ABSTRACT
Misattributions about the origins of information occur in a variety of contexts (e.g., Belli, Lindsay, Gales, & McCarthy, 1994; Foley, Durso, Wilder, & Friedman, 1991; Gerrig & Prentice, 1991). For example, individuals sometimes confuse who said what in conversations (Foley, Johnson, & Raye, 1983), particularly when speakers physically resemble each other or when they talk about similar topics (Lindsay, Johnson, & Kwon, 1991). Similarly, cryptomnesia, or inadvertent plagiarism, occurs when individuals generate responses they believe are original to them but that were expressed by someone else (Brown & Murphy, 1989; Marsh & Bower, 1993). These sorts of misattribution biases may occur for a number of reasons. For instance, if individuals attend more to what they are going to say than to what another person is currently saying, they may fail to encode who said what and believe they are responsible for the other person's statements (e.g., Brown & Murphy, 1989). Or if individuals covertly anticipate what another person is likely to say, they may later take credit for the utterance, forgetting their own ideas occurred only in thought (Johnson, Hashtroudi, & Lindsay, 1993).
