The science writer Jonah Lehrer, author of the runaway bestseller “Imagine: How Creativity Works,” has become the latest high-profile journalist to be caught up in a plagiarism scandal, with a counterintuitive twist that could come right out of his own books: The journalist he has been accused of borrowing from is himself.
Mr. Lehrer’s troubles began on Tuesday morning, when the media blogger Jim Romenesko noted that a June 12 post on The Frontal Cortex, Mr. Lehrer’s blog for The New Yorker, titled “Why Smart People Are Stupid,” included material recycled from a post he had written last October for The Wall Street Journal.
Within a few hours, New York magazine’s Daily Intel and other blogs had tracked down a number of other instances of self-duplication from Mr. Lehrer’s writing for Wired, the New York Times Magazine, and other publications.
By late afternoon, The New Yorker had appended an editor’s note to all five posts Mr. Lehrer has written since he began blogging for the magazine on June 5, noting the borrowings and saying “We regret duplication of material.”
Nicholas Thompson, the editor of The New Yorker’s Web site, said on Wednesday afternoon that Mr. Lehrer, whose blog he lured away from Wired, was still employed by the magazine but declined to elaborate, saying, “This is wrong. He knows it’s a mistake. It’s not going to happen again.”
Mr. Lehrer, reached by telephone, expressed remorse about the self-borrowings but declined to comment further. “It was a stupid thing to do and incredibly lazy and absolutely wrong,” he said.
His publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, said in a statement on Wednesday that self-borrowings that appeared in “Imagine,” while not unusual when journalists write books, will be formally acknowledged in future editions.
“Jonah Lehrer fully acknowledges that ‘Imagine’ draws upon work he has published in shorter form during the past several years and is sorry that was not made clear,” the statement said. “He owns the rights to the relevant articles, so no permission was needed. He will add language to the acknowledgments noting his prior work.”
Mr. Lehrer, 30, is a popular speaker on the lecture circuit, but has drawn less enthusiastic reviews from some social scientists. Christopher Chabris, writing in The New York Times Book Review, said that “Imagine” (which subsequently spent 12 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list) displayed some “elementary” scientific errors while also cherry-picking results that fit his thesis.
The news of Mr. Lehrer’s journalistic infractions arrive at a moment when social science is wrestling with its own credibility problems. Last year, a prominent Dutch psychologist was found to have committed academic fraud in several dozen peer-reviewed papers, many of which had been widely reported in the news media.
More recently, the psychologist Brian Nosek of the University of Virginia, began an effort, informally known as the Reproducibility Project, to replicate research findings, a high percentage of which he has estimated may not hold up.
Dan Simons, a psychologist at the University of Illinois and the author, with Mr. Chabris, of “The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us,” said that Mr. Lehrer’s troubles reflected the difficulty of filling a blog with a steady drip of quirky, surprising findings that also happen to be true.
But science, he said, has its own built-in bias against humdrum results.
“It’s almost impossible to publish a failure to replicate,” said Mr. Simons, who is working to start a journal dedicated to replication studies. “Most scientists who think about these issues are well aware of them, but that doesn’t mean they still aren’t a problem.”
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