Study title

People often work in groups, and later try to recall who said what. A common finding about group work is that when people try to recall their own contribution they sometimes recall other people's ideas as their own: an error known as unconscious plagiarism. This project looks at alternate accounts of why unconscious plagiarism occurs. One explanation is that people ruminate on other's ideas. Misremembering the later rumination with having originally generated the idea causes plagiarism. Alternately, people may recall the idea without any source-specifying information, and so have to guess where it came from. This guessing process can be either biased to the self (leading to plagiarism on all tasks), or biased towards the current task goals (leading to plagiarism when recalling own ideas, but the opposite when recalling a partner's ideas). Ten experimental studies will be run, all exploring the propensity to confuse the prior source of information during retrieval. The project contrasts different forms of encoding and test conditions to generate tests of the alternate accounts of unconscious plagiarism. It is also intended to test develop and test formal mathematical models associated with the 3 possible explanations of unconscious plagiarism.