Source Confusion

Source monitoring — the cognitive process of tracking where memories originate — was developed as a formal research program by Marcia Johnson and colleagues from the late 1970s. The specific term "misattribution" was popularized by Harvard psychologist Daniel Schacter, who named it one of memory's seven fundamental errors in a 1999 American Psychologist paper and his 2001 book The Seven Sins of Memory. Schacter drew on decades of eyewitness testimony research to show how people confidently recall facts while misremembering — or entirely fabricating — their source.