BASIC AND APPLIED SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY, 1988, P(l), 13-31

Copyright © 1988, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

Acting on Ideas: Appropriation to
One's Self
Robert A. Wicklund, Thomas Reuter, and
Rudolf Schiffmann
Universitdt Bielefeld

Two experiments were conducted to examine certain effects of subjects*

directing activity toward critical target ideas or concepts. In the first experiment,
the critical ideas were modern concepts for handling patients; the
activity consisted of subjects' translating the ideas. In the second experiment,
the critical ideas were psychological concepts; the activity consisted of
subjects' making a summary statement of the ideas. The effects —that is, the
dependent variables - were twofold: (a) subjects' claim that they had already
known the ideas beforehand and (b) length of time that subjects claimed to
have known the ideas. The impact of activity directed toward the idea was
relatively clear in both experiments: Activity led to claiming to have known
more of the critical ideas as well as to claiming to have known them for a
longer time. The concept of appropriation of ideas is employed here to
characterize the effects, and parallels are drawn to plagiarism of ideas and
internalization of ideas.
The psychological process that is central to this article can best be captured
by the following example. A composer attends a concert of modern classic
compositions. The composer listens attentively to a particular piece and
subsequently has one of several reactions with respect to his own standing
vis-a-vis that piece. These reactions, and the effects to be studied in this
article, can be ordered onto a scale approximately like the following:
"I am hearing this piece today for the first time.'
"I heard that piece at a recent concert."
"I've known that piece for a long time."
Requests for reprints should be sent to Robert A. Wicklund, Abteilung Psychologie,
Universitat Bielefeld, 4800 Bielefeld, Federal Republic of Germany.
14 WICKLUND, REUTER, SCHIFFMANN
"That piece is similar to something I composed myself."
"I composed that piece myself."
The example can be extended and reworked into works of literature,
science, styles, or inventions. The point that concerns us here is the
connection between oneself and a particular idea (see Wicklund, in press),
no matter whether the idea is a theory, a melody, or a literature theme. And
the central question is the extent to which the person regards the idea as
something that is already in one's own idea repertoire — as something that
one has brought along to the present situation. Although several concepts
could be employed to characterize the process to be described and demonstrated
here, we have chosen the term appropriation to capture the notion
that individuals can come to view certain ideas as already residing within
their knowledge repertoires, even when the ideas have only recently come
into view and even when the ideas have originated in others' minds.
The degree of appropriation of an idea can be characterized best when
another possible "knower" or "originator" of the idea is taken as a point of
comparison. Thus, in our example, the composer who is "hearing this piece
today for the first time" cannot be said to have appropriated the idea (i.e.,
the essence of the piece), whereas the listener who claims to have known it
for an eternity or to have played a role in its origination has appropriated
it to a much stronger extent.
Appropriation may then surface in two rather distinguishable operationalizable
forms: (a) the one is simply the extent of primacy—the
subjective sense that one has already possessed the idea within one's
knowledge repertoire — and of course the longevity of this possession and
(b) the sense that one is a relatively unique origin of the idea, whereby other
potential sources are thereby ruled out insofar as one's origin status comes
to dominate subjectively.
Of the various ways in which one might study this appropriation issue,
one that comes immediately to mind is to treat such phenomena as
plagiarism. Since at least the time of Roman laws, the official protection of
the original source of an idea has been a cultural institution (Fuchs, 1983).
The psychological state of the plagiarist is usually not seen as a critical
element in that the stealing of an idea is equally unlawful, no matter
whether the plagiarism is "conscious" or "unconscious" (Schwenn, 1959).
However, it is not our purpose here to delve into the objective determination
of whether an idea has been stolen; central here are the psychological
determinants of a person's having appropriated an idea. Thus, given that a
person has at some time or other been exposed to a given idea, what
determines the person's subjective feeling that (a) the idea has been in one's
own idea repertoire for a long time and/or (b) that the person has an origin
APPROPRIATION OF IDEAS 15
Status relative to the idea? Some hints toward a psychological interpretation
.can be garnered from a small, but pertinent empirical literature that relates
closely to the present problem. Under the title, "Egocentric Biases in
Availability and Attribution," Ross and Sicoly (1979) conducted several
studies in which responsibility for a group product must be divided up. In
one study, subjects were assembled in dyads; each participant was given
different portions of a case study about a certain Paula, and then the dyad
was asked to discuss possible solutions to Paula's problems, taking into
account the information they had just read. The discussion was taperecorded.
Several days later, the participants were invited back, and each subject
was requested to write down as much as could be recalled of the group's
discussion. Then each subject was asked to indicate who had contributed
what to the discussion. The results, described as "egocentric bias," were
striking evidence of a less-than-fair cognitive dividing-up of the group's
product: In 95% of the dyads, each subject claimed the majority of the
recalled statements as his or her own. The effect was to be found even when
the group's product had received a negative evaluation from the experimenter.
A subsequent study by Stephenson and Wicklund (1983) also involved a
group discussion paradigm, this time with three participants. The group of
three was requested to brainstorm solutions to the problem of what would
happen if the height of everyone in the world were suddenly reduced to 12
in. Once a group had generated exactly 11 solutions, the discussion was
interrupted, and subjects were requested the analyze the suggested solutions
in terms of who contributed what.
The results in the control condition showed that the average subject
claimed about one idea too many, even though the objective output of the
group was clear to all members. This overclaiming (appropriation of others'
ideas) was reduced substantially when subjects were brought to attend to
themselves (via hearing their own voices) immediately before estimating
their contribution to the total. This procedure, stemming from Duval and
Wicklund (1972) and Wicklund and Duval (1971), functions theoretically
through the self-aware subject's being better able to distinguish between
alternative perspectives.
Although several explanations — cognitive processing as well as selfneeds—
can be offered for the general tendency to overestimate one's
contribution to a group idea or other product (see Ross & Sicoly, 1979;
Stephenson & Wicklund, 1983), our central purpose is to focus on the
problem by means of a class of variables that was not included in the
experimental paradigms just summarized. In all those paradigms, the
subject was an active participant in a group activity that produced a result.
16 WICKLUND, REUTER, SCHIFFMANN
and it is the thesis here (cf. Wicklund, in press) that the activity per se may
well play a central role in the appropriation of ideas to oneself. What is
meant, then, by "activity"?
In principle, acting on an idea would mean to transform the idea, to
communicate it to another person, to implement or apply it, or anything
else that would entail the person's exerting a force with respect to the idea.
On a theoretical level, we can construe two broad classes of psychological
effects that can result from a person's acting on an idea.
PERCEPTUAL PROCESSES
One of the bases for a stimulus coming to be figural in a perceptual field lies
in the movement of that stimulus (Kahneman, 1973; Koffka, 1935;
McArthur & Post, 1977). It follows that if the person senses movement
between himself and some object (i.e., the idea that can eventually be
appropriated), that movement will dominate the perceptual field. Particularly
important is the implication that other sources competing for center
position in the perceptual field, such as other possible sources of the idea,
will sink into the perceptual background.
This oversimplified extension of Gestalt thinking adds up to a replacement
theory: The original connection between the idea and some other
source (e.g., author) becomes replaced by the connection between oneself
and the idea, owing simply to a shifting of the perceptual configuration as
a result of activity.
The Gestalt law of proximity (Wertheimer, 1923) leads to the same
conclusion in that two stimuli, insofar as they are mutually compatible
(Koffka, 1935), will be regarded as a unit when they are in close proximity
to each other. If activity directed toward an idea creates a unity between
actor and idea and simultaneously shuts out other unities involving the idea,
the result should then be appropriation of the idea.
The perceptual thesis can perhaps be formulated on a still broader level:
No matter what factors are basic to the perceptual prominence of a stimulus
(where humans are commonly regarded as the stimuli), the prominent
stimulus is seen as occurring earlier (Kahneman, 1973) and as being more
available for recall or recognition (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974).
TRANSFORMING THE IDEA
This second process does not require any particular theoretical foundation:
To the extent that a person improvises on an idea, it necessarily becomes
assimilated to what was known or practiced before. From this rather simple
APPROPRIATION OF IDEAS 17
assumption, it follows directly that the extent of alteration in the idea's
content, as a result of the person's idea-directed activity, would determine
the person's sense of having known the idea earlier and/or having generated
the idea.
The studies already summarized (Ross & Sicoly, 1979; Stephenson &
Wicklund, 1983) do not provide any evidence that increased activity
directed toward an idea furthers the appropriation of that idea. On the
other hand, it is an accepted principle in the arts that one develops a
personal or unique style through practicing and transforming others' ideas:
According to Gardner (in The Arts and Human Development, 1973),
apprentice artists, through "emulation" and "experimentation," are required
to perform progressively more difficult tasks until arriving at their
own, usable, "unique" styles. Gardner cited the most noted classical
composers as cases in point.
Still closer to the issue at hand is the empirical work on attitude change
by Janis and King (1954), in which one group of subjects was asked to
improvise a speech, advocating a position that was at variance with those
same subjects' previously stated opinions. Relative to a nonimprovising
control group, the persuasion effect of the improvising was considerable —
that is, the improvising subject tended more to adopt the opinion embedded
in the speech. Thus something about the subjects' active work on the speech
brought them to associate themselves more with the speech —that is, to
represent the opinion.
The relation between activity and adopting an idea as one's own can also
be found in the literature on internalization. For example, in a highly
explicit formulation of the internalization process, Deci and Ryan (1985)
characterized the gradual movement of a value (and other components of
moral systems) from the "outside" to the "inside." Thus children begin with
a heteronomous moral system, gradually come to represent those external
values themselves, and ultimately represent the value as something personal,
as their "own" value. Deci and Ryan (1985) emphasized the activity
inherent in this process: "Internalization is not something that gets done to
the organism by the environment, it is something the organism does actively
to accommodate the environment" (p. 130).
Thus there is some reason, in these various sources, to think that activity
directed toward the idea furthers the individual's appropriation of the idea.
The intent of the two studies reported here is that of trying out this
hypothesis, using very simple target ideas (relatively unfamiliar concepts)
whereby the subjects act on the ideas by translating them into another
language (Experiment 1) or summarizing the ideas (Experiment 2). The
extent of resulting appropriation is measured by subjects' claim of already
having had the idea in their knowledge repertoires.
18 WICKLUND, REUTER, SCHIFFMANN
EXPERIMENT 1
Method
O\/er\/iew
The central aspect of the experiment was a one-page text that dealt with
modern methods of handling patients and also with the training of medical
personnel for the implementation of these methods. The subjects, nurses,
and other patient-care personnel either read the text in German (read-only
condition) or else partly in German with critical aspects of the text printed
in English (translate condition). It was their task, in the latter condition, to
translate the English concepts into German. After this manipulation,
subjects in both groups responded to a questionnaire containing the critical
measures of appropriation of the critical concepts in the text.
Subjects
Sixty members of the patient-care personnel at a major hospital in
Westphalia (Federal Republic of Germany) served as subjects. Of these, 4
were not usable owing to incomplete answers to the questionnaire. Of the 56
subjects whose data were analyzed, 49 were registered nurses, and 7 were
patient-care personnel of lower status. Forty-five of the subjects were
women; 11 were men. The average age of the subjects was 23 years.
Procedure
The subjects were recruited through the assistance of hospital personnel;
at the time of recruitment, they knew only that the study dealt with a project
sponsored by the university. The experiment was conducted in two group
sessions in a classroom at the hospital. The sessions consisted of 40 and 16
participants, respectively, and both conditions were represented in each
session. Once the subjects were assembled in the classroom, the experimenter—
a male research assistant from the university—explained that he
and his colleagues were conducting a study to gather information from
experts on proposals for modern handling of patients. To this end, he
would be asking them to read a text on the "humanization of patient care"
and subsequently to respond to several questions pertinent to the text. At
that point he handed out the three-page form and cautioned the subjects not
to communicate with one another. Approximately half the forms belonged
to the read-only condition, and the other half to the translate condition.
They were distributed in random order.
On the first page of the form, the subjects received instructions regarding
APPROPRIATION OF IDEAS 19
what was to follow; at this point the directions for the two conditions
diverged from each other.
Read-only condition. The first page of the form stated that the
subject would find a text regarding patient care and training for patient care
on the second page. Further, it was noted that the text had earlier been
translated from English into German. Finally the subject was asked to fill
out the questions on the third page.
Translate condition. The directions were identical to those for the
read-only condition, except for additional instructions for a translation
task. The form explained to subjects that the research team had already
prepared a translation of the text (from English into German) but that the
research team was still attempting to make the text as comprehensible as
possible. To this end, it was noted that certain passages had been left in
English and that the subject's formulating them in German would be
instrumental toward the goal of a highly comprehensible text. Subjects were
instructed to write their translations on the blank page that was provided.
It should also be noted that none of the subjects experienced any serious
difficulties in this task, as every subject had had at least 5 years of English
as a student in the Gymnasium (high-level secondary school).
The text. The text had to do with modern patient care and with the
methods by which these advanced concepts could be taught. Altogether
there were 13 critical concepts. In the read-only condition, the concepts
were printed in German; in the translate condition, they were printed in
English. Each of the concepts was embedded within a central proposal —
that is, within a recommended method —and thus the concepts were not
simply isolated terms. For instance, the concept of nurse team was the
central concept in a proposal involving the working of a team in the
multifaceted care of patients, or the term education at central schools was
the key component in a proposal for reforms in nursing education. The
concepts themselves were rather mundane; important was the place of the
concepts in the proposals, which in each case dealt with reform in patient
care and associated education. The concepts were the following: rationalization
and disunion, group care, nurse team, collective decisions, education
system, nursing education, education, education at central schools,
practical education, teaching hospitals, changing theoretical contents and
teaching methods, nursing education, and making the education more
democratic. (The sixth and twelfth concepts were identical.)
The questions (third page). There were three categories of questions.
For one, subjects were asked for minimal biographical information (sex.
20 WICKLUND, REUTER, SCHIFFMANN
age, and occupation). Second, two questions were asked that served a
control purpose; it was desired that the attractiveness of the text and total
perceived number of ideas in the text would not be affected by the
manipulation. These items are as follows:
1. "How much did the contents of the text please you?"
the text is . ^ . ^ ^ ^ ^ the text is
very good , 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 very poor
2. "Summarize (in writing) the central ideas of the text." [The purpose of
this item was to detect whether or not subjects in both conditions
perceived the text as containing about the same number of central
points.]
Third, the following two items constituted the dependent measures of
appropriation:
1. Number of ideas: "Underline the ideas, directly in the text, that you
already had prior to reading the text."
2. Length of time: "How long have you had these ideas?"
a few weeks
a few months
7 year
2 years
longer
From the context, it was clear that subjects were to answer the lengthof-
time question on the basis of the ideas named in the preceding question.
To be sure, subjects found the questionnaire unambiguous.
Although there was no concrete hypothesis regarding the following,
subjects were also asked for the source (if any) of the ideas:
"Through what source did you gei these ideas?"
a. family
b. friends
c. colleagues
d. school
e. from myself _
f. other sources
Results
Given that the answers to two of the questions did not involve the simple
checking of a scale, two blind raters were asked to evaluate the answers to
APPROPRIATION OF IDEAS 21
TABLE 1
Means for the Two Appropriation Items (Experiment 1)
Dependent Variable
Number of ideas
Length of time
Translate
M
4.88
3.92
Condition
n
26
26
Read-Only
M
3.41
3.00
Condition
n
27
27
those two questions. The first question requested subjects to summarize the
major points of the text, and each rater was asked to record how many
points were included in the subject's summary. The second question, one of
the two central dependent variables, asked subjects to mark the ideas in the
text that they had known beforehand. Thus each rater was asked to record
the number of ideas that the subject had marked. For the first item (number
of major points in the text), the correlation between the raters' judgments
was satisfactory (r = .77). For the second item (number of ideas that
subjects had known beforehand), the correlation was also at an acceptable
level (r = .86).
Two Questions for Control Purposes
The first of these two items asked subjects how much they were pleased
by the text; there was not a reliable difference between conditions, ^(52)^ =
1.44, p > .15. The means for the read-only and translate conditions were
2.93 and 3.52, respectively, whereby a low number indicates a positive
rating. Thus, if anything, there was a slight tendency for subjects in the
translate condition to have a less positive opinion of the text.
The second item, which led to an index of the number of central ideas
perceived in the text by the subject, independent of whether the subject had
already known them previously, is an important one for the study. It was
desired that the manipulation have no effect here, and to be sure, there was
no effect, /(51) = 1.14,/? > .25.
The Hypothesis
The means for the number of ideas (in the text) that the subject claimed
to have already known are shown in Table 1. The difference is in the
expected direction and is significant, ^(51) = 2.43, /? < .02.
The second major dependent variable was worded, "How long have you
had these ideas?", and the means for the two conditions (Table 1) fall
'Degrees of freedom are reduced slightly here and in other analyses owing to missing
values
for certain subjects.
22 WICKLUND, REUTER, SCHIFFMANN
between the third and fourth points of the answering scale (i.e., between 1
and 2 years). The mean for the read-only condition (3.00) corresponds
exactly to 1 year, whereas the mean for the translate condition (3.92)
corresponds to about 1 year, 11 months. The difference between the two
values shown in the table is significant, /(51) = 3.15, p < .005.
Sources claimed by the subject. In indicating the sources of the idea
that they had already known, subjects checked one or more of the
categories shown (listed earlier). In general, there were no appreciable
differences between the groups. For only two of the categories was there
any hint of a difference: The translate group checked the categories of
school and other slightly more often. If we disregard the experimental
manipulation and consider the overall distribution of scores, the heaviest
concentration is in the categories of colleagues, school, and self.
Discussion
Three points should be made in regard to these data:
1. The measure of the total number of ideas that subjects perceived
showed no difference between conditions. Thus the translation activity did
not increase the amount of perceived material; rather, the effect was on the
amount of material that was claimed to have already been in subjects'
knowledge repertoires and on the length of time that subjects claimed to
have known the material.
2. It should be reiterated that we are not pursuing the issue of whether
subjects were, in fact, exposed to the ideas before and that it is not critical
to establish whether subjects in fact created the ideas themselves. The only
point here is that activity will tend to increase, or further, the extent of
appropriation of the idea. The extreme case of appropriation, of course, is
that where the person claims to have always known the idea and/or to have
created it. Given that appropriation can be regarded as a dimension, the
measurement can be accomplished in various ways (e.g., disclaiming that
one has learned the idea "today" for the first time; claiming that one knew
it before certain other knowers of the idea; claiming an origin-status with
respect to the idea).
3. We have suggested earlier that activity can have two broad effectsone
of these dealing with the person's perception of the relation between self
and idea (the Gestalt explanation) and the other assuming that the process
of acting on the idea results in a transformation of the idea. By introducing
the appropriate kinds of variables, one could eventually tease out the roles
of these two kinds of factors. For example, for the Gestalt hypothesis, a
manipulation of the relative salience or figural quality of the various
APPROPRIATION OF IDEAS 23
sources of the idea would be appropriate. For the transformation idea, it is
clear that the extent of the subject's reworking of the idea would be critical.
However, it is our goal for the present to demonstrate that activity of a
simple nature generates the appropriation effect; the teasing out of the
separate psychological contributions to the effect awaits further research.
EXPERIMENT 2
The primary purpose of Experiment 2 is that of replicating the first study
while using a slightly more conservative manipulation. Rather than translating
the concepts in question, the subjects here are asked to summarize the
critical terms —in this case, five psychological concepts. In addition, it was
decided to explore the effects of one further variable.
In their analysis of the egocentric bias problem, Ross and Sicoly (1979)
named a class of self-related variables that could conceivably lead to the
appropriation effect. In general, these variables can be viewed as a kind of
self-esteem protection or ego maintenance and as such are to be found in
practically any self-theory. However, one can take this general notion one
step further and ask whether subjects have a special, self-related interest in
the area that is represented by the concepts.
The direction of our thinking here is perhaps captured by James (1890):
"So the seeker of his truest, strongest, deepest self must review the list [of
self components] carefully, and pick out the one on which to stake his
salvation" (Vol. 1, p. 310).
That the more dominant aspects of one's self, namely, those to which one
has a strong psychological commitment, have special behavioral consequences
has been documented in at least two lines of research (Tesser, 1980;
Wicklund & GoUwitzer, 1981, 1982). In the Wicklund and Gollwitzer
research, it has been found repeatedly that individuals who are strongly
committed to an identity area (e.g., medicine, tennis, singing) are particularly
inclined to engage in self-defensive maneuvers when their status in that
area is threatened. Among other effects, it has been shown that such
threatened (and committed) individuals are inclined to raise their selfevaluations
within that area (Gollwitzer & Wicklund, 1985) and also refuse
to derogate themselves when under pressure to be self-effacing (Gollwitzer,
Wicklund, & Hilton, 1982). Combining the suggestion of Ross and Sicoly
(1979) with these latter findings, one might think that commitment to a
self-relevant activity could be a prerequisite for the appropriation effects
discussed here. In particular, it might be argued that a certain preexisting
affinity for the idea (to be appropriated) may be a prerequisite for the
workings of activity. To try out this idea, an individual difference variable
of commitment to the actively realm pertinent to the to-be-appropriated
ideas is included in the second experiment.
24 WICKLUND, REUTER, SCHIFFMANN
Method
University students were recruited on a volunteer basis for a study of
"memory processes." After filling out a form that assessed commitment to
psychology, the students read a text that contained five key terms.
Following that reading, they were asked either to summarize the text with
the help of key terms and in their own words (summarize condition) or to
write a short essay that was irrelevant to the text (irrelevant-essay condition).
Subsequently they indicated how long they had known the five terms.
Subjects
Fifty-two students from a university in Westphalia—33 women and 19
men —were recruited as subjects. All the subjects volunteered, and they
were not reimbursed for participation.
Procedure
The experiment was conducted in three data collection phases that
differed primarily in terms of the personnel who ran the experiment. In the
first phase, 30 subjects were recruited from the psychology department of
the university, were brought to seminar rooms in groups of 4 to 8, and were
run through the procedure by a male-and-female experimenter team. In the
second and third phases, the subjects were run in single-group sessions,
consisting of 13 and 9 subjects respectively, each time by a single experimenter.
Each of the two conditions was represented approximately equally
in each of the three sessions.
The experiment was introduced as a test of memory. The idea behind this
cover story was that of motivating subjects to pay close attention to the
critical text. From that point on, the instructions were printed; thus, almost
every aspect of the study was self-explanatory.
Subjects were first requested to fill out the cover page of the study, which
contained (a) basic biographical information and (b) the items appropriate
to the commitment variable. Seven items were introduced as pertinent to the
subject's commitment to being a psychologist:
1. Psychology is the ideal major for me.
2. Psychology is only a temporary major for me. (reverse scored)
3. I plan an occupation as a psychologist.
4. I have already learned a good deal about psychology in the course of
my studies.
APPROPRIATION OF IDEAS 25
5. I consider myself competent for many kinds of psychological questions.
6. Psychology is at the moment the appropriate major for me.
7. I spend a good deal of time reading psychological literature.
Each of the preceding statements was followed by a 5-choice answering
format: disagree, somewhat disagree, neither agree nor disagree, somewhat
agree, agree. The subject's extent of commitment was simply taken as the
sum of the seven answers (whereby the scoring of the second item was
reversed). In addition to the seven items, there were two filler items ("My
occupational goal is already clear" and "I spend lots of time with my fellow
students"). These were of course neglected in the data analysis.
The critical text. The subjects were then instructed to turn to the page
of text that dealt with the topic of theory construction.^ The text contained
five key words-Stigmatisierung, Klassifikation, Effektivitdt, pragmatisch,
and affrigmatisch —that were neither underlined nor otherwise set off from
the remainder of the text. The subjects were to read the text carefully. After
5 min, they were then instructed to proceed with the next task, and at this
point the instructions diversed for the two groups:
1. Summarize condition. With the help of 13 concepts taken from the
text (the 5 critical concepts and 8 others), the subjects were asked to
write a summary statement of the text. There were no special
instructions regarding the length of this summary. Thus the instructions
in this condition necessitated the subjects' becoming active with
respect to the critical terms.
2. Irrelevant-essay condition. These subjects were presented with a list
of eight terms (not taken from the text) and were asked to write either
a fantasy piece or a short scientific text on the basis of the terms.
After 7 min, the subjects were then directed to the next page. The purpose
here was to ensure that all subjects were equally aware of the presence of the
five critical concepts in the text, and to fulfill this goal, all subjects were
asked to give a short definition of each of the five terms. The five were listed
on the page. Although such a procedure tends to weaken the difference
between the two conditions, it was deemed necessary in order to eliminate
the possibility that the summarize-condition subjects would be more aware
of the five critical concepts than would the irrelevant-essay subjects.
text was taken from a book by Rexilius and Grubitzsch (1981).
26 WICKLUND, REUTER, SCHIFFMANN
TABLE 2
Mean Number of Concepts That Subjects Claimed to Have Known Prior to
Their Studies (Experiment 2)
Summarize condition
Irrelevant-essay condition
Above
M
3.50
3.07
Median
n
16
15
Commitment
Below
M
3.44
2.33
Median
n
9
12
Dependent variable. On the last page of the forms, the five key
concepts were again listed, on the left margin of the page, and subjects were
given four answering possibilities for each of the concepts. In response to
the question, "How long have you known the following concepts?",
subjects could either indicate before their studies, during the 1st semester,
during the 2nd semester, or else indicate that they had not known the
concept earlier.
Results
It was decided a priori to follow a conservative strategy in analyzing the
data and to simply score the number of concepts the subjects claimed to
have known prior to their studies. Thus any given subject could receive a
score between 0 and 4.^ The two experimentally created conditions were
each subdivided by means of the commitment variable. The commitment
index consisted of the sum of the seven commitment items (the combined
items form a reasonably consistent scale-alpha = .73), and the subjects
were divided into high- and low-commitment groups via a median split.
The means of the resulting 2 x 2 design are shown in Table 2. The main
effect of the summarize versus irrelevant-essay variable is significant, F(l,
48) = 7.69, p < .01, thereby replicating the effects of Experiment 1. The
effect for commitment is somewhat short of significance (p = .11), and
there is no clear evidence of an interaction (j? = .20). It was our guess that
commitment would function so as to bolster the impact of the activity
manipulation, but the table indicates that this is not the case. Rather, the
pattern of means makes it clear that a strong commitment to the area
of the five concepts —affrigmatisch-was a concept with a baseline probability of
knowing of approximately 0%. It was included simply to try out the possibility that
subjects
might lay claim to a concept that they could not possibly have known previously.
Because none
of the subjects indicated prior knowledge (i.e., prior to their studies) of affrigmatisch, the
term
was neglected from the following data analyses.
APPROPRIATION OF IDEAS 27
pertinent to the concepts is not a prerequisite for appropriation of the
concepts.
It might be noted that the effects just reported interacted neither with sex
of subjects nor with session (i.e.. Sessions 1 to 3); both/? values were greater
than .30. Similarly, there were also no main effects for sex or session {ps >
.30).
GENERAL DISCUSSION
Theoretical Summary
The central point of the second experiment, was, of course, to look at the
hypothesized relation between activity and idea appropriation in a context
different from that of Experiment 1. A few brief points should be made in
regard to specific aspects of this study and also in regard to the first
experiment. First, the effect seems to have a certain generality in that the
role of the type of setting, experimenter, sex of subjects, and nature of the
activity are not deciding factors for the effect.
On the other hand, the second experiment also makes the point that
activity per se is not sufficient to generate the effect. Subjects in the
irrelevant-essay condition were also active, but their task did not involve
their acting directly on the concepts in question. At the very least, then, it
is not sufficient that the person simply engage in productive activity or
become an origin of activity in some respect or another. Rather, it appears
as if the person must direct the activity toward the idea in question. This is
not the place to speculate regarding the exact character of such activities;
rather, it makes sense to define the necessary characteristics of the activity
theoretically, and we discuss two possibilities at the beginning of this article.
1. Through perceptual processes, the activity can serve to bring forth a
salient connection between the person (as source) and the idea. Thus, for
instance, if one starts from the Gestalt perception point of view, the
defining nature of the activity is that it bring the person-idea unit into the
foreground. One implication, then, is that there must be an existing
"affinity" between person and idea (Koffka, 1935); otherwise, the proximity
rule will no longer function. In both our experiments, we have dealt with
ideas that were occupationally relevant for the subjects; thus, the potential
for the "affinity" was there.
2. Our other theoretical starting point regarded activity as having the
possible effect of transforming the idea. The implications of this idea were
very clear: The more that the person's activity results in a subjectively
perceived new form of the idea, the stronger the appropriation effect. The
28 WICKLUND, REUTER, SCHIFFMANN
first experiment, involving translating, is a good case in point. More
generally, one can construe a variable of improvisation, or modification, or
assimilation to the known, such that the greater the alteration, the more
that the person will have a sense of being the origin of the idea or a sense
of already having known it.
Ross and Sicoly (1979) demonstrated that a certain amount of self-esteem
concern entered into the egocentric bias process (i.e., overclaiming of group
ideas) but also that the overclaiming took place even when the group
product had been evaluated negatively, implying that self-esteem needs are
not the central basis of overclaiming. The results here may be seen as
parallel to those of Ross and Sicoly in that there was a tendency (not quite
significant) for subjects highly committed to psychology to lay claim to
more of the psychological terms. At the same time, however, the results (the
absence of an interaction) make it very clear that such a commitment is not
a prerequisite for the functioning of activity. Accordingly, the functioning
of activity can be conceptualized without direct reference to the variable of
ego involvement in the situation. Thus activity should have its effects on
appropriation even when the subject feels relatively neutral about the
contents being appropriated.
"Objective" Prior Exposure
Our theoretical starting point distinguished between the legal approach to
appropriation of ideas (plagiarism) and a more general psychological
process of appropriation. For the legal definition, it is critical to establish
whether the person is objectively the source of the idea. Within our
theoretical framework — that is, the two factors just discussed —it is not
important to know precisely whether the person is the author, and it is not
necessary to know precisely whether the person was at some previous time
exposed to the idea. This is because the psychological effects of activity are
simply those oi further appropriation, regardless of whether the idea was
already known. Thus, when a person becomes active with respect to an idea,
it should become increasingly likely that the person will conclude that it was
already known personally. When the psychological effects of activity are
studied, the issue of "Did the person truly have the ideas earlier?" is by no
means critical, as the function of the activity is —generally stated-to bring
the idea closer to the person, quite aside from the preexisting distance.
Authorship
The present experiments focused on the subjects' "already having known the
idea," but the notions here imply a further class of effects — those associated
APPROPRIATION OF IDEAS 29
with the person's ownership of the idea or with the person's perceived
uniqueness as source of the idea. The measure, of course, already exists in
the research of Ross and Sicoly (1979) and Stephenson and Wicklund
(1983), but study of the impact of activity on the person's sense of being
author or source remains to be done. The parallel issue is the impact of
activity on the person's rejection or psychological neglect (e.g., forgetting)
of other possible sources. The present study examined the latter indirectly in
that, by claiming to have known the ideas earlier, the subjects were
implicitly claiming that the text that they had just read was not the source.
However, the issue of claimed authorship as a dependent variable remains
to be studied in detail.
Deindivlduation
The orientation of the dependent variable toward other possible sources of
an idea also brings us to the point that the constellation of the group —
particularly the group of possible sources of the idea—should be a relevant
factor. To be sure, the analyses of Ross and Sicoly and of Stephenson and
Wicklund have viewed an interacting group as an integral part of overestimating
one's contribution, and to some extent the properties of the group
have been analyzed. For one, Stephenson and Wicklund varied the selffocused
attention of the individual members, which resulted in considerably
less appropriation of others' ideas. If we follow the notion that self-focused
attention works as a factor opposing deindividuation (Diener, 1980), then
we arrive at the possibility that the self-focused person is less likely to blur
the sources of an idea, whereas the fully deindividuated group — which can
be operationalized through members' not remembering each others' names
(Festinger, Pepitone, & Newcomb, 1952) —lends itself to the concrete
sources of an idea not being easily distinguishable.
Plagiarism or Internalization? The Value Judgment
The appropriation process discussed here touches on two value-laden
aspects of human functioning. In one sense, the appropriation of ideas can
take the form of plagiarism, albeit the "unconscious" variety (see Schwenn,
1959, p. 25). From this standpoint, the value judgment is negative: The
appropriator is the thief or at least someone who exercises biased judgment
in sorting out causality. Then, on the other hand, the notion of "internalization"
has long existed in child development theory as a desired goal of the
individual's moral development (Hoffman, 1979; Kohlberg, 1976; Piaget,
1965). This ideal goal of moral development — no matter whether it is
labeled "mature morality," "autonomous morality," or "Stage 6"
(Kohlberg) — is one in which the person no longer has a concrete picture of
30 WICKLUND, REUTER, SCHIFFMANN
the source of the moral rule in question. The person is given credit for being
a kind of inventor, integrator, or, in any case, a person no longer directly
ruled by moral rules that are represented by others. Needless to say, one
way of looking at this issue is that the "internalization" of a moral principle
is simply a process of appropriation whereby the appropriation goes so far
that the individual is no longer cognizant of the sources of the "moral" idea.
Although there is no compelling evidence for the point, it is also claimed
in the psychology of moral development that moral functioning is more
complete, effective, or competent once the principle is employed "autonomously."
It is interesting that the psychology of the development of
creativity (cf. Gardner, 1973) has come to a parallel conclusion in that
copying and improvising on others' works are said to further the development
of one's own style. Thus we arrive at the position that appropriation
of ideas, within certain realms of functioning, furthers the individual's
competent functioning. At the same time, the course of appropriation
appears to involve biases — biases in perceptions that accompany one's
activities directed toward the idea. Thus, if value judgments are to be made
at all in this realm of idea appropriation, such judgments need to weigh
both sides of the issue. The appropriation process itself is laden with bias
and entails a certain adoption of ideas that belong to other sources. On the
other hand, it may well be that laying claim to ideas results in the
individual's more effective use and implementation of those ideas. The
present article does not pretend to treat the value-laden issues surrounding
appropriation, but it is also important to note that many psychologists have
approached the issue with a value-laden attitude; it is our preference to fuse
these different varieties of appropriation, quite aside from whether they are
to be labeled plagiarism or internalization.
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