expressions of concern” on papers dating as far back as 1946 (for more on this, see the Retraction Watch database at retractiondatabase.org). News of the scandal broke in the Guardian (Boseley 2019) and in Science (O’Grady 2020). The story doesn’t end here.

Intellectual Dishonesty

Hans Eysenck’s intellectual honesty was a subject of concern over many decades since suspicions surfaced in the 1960s. In those days, Eysenck’s book Uses and Abuses of Psychology was required reading for all psychology undergraduates, and it sold millions of copies. Little did we imagine that the great man himself would later be proved to be one of psychology’s principal abusers! One of my lecturers, Dr. Vernon Hamilton, revealed something about Eysenck’s laboratory ways.

Hamilton privately told me that his ex-boss, Eysenck, had cheated doing his data analyses. Hamilton didn’t stay long and was asked to leave the institution. This ultimately led to public conflict with Hamilton (Eysenck 1959). Similar unsettling concerns were raised by others working for or with Eysenck, and rumors circulated over several decades.

Anthony Pelosi (a psychiatrist at Priory Hospital Glasgow), with Louis Appleby, had critiqued Eysenck’s research in the early 1990s, but no action to sanction Eysenck was taken. The only society of professional psychologists in Britain, the British Psychological Society, washed its hands of Eysenck. The Society had got its fingers burned investigating the earlier massive data fraud by Sir Cyril Burt, and it was unwilling to risk another scandal by investigating Eysenck—who purely coincidentally(?) was Burt’s most famous student. Additionally, the 2019 King’s College investigation was half-baked. The unnamed investigating committee ignored Eysenck’s multiple single-authored publications even though they were based on the very same datasets supplied by Grossarth-Maticek, craftily diverting the blame away from Eysenck toward his ever-willing apprentice (Marks and Buchanan 2020).

Richard Smith, retired editor of the British Medical Journal, astutely remarked:

When forensic accountants detect fraud they assume that everything else from that person may well be fraudulent. Scientists tend to do the opposite—assuming that everything is OK until proved to be fraudulent. But as proving fraud is hard, lots of highly questionable material remains untouched. … I think of the example of R. K. Chandra, who was eventually found guilty not only of research fraud but also of financial and business fraud. His first paper established to be fraudulent was in 1989. Why, I ask myself, would you start being honest after you’d practiced fraud—yet hundreds of his papers are left unremarked, including unfortunately some that have been shown to be fraudulent. (Smith 2020)

A reliable source and long-time colleague of Eysenck states: “Eysenck was a mendacious charlatan. I base that not so much on his published fiction but his denial of the link between smoking and cancer was pernicious. His espousal of the beliefs of the John Birch Society was egregious … a grant had to be withdrawn and several researchers dismissed.” Not good.

Hans Eysenck’s Books on Parapsychology

A profile of Hans Eysenck based on his biography by Rod Buchanan and also on his parapsychology books with Carl Sargent provides insights into Eysenck’s intellectual values as a scientist and scholar. There were four books with Sargent, all having Eysenck as first author: Explaining the Unexplained: Mysteries of the Paranormal (1982), Know Your Own Psi-Q (1983), Explaining the Unexplained: Mysteries of the Paranormal (2nd Ed.) (1993), and Are You Psychic? (1996). The collaboration between the two authors began in the early 1980s in Sargent’s heyday at Cambridge and continued until 1996.

These four books present a distorted and strongly biased view that psychic powers are scientifically proven, when in fact evidence suggests exactly the opposite (Marks 2020).

Eysenck’s and Sargent’s naiveté and credulity are everywhere apparent. In one of their books, Sargent and Eysenck argued that the experiments of William Crookes with the medium Daniel Dunglas Home were evidence of supernatural powers. Yet critics such as Victor Stenger noted that “Crookes gullibly swallowed ploys such as this and allowed Home to call the shots … his desire to believe blinded him to the chicanery of his psychic subjects” (Stenger 1990, 156–157).

Eysenck and Sargent present a totally one-sided view of the scientific evidence on psi. They affect the naive and frankly idiotic stance that fraud and trickery do not need to be considered. David Nias and Geoffrey Dean (1986) summarized their criticisms of the Eysenck/Sargent books thus: “the failure of Eysenck and Sargent’s books to cover trickery and credulity is a serious deficiency” (368).

These books are among the most distorted and misleading accounts of parapsychological phenomena ever published by academic psychologists. The four books are a total disgrace, and how Eysenck had the gall to put his name to them—perhaps only to build his reputation as the fearless contrarian—is beyond imagination. In addition to the terrible scholarship, there is convincing evidence of scientific fraud by Sargent. How much Hans Eysenck knew about this, we will never know because Eysenck’s wife destroyed his papers after his death. However, Susan Blackmore’s report on Sargent’s fraud became public knowledge several years into the collaboration and years before the third and fourth books with Eysenck were published.

If Sargent had kept his trickery hidden from Eysenck, then Eysenck could have been an innocent party. In a partnership built over more than fourteen years, surely there would have been a conversation that included a question of the kind, “Oh, I hear you left Cambridge, why was that?” If, as seems likely, Sargent admitted the occurrence of some kind of experimental “error,” then Eysenck would have been party to covering up Sargent’s deceit. Did Eysenck imagine nobody would notice? Or perhaps he simply did not care. After all, that great Cambridge genius, Isaac Newton, had done the same kind of thing, and Eysenck saw no problem with a bit of data fudging. According to Eysenck, a genius does whatever is necessary to prove his or her theories, as he stated in one of his many potboilers.

Chronology of Events

A chronology of events shows how the career of this aspiring parapsychologist unfolded:

1979: The University of Cambridge awards Sargent a PhD, which he claims was the first awarded to a parapsychologist by this university.

1979: The Society for Psychical Research provides a grant to Susan Blackmore enabling her to visit Sargent’s lab at Cambridge in November. The original plan was to visit for a month. However, Blackmore was only able to stay eight days from November 22–30, 1979. Blackmore summarized her visit to Sargent’s lab this way:

[Sargent’s Ganzfeld] research was providing dramatically positive results for ESP in the GF and mine was not, so the idea was for me to learn from his methods in the hope of achieving similarly good results. … After watching several trials and studying the procedures carefully, I concluded that CS’s [Carl Sargent’s] experimental protocols were so well designed that the spectacular results I saw must either be evidence for ESP or for fraud. I then took various simple precautions and observed further trials during which it became clear that CS had deliberately violated his own protocols and in one trial had almost certainly cheated. I waited several years for him to respond to my claims and eventually they were published along with his denial. (Harley and Matthews 1987; Sargent 1987; see also Marks 2020).

1980: Sargent writes a monograph, Exploring Psi in the Ganzfeld. Parapsychological Monographs No 17.

1980: Sargent, Harley, Lane, and Radcliffe publish “Ganzfeld Psi Optimization in Relation to Session Duration” in Research in Parapsychology.

1981: Sargent and Matthews publish “Ganzfeld GESP Performance in Variable Duration Testing” in Journal of Parapsychology.

1982: Eysenck and Sargent publish their first book together, Explaining the Unexplained: Mysteries of the Paranormal.

1983: Eysenck and Sargent publish their second book, Know Your Own PSI-Q.

The Inevitable Downfall

1984: The Parapsychological Association Council asked Martin Johnson to head a committee to investigate Blackmore’s accusation of fraud by Sargent. My book Psychology and the Paranormal describes what happened next: “The Parapsychological Association (PA) invited CS to provide an account of the ‘errors’ that SB [Susan Blackmore] had reported, but he declined to offer any explanation. The PA President, Stanley Krippner, wrote to CS at four different addresses, but still received no reply. The PA’s ‘Sargent Case Report’ dated 10 December 1986 found that, in spite of strong reservations about CS’s randomisation technique, there was insufficient evidence that CS had used unethical procedures.”

Sargent was “reproved” for failing to respond to the Parapsychological Association’s request for information. However, Sargent had allowed his membership to lapse through non-payment of dues and was informed that, should he wish to renew his membership, his application would be considered with “extreme prejudice,” i.e., Sargent would be unlikely to be readmitted as a member.

The final report of this committee reprimanded Sargent for failing to respond to their request for information within a reasonable time.

1985: Sargent leaves Cambridge University and the parapsychology field (stated in the 2nd edition of Explaining the Unexplained: Mysteries of the Paranormal, 1993). Sargent moves into full-time authoring of game-books.

1987: Susan Blackmore’s 1979 “A Report of a Visit to Carl Sargent’s Laboratory” is finally published in Journal of the Society for Psychical Research.

1993: Undeterred by the report of cheating, Eysenck and Sargent publish their third book, Explaining the Unexplained: Mysteries of the Paranormal. (2nd ed.)

1996: Eysenck and Sargent publish their fourth book, Are You Psychic?: Tests & Games to Measure Your Powers, a revised version of Know Your Own Psi-Q.

The Hidden Truth

Two editions of the book by H.J. Eysenck and Sargent (1982, 1993) raise questions about how much Eysenck knew of the fraud accusations against Sargent in Blackmore’s Society for Psychical Research report of 1979. In the 1982 edition of the first book, the procedural problems with Sargent’s Ganzfeld research are not even mentioned. In the 1993 edition, the authors refer to “spirited exchanges on GF research” between Blackmore, Sargent and Harley (189).

However, the Ganzfeld evidence of psi is described by them as “very, very powerful indeed.” They do not mention the accusations of fraud against Sargent, his departure from Cambridge University, or his repeated noncooperation with the Parapsychology Association enquiry. I obtained an update from Susan Blackmore on her current thinking about her thirty-year-old allegation of fraud by Sargent and on psi research more generally, which I reproduce below. Here are Susan Blackmore’s answers to a few specific questions:

DM: Do you think, in the light of everything that has come to light, CS committed fraud at Cambridge? (Ideally, a yes or a no).

SB: Yes, at least on one specific trial.

DM: Do you think CS knowingly deceived anybody (including possibly himself) or was he simply a victim of confirmation bias/subjective validation?

SB: The former.

DM: Is there anything else you would like to say about research on psi?

SB: In the light of my decades of research on psi, and especially because of my experiences with the GF, I now believe that the possibility of psi existing is vanishingly small, though not zero. I am glad other people continue to study the subject because it would be so important to science if psi did exist. But for myself, I think doing any further psi research would be a complete waste of time. I would not expect to find any phenomena to study, let alone any that could lead us to an explanatory theory. I may yet be proved wrong of course. (Blackmore 2019)

Conclusions

With this history, we can establish the following facts and conclusions.

1. A pattern of data manipulation in Hans J. Eysenck’s and two of his collaborators’ research is evident over several decades. The earliest paper of concern was published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine in 1946. Following a recent exposure in the Journal of Health Psychology by Pelosi (2019) and an ensuing enquiry by King’s College London (2019), journals have retracted fourteen of Eysenck’s papers and published seventy-one expressions of concern.

2. A reliable source accused Eysenck of cheating with his data analyses as early as the 1960s. Eysenck’s colleagues and PhD students at that time publicly critiqued Eysenck’s laboratory methods, but no action was taken.

3. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Eysenck formed a long-term collaboration with Cambridge parapsychologist Carl Sargent. Although Carl Sargent had been accused of fraud in 1979, Eysenck publications with Sargent occurred over the period 1982–1993. These books grossly distorted the scientific evidence of the paranormal.

4. Anthony Pelosi and Louis Appleby (1992; 1993) and others raised serious questions about publications by Eysenck with R. Grossarth-Maticek. The authorities failed to respond.

5.  Anthony Pelosi (2019) again voiced his concerns. My own editorial (Marks 2019) appealing to Kings College London to open an enquiry finally led to concrete action. Twenty-five publications by H.J. Eysenck and R. Grossarth-Maticek were deemed by Kings College London to be unsafe, yet the true number of unsafe publications is most likely well over 100.

6.  As suspicions strengthened over a seventy-five-year period from the mid-1940s, torpor and complacency in the academic system enabled research malpractice to continue, not only Eysenck’s, Grossarth-Maticek’s, and Sargent’s, but across the board.

7. The currently available systems for regulating research integrity and malpractice in the United Kingdom are an abject failure. A totally new approach is required. An Independent National Research Integrity Ombudsperson needs to be established to significantly improve the governance of academic research. Perhaps then, future Hans Eysencks can be stopped in their tracks.

 

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References

• Blackmore, S. 2019. Personal communication with the author (August 1).
• Boseley, S. 2019. Work of renowned U.K. psychologist Hans Eysenck ruled ‘unsafe.’ The Guardian (October 11). Available online at https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/oct/11/work-of-renowned-uk-psychologist-hans-eysenck-ruled-unsafe.
• Eysenck, H.J. 1959. Anxiety and hysteria—a reply to Vernon Hamilton. British Journal of Psychology 50(1): 64–69.
• Harley, T., and G. Matthews. 1987. Cheating, psi, and the appliance of science: A reply to Blackmore. Journal of the Society for Psychical Research 54(808): 199–207.
• King’s College London. 2019. King’s College London enquiry into publications authored by Professor Hans Eysenck with Professor Ronald Grossarth-Maticek. Available online at https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/statements/hans-eysenck.
• Marks, D.F. 2019. The Hans Eysenck affair: Time to correct the scientific record. Journal of Health Psychology 24(4): 409–420.
• ———. 2020. Psychology and the Paranormal. Exploring Anomalous Experience. London: Sage Publications.
• Marks, D.F., and R.D. Buchanan. 2020. King’s College London’s enquiry into Hans J Eysenck’s ‘unsafe’ publications must be properly completed. Journal of Health Psychology 25(1): 3–6
• Nias, D.K.B., and G.A. Dean. 1986. Astrology and parapsychology. In S. Modgil and C. Modgil (eds.). 2012. Hans Eysenck: Consensus and Controversy Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 357–371.
• O’Grady, C. 2020. Famous psychologist faces posthumous reckoning. Science 369(6501): 233–234. Available online at https://science.sciencemag.org/content/369/6501/233.full.
• Pelosi, A.J. 2019. Personality and fatal diseases: Revisiting a scientific scandal. Journal of Health Psychology 24(4): 421–439.
• Pelosi, A.J., and L. Appleby. 1992. Psychological influences on cancer and ischaemic heart disease. British Medical Journal 304(6837): 1295.
• ———. 1993. Personality and fatal diseases. British Medical Journal 306: 1666–1667.
• Sargent, C.L. 1987. Sceptical fairytales from Bristol. Journal of the Society for Psychical Research 54(808): 208–218.
• Smith, R. 2020. Personal communication with the author.
• Stenger, V. 1990. Physics and Psychics: The Search for a World Beyond the Senses. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.

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Related Articles in Skeptical Inquirer

These previous articles in SI deal, in part, with Eysenck collaborator Carl Sargent’s questionable papers:

• Susan Blackmore, “Another Scandal for Psychology: Daryl Bem’s Data Massage,” November/December 2019
• Susan Blackmore, “Daryl Bem and Psi in the Ganzfeld,” January/February 2018
• Susan Blackmore, “Psi in Psychology,” Summer 1994
• Susan Blackmore, “The Elusive Open Mind: Ten Years of Negative Research in Parapsychology,” Spring 1987