I’ve been envious of Jonah Lehrer for years, ever since I started reading his neuroscience articles in Wired.

I’ve also been a fan of applied neuroscience and psychology for years, ever
since I discovered some of the early figures in the field of positive
psychology like Edward Deci and Martin Seligman. I always fancied that I
might help popularize their ideas. So when I started reading smart,
well-written articles from Lehrer in Wired and other outlets, I was
jealous.

Here was a guy who had it all figured out–he had
studied neuroscience, and now he was using the deadly combination of his
science training and writing skills to do what I had always wanted to
do.

As it turns out, Lehrer was a fraud. He straight made up
quotes and lied about doing it. His career and reputation are in
tatters. And worst of all, it was all unnecessary.

New York, one of my favorite publications, produced an excellent piece on Lehrer’s rise and fall; it’s well worth reading.

“Jonah Lehrer is known as a fabricator, a plagiarist, a reckless
recycler. He’s cut-and-pasted not just his own stories but at least one
from another journalist; he’s invented or conflated quotes; and he’s
reproduced big errors even after sources pointed them out. His
publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, will soon conclude a fact-check of
his three books, the last of which, Imagine, was recalled from
bookstores—a great expense for a company that, like all publishing
houses, can’t afford to fact-check most books in the first place. In the
meantime, he’s been completely ostracized. It’s unclear if he’ll ever
write for a living again.”

The writer of the piece, Boris
Kachka, argues that the rise of the writer as rock star (fueled in equal
parts by Malcolm Gladwell and TED Talks) made it all too tempting to
swing for the fences with “Big Insights”–even when those insights
weren’t backed by the data.

I see marketing run amok.

As a marketer and storyteller, your first loyalty has to be to the
truth. Selling sow’s ears as silk purses isn’t good marketing, it’s
lying, no matter how successful, and in today’s highly connected world, the truth tends to come out, whether you’re a philandering politician or a best-selling plagiarist.

Lehrer lost sight of this fact.  Rather than focusing on unearthing new truths and insights from real scientists, he
made himself into a intellectual “guru.”  Rather than trying to enlighten others, he focused on exalting himself. Once you place the needs of the storyteller ahead of the story, it’s all too easy to find
“facts” to fit the story, rather than finding a story that fits the
facts.

There’s nothing wrong with making things up to tell a good story…as long as your books are shelved in the “Fiction” section of the library.  If you’re going to claim to be a non-fiction writer, your first allegiance should always be to the truth (and your second to providing a great experience for your readers).






The sad thing is that those original articles that Lehrer wrote, and that I loved were actually true.  He was a truly gifted writer,
and had he stuck to the truth, he’d probably still have the success that
he lied for and destroyed.