Plagerism and Self-Persuasion

Remember that guy Neale Donald Walsch that wrote the "Conversations with God" series? He is being accused of plagiarism for using a well-known anecdote from another popular spiritual writer, Candy Chand (Chicken Soup for the Christian Family Soul). He was writing a Christmas essay for Beliefnet and told a heart warming story about a Christmas pageant he says he saw. Oops. Turns out the story he claimed happened to him was written 10 years ago by Chand and has made the rounds on the web ever since and appeared in the Chicken Soup series as well as elsewhere. It's even officially copyrighted.

Now, Walsch says he convinced himself that this happened to him 20 years ago and that it was an honest mistake. But that fails to explain why his version of the story matches Chand's almost verbatim. He offered this explanation:

All I can say now — because I am truly mystified and taken aback by this — is that someone must have sent it to me over the Internet ten years or so ago,” Mr. Walsch wrote. “Finding it utterly charming and its message indelible, I must have clipped and pasted it into my file of ‘stories to tell that have a message I want to share.’ I have told the story verbally so many times over the years that I had it memorized ... and then, somewhere along the way, internalized it as my own experience. (source)

Chand doesn't bite: "Quite frankly, I’m not buying it," she told the Times. It's not the first time people have tried to claim the story as their own, but it the first time a professional writer has done it. "As a professional writer, when someone appears to plagiarize, they damage the industry, they damage other writers’ credibility and they hurt the reader because they never know what to believe anymore."

Quite right. But the best line was her zinger that ended the NYTimes article about the situation: "Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not lie, and thou shalt not covet another author’s property." Lol.

But I think the real question is whether it is possible to absorb a story and make it your own in this way. Answer: "of course it is." In the television version of This American Life, there is a true story of a husband and wife where the husband has convinced himself of something that actually happened to his wife, not him. (Episode 11: "Every Marriage is a Courtroom"). I think it's perhaps quite common for people to appropriate anecdotes in this way. Of course, it's impossible to notice oneself.

So understand Chand's anger as well as how Walsch could have persuaded himself in this way. Now, are some people more prone this kind of self-suggestibility than others?

-t