8.1: Misattribution of Source

Often, we remember something accurately, but we forget what the source was. We may even form quite mistaken beliefs about the source. We are wrong about where we learned it, when, and who we learned it from. For example, Ronald Reagan was fond of telling a story about a World War II gunner whose plane was severely hit by enemy fire. His seat ejection device malfunctioned, and the commander said, “Never mind, son, we’ll ride down together.” The commander, Reagan said, was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for this heroic act.

It turned out that no medal had ever been awarded for this action, but that the scene had occurred in the 1944 movie A Wing and a Prayer. Reagan correctly remembered the story, but he was wrong about its source.

In extreme cases, we may not know whether the source of a current “memory” is an earlier event or something we merely imagined. And in some cases, where we can’t remember a source, we (unconsciously) invent one. The hypnotist tells me that when I come out of my trance I will crawl around on the floor when he snaps his fingers. I later react to his cue when he snaps his fingers and someone in the audience asks me why I am crawling around on the floor. I will very likely make up an explanation right there on the spot—I’m looking for a pen that I dropped— and what’s more, I’ll believe it. In this case, I am the one taken in by the story I invent.

It is easy to laugh at some misattributions of sources, but we all make mistakes of this sort. Often our errors are harmless, but sometimes they aren’t. It is likely that some cases of plagiarism involve source amnesia. An author gets an idea while reading, then later forgets that they read it and think that the idea is their own. Or we may think we learned something from a reliable source when in fact we got it from someone unreliable, which will make us more confident in our belief than we should be.