kleptomnesia

Kleptomnesia happens due to a pragmatic, but peculiar, feature of how human memory is wired. When we encode information, we tend to pay more attention to the content than the source. Once we accept a piece of information as true, we no longer need to worry about where we acquired it.

2015 January 2, Adam Grant, “The Biggest Reason We Steal Other People’s Ideas”, in Time, archived from the original on 20 Mar 2016

Chad Bauman has offered a great model for the “make your own religion” exercise, and I will engage in repeated acts of “kleptomnesia” in appropriating his ideas.

2016 January 5, CM Bauman, BAR Hege, R Kleckley…, “The “make your own religion” project”, in Teaching Theology & Religion, volume 19, number 1, pages 99–110

It’s fair to say that psychologists haven’t exactly figured out a way around kleptomnesia, and maybe Melania Trump’s speech might instigate research into this fuzzy area.

2016 July 19, Tanya Basu, “Melania Trump's Speechwriters Apparently Suffer From Kleptomnesia”, in Inverse, archived from the original on 01 Oct 2021

Like every other author, I'm vulnerable to 'kleptomnesia' – accidentally remembering the ideas of others as your own.

2019, Andy Cope, The Little Book of Being Brilliant, Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, →ISBN, page 169

I worry that I will wake up tomorrow in a cold sweat, having forgotten to thank someone who assuredly deserved it. Everyone is vulnerable to "kleptomnesia," or accidentally remembering the ideas of others as our own.

2021, Lisa Grossman Liu, The Transparent, Concurrent, and Collaborative Health Record (thesis), New York: Columbia University, →DOI, page xviii