Elaboration inflation: how your ideas become mine

Abstract

Unconscious plagiarism occurs when individuals claim previously experienced ideas as their own. Using an adaptation of Brown and Murphy's (1989) three-stage paradigm, participant elaboration was investigated using the Alternate Uses Test at generation. Following generation, ideas were imagined and rated (imagery-elaboration), improved in three ways (generative-elaboration), improved by another participant and then imagined and rated (rich imagery-elaboration) or not re-presented. A week later, participants recalled their original ideas and generated new ideas. Relative to control, elaborating or imagining an idea previously generated by someone else improved recall and reduced plagiarism in the generate-new task. However, in the recall-own task, generativeelaboration alone led to high levels of plagiarism in the recall-own task. Consequently, it is the generative nature of the elaboration performed on an idea that influences later idea appropriation.

The effects of repeated idea elaboration on unconscious plagiarism

“…Second, the responses given by each participant are much more distinctive and, so, memorable enough for the participants to avoid duplication. In our previous studies using the same generation tasks, we have also found minimal levels of initial plagiarism during the generation phase, although we did not previously report this (Stark & Perfect, 2006;Stark et al, 2005).…”

“…However, in the recall-own task, plagiarism increased following generative elaboration, but not following imagery elaboration. In a series of follow-up studies, we have replicated this basic pattern (Stark & Perfect, 2006. Stark et al (2005) explained this pattern using a sourcemonitoring account (Johnson, Hashtroudi, & Lindsay, 1993).…”

“…In the previous work, imagination has had no reliable impact upon the rates of plagiarism in the recall-own phase. Although we have argued that this is not because imagery is a weak manipulation of memory strength, it remains the case that we are drawing inferences from the null hypothesis (Stark & Perfect, 2006Stark et al, 2005). Consequently, a second opportunity to form an image of the idea should result in even stronger memories than does a single-imagery session.…”

“…Plagiarism has also been detected across a range of more creative tasks, such as finding solutions to word puzzles (Marsh & Bower, 1993;Marsh & Landau, 1995), brainstorming ideas to solve problems (Landau, Marsh, & Parsons, 2000;Marsh, Landau, & Hicks, 1997), generating alternate uses of common items (Stark & Perfect, 2006;Stark, Perfect, & Newstead, 2005), and drawing novel space creatures (Marsh, Landau, & Hicks, 1996). Plagiarism has been shown for both auditory and visual materials (Brown & Murphy, 1989;Marsh & Bower, 1993) and has been demonstrated when participants are tested individually (e.g., Marsh & Landau, 1995), in dyads (e.g., Brédart et al, 2003), or in groups of four or more (e.g., Brown & Murphy, 1989;Stark & Perfect, 2006). Thus, basic demonstrations of unconscious plagiarism using the three-phase paradigm are clear, consistent, and generalizable.…”

Autobiographical memory, eyewitness reports, and public policy.

“…What leads people to feel that they are remembering as opposed to thinking, fantasizing, etc.? As Jacoby and colleagues have pointed out, people can "retrieve" and use memory information from specific prior episodes without having the subjective experience of remembering (as in involuntary plagiarism; Stark & Perfect, 2006), and people can have the subjective experience of remembering specific prior episodes that they never, in fact, experienced (as in various forms of false memories; Jacoby et al, 1989). This "memory attribution" problem is equivalent to the sourcemonitoring problems described above; thoughts, images, and feelings that come to mind with characteristics typical of memories are likely to be experienced as memories, especially if the person is oriented to the past as a source of current mental events.…”