Adam Grant has an article in Time that explores why we steal others people’s ideas. For those with a cynical eye, stealing is done with intent. But perhaps some thefts are accidental, or beyond conscious thought.
Enter kleptomnesia, which is defined as:
generating an idea that you believe is novel, but in fact was created by someone else.
And the root psychological cause?
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.
I can see this happening. In research, it often happens that three or four different groups start working on the same experiment, but one of those groups gets it published first. In this case, who should be the originator? The fastest group? The group with the best story? Perhaps the experiment was conceived independently, or by attending the same thought-provoking lecture?
One more thing. Usually in my line of work, when I am presented new information, before I accept it as true, I weigh the quality of the source. This is not unlike the great number of researchers that preferentially read research articles from Nature, Science, and Cell (perhaps due to the potentially higher bar in peer review). Maybe this would really limit the number of genuinely new ideas I could potentially “generate”.