What Is Unconscious Plagiarism? What Are Its Effects?

Unconscious plagiarism is the incident of presenting someone else’s ideas as her/his own. According to a recent study, plagiarism occurs during the retention interval. The act of repeating the elaboration phase in a recall task has various consequences.

Repeated imageries are not inflated in unconscious plagiarism when people elaborate the ideas by either improvising them or imagining them. The repetition of the improvement phase increases plagiarism percentage. There are some legal cases and anecdotal accounts where people plagiarize content without being aware. The journal of psychology states the reason for unintentional plagiarism. This act has three phases, namely.

• Generation phase
• Recall-own phase
• Generate-new phase

Unconscious plagiarism is prevalent in many creative works, word puzzles, generating alternative use of available items, brainstorming ideas for problem-solving, and drawing novel space creatures.

What Is Cryptomnesia?

Unintentional plagiarism is also known as cryptomnesia. Psychologists Dana Murphy and Alan Brown coined the term. In daily lives, people do come across a wide range of ideas, information, and data. It is human nature to forget some ideas and remember others. Cryptomnesia is nothing but the brain’s incapacity to remember concepts. They get them back in memory without recognizing the subject. People believe it is something original and new to them—the memory returns in intuition.

When Does Cryptomnesia Happen?

Cryptomnesia takes place when people lose the ability to monitor the sources properly. Under a high cognitive load, they are more likely to claim ideas as their patent. Hypermnesia psychology is an extreme degree of recall and retentiveness with the casual clarity of memory images.

Repercussions of Cryptomnesia

Cryptomnesia may lead to inadvertently plagiarized content which suppresses the originality of writing. People fail to acknowledge the source unwittingly and fail to recognize the thoughts as unoriginal but duplicate content.

Unconscious plagiarism is the most common result of cryptomnesia. Here, people cannot create an original idea but form ideas that are the combinatorial product of existing ideas that they have absorbed over time. This fusion of living and new combinations occurs in an unconscious process as people tend to obliterate the sources.

When people are accused of plagiarism, the authority in charge should know a fine line between deliberate theft and unconscious borrowing. In history, Helen Keller, T.S Eliot, Martin Luther King JR., and various other famous personnel were accused of cryptomnesia.

Why Does Plagiarism Occur?

Plagiarism is the act of borrowing others’ ideas and claiming them as one’s own. It is a dishonest and morally incorrect act. But writers often draw upon existing sources both consciously or unconsciously to improve their writing quality or increase acceptance.

Students copy from existing articles to write scientific papers, research papers, and dissertations.

People can include summarizations, verbatim quotations, but in that case, proper citation and attribution to the original writer are necessary. Otherwise, one may need to bear the legal consequences of plagiarism. For example, researchers must follow specific rules and keep themselves away from any plagiarism. If caught for plagiarism, there will be a fine imposed upon them, and the authority may not accept their thesis. Writers must not paraphrase as it comes under the ambit of plagiarism too.

How To Avoid Plagiarism?

Teachers should teach the students how to attribute to the original sources while writing a journal article or thesis paper. There are various plagiarism checker tools available online now which people must use to avoid plagiarism. These platform show both the percentage of plagiarism and uniqueness in an article. Writers can scan their papers’ through such tools and identify the plagiarized portions. These tools cite the sources of the plagiarized sources too. Once they come across the copied sentences or phrases, they must edit or delete them to make their writings 100% unique.

Plagiarism has become a pretty common phenomenon in the E-learning environment.

How Does Cryptomnesia Impact Creativity?

Cryptomnesia is a creative pathology. This growing trend of the Cryptomnesia epidemic may impact the creative culture. As psychologists say, memory and creativity are interlinked, and it is hard to separate one from the other completely. People tend to plagiarize more while writing than speaking. Writers unknowingly borrow ideas from previous discussions and lectures, which is known as accidental plagiarism.

Sociocultural knowledge and discourse exist in implicit form. People do share cultural beliefs without conscious awareness.

Unconscious copying is there in facts, arguments, and sentences.

Writers must acknowledge the sources to avoid unintentional plagiarism and not to be guilty of Cryptomnesia.

How To Avoid Cryptomnesia?

People can follow specific tips to avoid Cryptomnesia.

1. Writers must research carefully, cite the sources, cross-check their articles to ensure there is no inadvertently plagiarized content.
2. They can use Google to avoid any recalled or copied ideas.
3. Anti-plagiarism apps like Copyleaks are beneficial.
4. They must check numerous original contents to check if there is any similarity.
5. Students can take help from the respective authority to learn the skills of writing original papers.

Why Do People Choose Copyleaks?

Copyleaks is a comprehensive plagiarism checker that uses Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning based algorithms. This tool can check contents in 100 plus languages. People use Copyleaks for it is automated, accurate, and fast. It performs multi-layered and extensive online searches and databases across the internet to find many similarities. It has robust APIs, platform integrations, and code plagiarism detection facilities.

There are numerous plagiarism checking tools available online that people can get for free or bear some charges. The freely available tools are often unsafe to use, and they cannot detect the entire content authentically. Apart from that, the majority of the checkers have a fixed word limit. Users can check up to that word limit at free cost. Moreover, the checkers do not give an accurate report and take few minutes without verifying properly.

Another reason for trusting Copyleaks is the data safety and security it provides. The papers people upload for plagiarism checking are never exposed to any third party. Individuals and students use it for various Learning Management Systems, SEO, blogging, business, enterprises, and Standardized Testing Assessments.