misattribution

Misattribution is the attribution of a belief, action, memory, or idea to the wrong source. It occurs when the origin of information is confused, leading to false assumptions about who or what produced it, where it came from, or why it happened.

Common forms include misattribution of memory (false memories, source amnesia, cryptomnesia), misattribution of authorship or credit for ideas or works, and misattribution of quotations in journalism and public discourse. In science and academia, findings or theories may be wrongly ascribed to a different researcher or paper, which can propagate errors through the literature.

Causes of misattribution include failures of source monitoring—the cognitive process that tracks where memories and ideas come from—along with memory reconstruction, suggestion, and social influence. Context, repetition, and expectations can shape how we encode and recall information, making it easy to confuse familiarity with originality. Cognitive biases and the tendency to attribute actions to dispositions or intentions when they are actually due to situational factors can also contribute to broader misattribution patterns.

Consequences range from everyday misunderstandings to more significant outcomes, such as misinformation spreading, damaged reputations, plagiarism disputes, or erroneous or unethical claims in legal, scientific, or media contexts. Correcting misattributions often requires careful examination of sources, corroboration of evidence, and explicit attribution of context and provenance.

In research and psychology, notable concepts include the misinformation effect and source monitoring theory, which describe how memories can be altered by external information and how people misattribute the source of their memories. Cryptomnesia describes when a forgotten idea is remembered as a new, original thought, leading to uncredited borrowing.