Chapter 14 Eysenck’s Biologically Based Factor Theory 411Biography of Hans J. Eysenck
Hans Jurgen Eysenck was born in Berlin on March 4, 1916, the only child of a
theatrical family. His mother was Ruth Werner, a starlet at the time of Eysenck’s
birth. Ruth Werner later became a German silent film star under the stage name
of Helga Molander. Eysenck’s father, Anton Eduard Eysenck, was a comedian,
singer, and actor. Eysenck (1991b) recalled: “[I] saw very little of my parents, who
divorced when I was 4, and who had little feeling for me, an emotion I recipro-
cated” (p. 40).
After his parents’ divorce, Eysenck went to live with his maternal grand-
mother, who had also been in the theater, but whose promising career in opera was
cut short by a crippling fall. Eysenck (1991b) described his grandmother as “unself-
ish, caring, altruistic, and altogether too good for this world” (p. 40). Although his
grandmother was a devout Catholic, neither parent was religious, and Eysenck
grew up without any formal religious commitment (Gibson, 1981).
He also grew up with little parental discipline and few strict controls over
his behavior. Neither parent seemed interested in curtailing his actions, and his
grandmother had a quite permissive attitude toward him. This benign neglect is
exemplified by two incidents. In the first, his father had bought Hans a bicycle
and had promised to teach him to ride. “He took me to the top of a hill, told me
that I had to sit on the saddle and pump the pedals and make the wheels go round.
He then went off to release some balloons... leaving me to learn how to ride all
by myself” (Eysenck, 1997b, p. 12). In the second incident, an adolescent Eysenck
told his grandmother that he was going to buy some cigarettes, expecting her to
forbid it. However, his grandmother simply said: “If you like it, do it by all means”
(p. 14). According to Eysenck, environmental experiences such as these two have
little to do with personality development. To him, genetic factors have a greater
impact on subsequent behavior than do childhood experiences. Thus, his permis-
sive upbringing neither helped nor hindered him in becoming a famous maverick
scientist.
Even as a schoolboy, Eysenck was not afraid to take an unpopular stand,
often challenging his teachers, especially those with militaristic leanings. He was
skeptical of much of what they taught and was not always reluctant to embarrass
them with his superior knowledge and intellect.
Eysenck suffered the deprivation of many post–World War I Germans who
were faced with astronomical inflation, mass unemployment, and near starvation.
Eysenck’s future appeared no brighter after Hitler came to power. As a condition
of studying physics at the University of Berlin, he was told that he would have to
join the Nazi secret police, an idea he found so repugnant that he decided to
leave Germany.
This encounter with the fascist right and his later battles with the radical left
suggested to him that the trait of tough-mindedness, or authoritarianism, was
equally prevalent in both extremes of the political spectrum. He later found some
scientific support for this hypothesis in a study that demonstrated that although
communists were radical and fascists were conservative on one dimension of per-
sonality, on the tough-minded versus tender-minded dimension, both groups were