Source Confusion

The charge

Source confusion is a memory error in which you correctly remember information but cannot accurately identify whether it came from direct experience, someone else, imagination, or another medium. It is a specific failure of tracking origin.

How it operates

People infer source from cues like vividness, fluency, and familiarity rather than replaying a perfect record. When those cues overlap across imagined, heard, and seen events, the brain can assign the wrong source.

Logged incidents

1. Incident 01

   A founder thinks a user explicitly requested a feature, when in fact the idea came from an internal brainstorming session.

2. Incident 02

   A manager believes a performance concern came from multiple peers, but it was mostly repeated from one initial comment.

3. Incident 03

   A marketing team treats a rumor from social media as customer-validated insight because it was repeated often in meetings.

What to watch for

Be skeptical when you remember a point clearly but not how you learned it. Ask: "Did I observe this directly, infer it, or hear it from someone else?"