What's yours is mine, what's mine is yours: unconscious plagiarism and its opposite. Tim Perfect, Nicholas Lange & Ian Dennis Plymouth 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 error A 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-own Then The only possible errors are intrusions plagiarism

However… If the only recall-tasks are recall-own and recall-partner Then The only possible errors are intrusions plagiarism anti-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 either Their own ideas Their partner’s ideas For different orthographic cues (Re___; Sp____).

Frequency of errors by type

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. COMMON 598 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 RORPRORP Correct recall Plagiarism Intrusions % plagiarism given an error 40.4%42.8%

Guessing is too successful to be guessing DataSimulationN = 10,000 Guess = 2Guess = 4 RORPRORP Correct recall Plagiarism Intrusions % plagiarism given 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 bias Jacoby et al (1988) false fame effectBrown & 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”) Predictions No 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

Summary of predictions Task Single-cue (own / partner)Recall Both HypothesisSourceIntrusionsSourceIntrusions It had to be youBias AvailabilityBiasNo*BiasNo* False ownership BiasNo*NoNo* * Depends upon no shift in response criterion overall

Experiment 2: delay It had to be you

Experiment 2: delay It had to be you

Experiment 3 Duplicated the 1-week condition of Expt 2 Participants instructed to focus on either – Quality (accuracy) – Quantity

All measures show an it had to be you effect

No bias

Task Single-cue (own / partner)Recall Both SourceIntrusionsSourceIntrusions Expt 1 -- Expt 2 x Expt 3 quality Expt 3 quantity xx It had to be youBias AvailabilityBiasNo*BiasNo* False ownership BiasNo*NoNo*

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 overall Should lower partner recall (because fewer guessed)

Recall all vs source-cued recall Higher partner recall, not lower

Experiment 4: source similarity

Experiment 5: Typicality

Task Single-cue (own / partner)Recall Both SourceIntrusionsSourceIntrusions Expt 1 -- Expt 2 x Expt 3 quality Expt 3 quantity xx Experiment 4 Experiment 5 x Summary

It has to be “it had to be you” Task Single-cue (own / partner)Recall Both SourceIntrusionsSourceIntrusions Summary It had to be youBias AvailabilityBiasNoBiasNo False ownership BiasNo

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.