What's yours is mine, what's mine is yours: unconscious plagiarism and its opposite.

Tim Perfect, Nicholas Lange & Ian DennisPlymouth University

Disclaimer…

"One of the most disheartening experiences of old age is discovering that a point you just made—so significant, so beautifully expressed—was made by you in something you published long ago”

Skinner (1983)

Unconscious Plagiarism

UP occurs when an individual unknowingly claims a previously experienced idea as their own.

Either as:A source-memory errorA failure of creativity (priming)

The Brown & Murphy (1989) paradigm

3 stages:1. Generation

Groups take turn to generate solutions to a given problem.

2. Recall Own Phase (RO 7%)Individuals recall the solutions that they generated, avoiding other’s solutions.

3. Generate New Phase (GN 9%)Individuals generate new solutions, avoiding ALL previous solutions.

Macrae, Bodenhausen & Calvini (1999)

Cryptomnesia=

Kleptomnesia

Errors are self-serving.

But…

If the only recall-task is recall-ownThenThe only possible errors are

intrusions plagiarism

However…

If the only recall-tasks are recall-own and recall-partner

ThenThe only possible errors are

intrusions plagiarismanti-plagiarism

Main questions

Do people steal more ideas than they give away? (self-serving)

Or do they give away more ideas than they steal (self-defeating)

And what would any bias tell us?

Anticipation at generation?

During idea generation, a participant may think of an idea that their partner says.

Later they may misrecall having thought of an idea with having said it. Predicts idea theft, not idea donation.

Experiment 1

Pairs of participants generated words to orthographic cues.

Individuals then were asked to recall eitherTheir own ideasTheir partner’s ideas

For different orthographic cues (Re___; Sp____).

Frequency of errors by type

Source error Intrusions0

0.5

1

1.5

2

2.5

Own Partner

In absolute terms, people gave away more than they stole.

Additionally, because people recalled more of their own solutions (10.5) than their partner’s (4.95).As a proportion of answers output:

Plagiarism = 6.5%Anti-plagiarism = 17.4%

Alternate accounts

(Non-memorial) Guessing

Source attribution bias: “It had to be you”

Simple availability bias

Retrieval cued availability bias: “false ownership”

Guessing

Greater propensity to give away ideas would happen if:

1: The answers could be duplicated by chance.2: Participants guess more when recalling partner’s ideas.

Estimating guessing

For each category, we identified the most common responses, by carrying out a median split.

158 words constituting 50.4% of all responses initially generated. COMMON598 words constituted the remaining 49.6% of items. RARE

If plagiarism is just guessing, then the probability of plagiarising the commonly generated items should be 50.4%.

In fact common items were plagiarised 38 / 124 times – 30.6%.

At the same time, errors were too successful

Guessing is too successful to be guessing

Data

RO RP RO RP

Correct recall 10.5 4.95

Plagiarism 0.95 1.96

Intrusions 1.40 2.62

% plagiarismgiven an error

40.4% 42.8%

Guessing is too successful to be guessing

Data Simulation N = 10,000

Guess = 2 Guess = 4

RO RP RO RP

Correct recall 10.5 4.95 10.19 5.42

Plagiarism 0.95 1.96 0.24 0.47

Intrusions 1.40 2.62 1.57 3.10

% plagiarismgiven an error

40.4% 42.8% 13.3% 13.2%

Memory based accounts

It had to be you (Hoffman, 1997)

Weak ideas (those without source) get attributed more often to a partner.

Predictions: Bias should be apparent in both old and new ideas. Bias should occur whatever the retrieval cue.

Simple availability bias

More of one’s own ideas are available at retrieval.Source monitoring is error prone without being biased.

Predictions: Bias for old ideas, not intrusions (*).Bias independent of retrieval cue

(*Already contradicted by Expt 1, but perhaps a response criterion shift)

Retrieval-cued availability biasJacoby et al (1988) false fame effect Brown & Halliday, (1991) source neglect

During retrieval, source information may be neglected, and the retrieval cue used to bias attributions.

i.e. a retrieved item is interpreted as mine (in recall own), and yours (in recall-partner). (“false ownership”)

PredictionsNo bias with a neutral retrieval cue (recall both)Bias due to availability.

A new task: recall both

Recall Own Recall Own Recall PartnerRecall Partner

Plagiarism

Anti- Plagiarism

Single-cue recall tasks

OR

Joint-cue recall task

Intrusions Intrusions Intrusions Intrusions

Summary of predictionsTask

Single-cue (own / partner) Recall Both

Hypothesis Source Intrusions Source Intrusions

It had to be you Bias Bias Bias Bias

Availability Bias No* Bias No*

False ownership

Bias No* No No*

* Depends upon no shift in response criterion overall

Experiment 2: delay

Single own Single partner Joint own Joint partner0

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

Wrong source errors

1 day1 week

No biasIt had

to be yo

u

Experiment 2: delay

Single own Single partner Joint own Joint partner0

1

2

3

4

5

6

Intrusion errors

1 day1 week

It had

to be yo

u

It had

to be yo

u

Experiment 3

• Duplicated the 1-week condition of Expt 2• Participants instructed to focus on either– Quality (accuracy)– Quantity

Single source errors Joint source errors Single intrusions Joint intrusions0

0.5

1

1.5

2

2.5

3

3.5

4

Quality

Own PartnerAll measures show an it had to be you effect

Single source errors Joint source errors Single intrusions Joint intrusions0

2

4

6

8

Quantity

Own Partner

It had to be you

It had to be you

No bias

Task

Single-cue (own / partner) Recall Both

Source Intrusions Source Intrusions

Expt 1 - -Expt 2 x Expt 3 quality Expt 3 quantity x x It had to be you Bias Bias Bias Bias

Availability Bias No* Bias No*

False ownership

Bias No* No No*

Is there a shift in response criterion?

Willingness to respond may be driving up errors specifically in recall-partner task.

We ran a “Recall all” task with no reference to source at all. Should be less susceptible to lowering threshold. Predictions:

Lower rate of intrusions overallShould lower partner recall (because fewer guessed)

Recall all vs source-cued recall

Own Partner Intrusions0

5

10

15

20

25

30

No source

Single Source

Joint source

No change in rate of intru-sions.

Higher partner recall, not lower

Experiment 4: source similarity

Single source Joint Source Single Intrusions Joint Intrusions0

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

Own Partner

Experiment 5: Typicality

Single source Joint Source Single Intrusions Joint Intrusions0

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

Own Partner

Task

Single-cue (own / partner) Recall Both

Source Intrusions Source Intrusions

Expt 1 - -Expt 2 x Expt 3 quality Expt 3 quantity x x Experiment 4 Experiment 5 x Summary

It has to be “it had to be you”Task

Single-cue (own / partner) Recall Both

Source Intrusions Source Intrusions

Summary It had to be you Bias Bias Bias Bias

Availability Bias No Bias No

False ownership

Bias No No No

Conclusions

People give away more than they steal, because there is a bias to attribute weakly remembered ideas to an external source.

Unconscious plagiarism therefore:occurs despite a bias against the self, and is not self-serving.

Conclusions

This bias occurs even when the salience of the self is made high (recall-both task).

In applied terms, people may not recall a past event once, so these initial errors may become consolidated.

Moral

Be careful who you talk to when discussing your great ideas.

Be careful how you choose to recall the conversation.

Worry less about others stealing your ideas, than about you mentally giving your ideas away.