The world has no author

I’ve been to Minnesota a couple of times, though fortunately never in the depths of winter. Still, even in early April, I remember seeing people driving with gloves on.

So it’s easy for me to picture a small town in the Land of 10,000 Lakes: frozen water stretching into the distance, power lines bowed under coats of ice, a bus rolling endlessly northward through the white landscape. Pretty much the scenery from Fargo—technically set in North Dakota, but filmed in Minnesota—a fitting conflation for a movie about blurred boundaries between truth and fiction.

This is how journalist Claas Relotius opened his report for the German magazine Der Spiegel about Fergus Falls, Minnesota:

The bus to Fergus Falls drives north from Minneapolis, past frozen lakes, iced-over power poles, and farmland stretching flat to the horizon. After three and a half hours, it turns off the highway onto a narrow sloping road, rolling towards a dark forest that looks as if dragons might live there.

It reads like the beginning of a novel (or movie script). And that was precisely the problem. It was fiction.

Almost everything in his piece was fabricated: the sign at the town’s entrance reading “Mexicans keep out” never existed; the solitary town clerk with a pistol, stuffed boar, and a penchant for 18th-century French philosophers was pure invention; even the Mexican boy bullied at school wasn’t actually enrolled there.

Relotius wrote what readers expected: a story confirming that Trump voters in rural America are backwards, gun-obsessed racists. Residents didn’t recognise their town at all. Two of them read the article, which was in German, using Google Translate and initially thought the software was malfunctioning. Only when they saw that the translation matched the original did they realise: the issue wasn’t Google, but the journalist himself.

Der Spiegel sent another reporter to check. He found no dark forest, no hateful sign, no lonely men clutching guns. The supposed coal worker turned out to run a fitness studio and had travelled across much of the United States. Relotius had written literature, not reportage.

Reading about Relotius, I thought of Diederik Stapel, the Dutch social psychologist who fabricated dozens of studies to produce clean, publishable stories. Stapel once described how he would drive to Zwolle (a 90 min. ride for him), notebook on the passenger seat, imagining the students he was about to survey for an experiment he never intended to run. He would visualise the setting in precise detail – the station, the cafeteria, the questions he would ask – so that later, when typing the fabricated data into his computer, the fiction felt grounded. He called it making the story kloppend and geloofwaardig – coherent and believable.

For Stapel, data were narrative elements to arrange into an elegant argument. If the numbers didn’t confirm his hypothesis, he simply changed them until they did. The world was chaotic; his job was to make it logical. As he put it, with satisfaction: “The world was logical again.”

When completing this post, I had a humbling sense of déjà vu. I checked, and yes, nearly ten years ago I wrote something similar about Stapel. If nothing else, at least I’m consistent.

Our minds crave stories. Stories provide structure, reduce ambiguity, and are easier to remember. But this craving becomes dangerous in domains where truth matters. In journalism, we expect that what we read actually happened. In science, we expect that results reflect reality.

Relotius’ deception worked because he wove his fabrications into verifiable details — Minnesota winters are indeed harsh, even in April, as I know from experience — while inventing the story’s core.

Stapel did the same in science, but he overdid the fabrication, which is why he was found out. As psychologist and fraud investigator Uri Simonsohn has shown, fabricated data often contain too much regularity. Real data are messy. Frauds, like like normal people, crave patterns.

Neither Relotius nor Stapel acted alone. They operated in systems that rewarded their behaviour. Relotius was a star reporter whose stories read like Hollywood films. Nobody checked his sources because he wrote what people wanted to read. Stapel published prolifically, with beautiful, theory-confirming results. Editors loved it.

In both journalism and science, there is a preference for neat narratives with clear causal arcs. As Nature Human Behaviour wrote:

“The pressure to produce clean narratives represents a significant threat to validity and runs counter to the reality of what science looks like.”

Journalist Juan Moreno, who exposed his erstwhile Spiegel colleague Relotius in a hard-hitting book, still argues that journalism needs stories—otherwise we are left with a dry list of facts. The same is true in science: stories help us understand and communicate complex realities. But stories should not be invented. Sometimes the world doesn’t fit into a neat narrative. There are loose ends, ambiguities, contradictions. That’s not a flaw. That’s reality.

The world has no author.

(This post is based on chapters 11 and 12 of my Dutch language book Drang naar samenhang, written for a broader audience.)

References

Moreno, J. (2019). Tausend Zeilen Lüge: Das System Relotius und der deutsche Journalismus. Rowohlt: Berlin.

Simonsohn, U. (2013). Just Post it: The Lesson from Two Cases of Fabricated Data Detected by Statistics Alone. Psychological Science, 24(10), 1875-1888,

Stapel, D. (2012). Ontsporing. Prometheus-Bert Bakker.

Tell it like it is. Nat Hum Behav 4, 1 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-020-0818-9

Zwaan, R. (2021). Drang naar samenhang: de psychologie van het begrijpen. Amsterdam, Boom.