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Jill Arnold's avatar

Thank you for this book -I look forward to reading it for all the ways it will vindicate my *longstanding view that this man was a scandalous charlatan -definitely not a genius! *When I was a first year as a young but mature enough psychology student to question things,(1965/6 this man came to give a lecture at the university and also a Q&A talk in the Psychology department. Up close from the front row he looked surprisingly disreputable but worse - after looking down at me and several other keen but coincidentally blonde (yes that too) minority of young women - he spoke directly to us saying that he was pleased to be there -but couldn’t understand why we were there… we could stay if we wanted to but.. Our dear Prof didn’t know what he meant but I did and shocked at the blatant insult I walked out and the others followed. Emperors knew clothes it may have been but in later studies it was even more obvious that his methods and claims were unsupportable and his views obnoxious.

I never cited his work and would always explain to my students later my reasons for this and how they should not do so nor use his inventories but to question and look further and better. In my Adult Education teaching the hidden scandal of Eysenck and his influence was a great example for many wide ranging topics of discussion (political social historical, geographical critical feminist etc) relating to psychological research and it’s influence. I’m glad we can now call time on all his dangerous nonsense!

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Paul Black's avatar

This might be an unanswerable question, but do you it’s likely there are other Eysenck equivalents out there, maybe smart enough to fly under the radar, but still poisoning the well?

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Helen Lewis's avatar

Undoubtedly. Thanks to great work by Data Colada and others, Harvard just ended its association with Francesca Gino, a really high profile ethics and behaviour researcher, for data fraud. Her 2018 book was called … Rebel Talent: Why It Pays to Break the Rules at Work and in Life

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Paul Black's avatar

STOP IT, YOU’RE JUST MAKING STUFF UP NOW

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pseudonyms for fun and safety's avatar

The safest job in any academic publisher right now is research integrity. The amount of fraud going on is astonishing.

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Chris Saville's avatar

I guess maybe where these stories are a bit different is that what Gino is accused of seems more consistent with wanting a neat story and a cool effect, whereas Eysenck's (alleged? I don't know the case as well) behaviour sounds like it was driven by a more ideological project.

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Jill Arnold's avatar

Yes… but cannot think of anyone with extent/depth of Eysenck’s influence/teach etc. but critical approaches to all major claims to definitive ‘explanations’ are needed.

For example: over-simplistic ideas of biologically determined categories stages and hierachies that ignore up to date neuroscience research. Bad metaphors have a lot to answer for too!

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Mark Osborn's avatar

Great extract and very enjoyable read. I lost count of the times that I mentally cried, "What! No way!" I'll be ordering a copy of The Genius Myth to be further entertained and infuriated.

Cheers.

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fortuna desperata's avatar

"The name of Hans Eysenck is little remembered now..."

I feel very old reading this blog. Eysenck was big when I was growing up in the 70s and 80s, published in slim blue Pelican paperbacks, which were very prestigious.

Some time around 1980 our teacher got us to take Eysenck's personality test, the one that categorised subjects according to Galen's four humours (choleric, sanguine, melancholy, phlegmatic). It's a long time ago now, but I remember the survey questions included at least one about stereotypes of Jews, which I found offensive, which indicated I was introverted according to Eysenck, which struck me as odd - what if I was an extrovert who thought racial stereotypes were offensive? (Or an extrovert Jew, for that matter).

Eysenck's views on race & IQ were popular with the kind of boys who thought apartheid was a Good Thing. Sounds like this stuff is coming back again, so well done for exposing its shaky foundations to a younger generation.

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Helen Lewis's avatar

The four humours! Cutting edge science, there.

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Sean Donnelly's avatar

My copy arrived this morning. Brought it into work (library) to cover it, as I suspect it will become very well thumbed (and will probably be added to the library).

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We are all born's avatar

"dismissed the idea that women are just as brilliant as men" ... I was doing a PGCert (Higher Education) in 2019 and a colleague challenged that the list of learning theorists we were given to research was all male. Another student (we were all already qualified in our own fields and just moving into HE) stated that the tutor (who had immediately acknowledged the error) couldn't include them if there just weren't any women. There was more than a sharp intake of breath!

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John's avatar

This is interesting, well written and valuable. Your book is excellent. Tony Pelosi sparkled at the many talks of his I attended when a trainee in Edinburgh and subsequently at various conferences when I was in practice. He’s a nice guy and modest about himself. Thanks for all the effort you have put into this.

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Derek Brown's avatar

I couldn’t agree more (as another psychiatrist who attended many of his talks) and nice to hear his name again. He definitely had an astute bullshit detector and was always ready to challenge the latest, often unproven, fads.

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Helen Lewis's avatar

I thought his cheerfulness was very notable -- he obviously cares very deeply about getting things right, but he also has an innate resilience and self-deprecation that means he's not too self-serious about it. Louis Appleby, his co-author, also bravely signed up to review the Tavistock's suicide rates after the ban on puberty blockers (and found no rise).

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James M. Boekbinder's avatar

Great piece. Pretty damning indictment of the whole review process!

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Helen Lewis's avatar

Yeah. If that interests you, both Stuart Ritchie’s Science Fictions and Jesse Singal’s The Quick Fix are very good on this

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pseudonyms for fun and safety's avatar

Peer review is only as good as the peers doing the reviewing. If someone has managed to build a cult of personality around themselves it is totally useless.

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Maev Mac Coille's avatar

Weirdly I have heard comments about the sunspot thing before - specifically that there was virtually no solar activity for about 30ish years during the 17th century…which lines up pretty neatly with the mini-Ice Age (and a period of significant political turmoil). Though the astronomer who mentioned this wasn’t sure if there was any link at all - more along the lines of “this is interesting.”

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Helen Lewis's avatar

Right, there's no causal mechanism anyone can suggest for why it's more than "huh, interesting coincidence".

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Maev Mac Coille's avatar

And I think it was more in the sense of “could this affect the climate” not an individual brain!

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Kate Cook's avatar

I wonder if there is an opposite effect, for those who are not treated as a genius but later mature into their strengths. From my observations, many of us go through different phases of recognition of genius depending in part on circumstances, in part on actualization.

Thank you for these provoking ideas.

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Graham Longbottom's avatar

Enjoyed the article.

Will be listening to " The Genius Myth' on audiobook (as I did with "Difficult Women" and "The Spark").

The Wayback Machine didn't seem to like your link for reference 4.

Incorrect link? Or forces at work removing the rebuttal again?...

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Helen Lewis's avatar

You can ask for stuff to be excluded from the WM, so maybe it's that.

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Blob Loblaws's avatar

It’s actually just that there were a couple of “%20”s in the url and an extra http, I deleted them and was able to load it:

https://web.archive.org/web/20250421021109/https://krebs-chancen.de/referenzen-und-gutachten/denunziation-englisch/

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Jill Arnold's avatar

Oh yes bad metaphors are also something that I discuss in classes.. opens up so many opportunities to encourage students to think about how much they can limit ideas, understanding etc.. steam engines and computers are good starting points :-)

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Sasha “Nelie” Chernykh's avatar

1. Thanks for the book, whatever it contains (I haven’t purchased it yet, as it’s difficult to shop anything in Western stores from Russia). So far, I’ve read critical materials about geniuses that solely address the lack of representation of women, BIPOC and non-Western people in the “genius” category; and also materials on the social construction of certain geniuses — Tia DeNora’s scientific book “Beethoven and the Construction of Genius: Musical Politics in Vienna, 1792–1803”, Charles Seife’s popular science book “Hawking Hawking: The Selling of a Scientific Celebrity” and Christian Forstner’s scientific article “The Making of a Genius: Richard P. Feynman”. I hope that “The Genius Myth” will provide a more comprehensive understanding of the genius myth.

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2.1. However, I’m not sure if the book considers topics I intended to write an article with a title like “Genius and Service to Society Are Incompatible? People Who Make the World Better Aren’t Called Geniuses”.

2.2. For example, see excerpts from “The Genius Myth”:

> I’m more comfortable writing about artists and scientists than musicians and athletes, so my examples skew towards the former.

> none on a list of the leading mathematicians, and none would be found among the 100 best-known sculptors, painters or dramatists

Are artists, musicians, athletes, sculptors, painters or dramatists the people who make the biggest contributions to solving social problems? Of course, there are people with an active civic position among them, but if they are called “geniuses”, it’s not for their civil actions, but for their main work as artists, musicians etc. At the same time, in most images of geniuses as in the sentences above, we don’t see reformers, revolutionaries, activists and lawyers of social movements, NGOs and trade unions, critical and investigative journalists, whistleblowers, and other agents of change — people who have dedicated their lives to serving society.

2.3. Genius scientists usually make discoveries in natural and formal sciences, such as physics and mathematics. Social scientists who reveal the functioning of our society are rarely called “geniuses”. The genius psychologists are scientists like Freud and Eysenck, but not social psychologists.

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3. Technical geniuses fall into two types. Firstly, entrepreneurs like Elon Musk. I wrote about Elon when he owned solely one Tesla factory; according to labor historian PhD Nelson Lichtenstein, Musk’s rhetoric already in those days “was the worst kind of caricature of a capitalist, like it’s 1898”. Also, such hypercapitalists employ engineers, programmers and other workers with advanced technical knowledge and skills, who are also sometimes called “geniuses” unlike, for example, workers who have developed the Lucas Plan. It would be nice if “The Genius Myth” addressed whether their activities, as argued in books like “The Bleeding Edge: Why Technology Turns Toxic in an Unequal World” by Bob Hughes, cause more harm than benefit to society, and if the harm is really high, then how appropriate to consider them geniuses.

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4. A related topic is the perception of the areas of activity with the geniuses and without them. For example, I faced that children who receive high grades at school are encouraged to become physicists, not sociologists — physics is considered a “serious science”, smart children are called “future Einsteins”. A teenager might aspire to reach the heights of genius and know little about “non-genial” alternatives. In popular culture, the series “The Big Bang Theory” about a genial physicist was a great success, but no such movies/series about social scientists.

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5.1. If someone has read “The Genius Myth” entirely, could you please tell, if it covers topics mentioned by me above:

1. Areas of activity that have and have no geniuses

2. Social activity of geniuses

3. Benefits of geniuses for society

4. Perception of areas of activity with and without geniuses

5.2. I doubt that a staff writer at “The Atlantic” would come to conclusions like “elites that shape public opinion can lavish praise on painters and athletes who don’t pose a threat to them, but not people who question and transform the existing order” and “for these elites, single rebels are safer and thus more likely to be deemed geniuses than organizers of collective actions”, but the book may contain some thoughts on the topics I have listed.

Thanks.

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Susan Ellis's avatar

Really interesting book. It helps to see what our own lives are about too. How far off the mark. Puts seing what a genius is in the real world of 2025. Thank you. Can't wait to read some more.

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David RJ Lloyd's avatar

staggerd & took a sharp intake of breath at the mad stats of male dominance in that context. great piece helen

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Fred Mellon's avatar

Great article, beautifully written. I never met Eysenck but did know a close relative of his, the source of a story I can’t repeat on a public forum but was yet another exemplar of his monstrous ego.

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Sarah Best's avatar

Thanks for sharing the extract.

What is it with some of these psychologists (or geniuses) and the fascination with numbers that link to age? Freud had a fear of the number 62 and thought he would die then.

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