Source Confusion
We misattribute the origin of a memory, forgetting where or how we learned something.
Source confusion (or source misattribution) is a memory error in which the source of a memory is forgotten or incorrectly recalled. People correctly remember information but misremember where or how they learned it — attributing a dream to reality, a rumor to a reliable source, or imagined events to actual ones. This underlies false eyewitness testimony and the 'cryptomnesia' phenomenon where people present others' ideas as their own.
What it looks like in the wild.
- Justice False Eyewitness An eyewitness is shown a photo array before a lineup. Later, when identifying a suspect in the lineup, they misattribute the familiarity from the photo as recognition from the crime scene.
Recognising a definition is not the same skill as spotting it.
Two scenarios from the app, with distractors drawn from the same family of biases — which is what makes them hard.
Nina is convinced her mother taught her a particular family recipe. When she asks her mother, she has no memory of it. Nina likely got the recipe from a cooking website.
Laura remembers a recipe calling for two cups of sugar. When the dessert is too sweet, she checks the cookbook and sees it says one cup. She blames her oven for the result.
Biases rarely arrive alone.
Understand more. Assume less.
188 biases, 18,869 scenarios, and a record of how you actually decide.
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