When elaboration leads to appropriation: unconscious plagiarism in a creative task.
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.
Stark
Louisa-Jayne
LJ
University of Plymouth, Devon PL4 8AA, UK. Istark@plymouth.ac.uk
Perfect
Timothy J
TJ
Newstead
Stephen E
SE
D001364:Awareness; D003071:Cognition; D003405:Creativity; D003463:Cues; D006801:Humans; D007092:Imagination; D011939:Mental Recall; D008960:Models, Psychological; D009042:Motivation; D015714:Plagiarism; D011581:Psychological Tests; D014473:Unconscious, Psychology