When elaboration leads to appropriation: Unconscious plagiarism in a creative task

Louisa Jayne Stark*, Timothy J. Perfect, Stephen E. Newstead

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

Brown and Murphy's (1989) three-stage paradigm (generation, recall-own, generate-new) was used to assess the effects of participant elaboration on rates of unconscious plagiarism in two experiments using a creative task. Following the generation phase, participants imagined and rated a quarter of the ideas (imagery elaboration), generated improvements to another quarter (generative elaboration), and listened to a quarter of the ideas again without elaboration, with the remaining ideas acting as control. A week later, participants attempted to recall their own ideas, and generate new solutions to the same cues. In Experiment 1 both forms of elaboration equally increased correct recall, and decreased plagiarism in the generate-new task. However, generative elaboration led to significantly greater plagiarism in the recall-own task, but imagery elaboration did not. Participants in Experiment 2 were encouraged not to plagiarise by means of a financial incentive. However, they showed the same pattern as seen in Experiment 1. Therefore, contrary to a simple strength account, the probability of a person plagiarising another's ideas is linked to the particular nature of the elaboration carried out on that idea, rather than its familiarity.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)561-573
Number of pages13
JournalMemory
Volume13
Issue number6
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Aug 2005

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous)
  • General Psychology

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