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Two experiments were conducted to examine certain effects of subjects directing activity toward critical target ideas or concepts. The concept of appropriation of ideas is employed here to characterize the effects. The effects can be extended and reworked into works of literature, science, styles, or inventions.
Two experiments were conducted to examine certain effects of subjects directing activity toward critical target ideas or concepts. The concept of appropriation of ideas is employed here to characterize the effects. The effects can be extended and reworked into works of literature, science, styles, or inventions.
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Two experiments were conducted to examine certain effects of subjects directing activity toward critical target ideas or concepts. The concept of appropriation of ideas is employed here to characterize the effects. The effects can be extended and reworked into works of literature, science, styles, or inventions.
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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. 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