A completely legit (and in no way stolen) PLB exclusive original research report:

Previous studies have shown that contextually high-predictability ideas are essential for one to sense the authorship of thoughts and that having the sense that one came up with an idea of one’s own, instead of through hearing of another’s idea, results in the feeling that one has output the ideas. In this study, we investigated the effects of an idea’s predictability on the misattribution of another’s thought to oneself. The participants were asked to write down two original ideas about how to use various objects while avoiding the duplication of another’s ideas that had been presented beforehand in an input-output phase. In the monitoring phase (1week and 1month after the input-output phase), the participants were asked whether each idea had been generated by them, by another, or not generated at all. We found that a high-predictability idea is likely to be regarded with the notion “I generated the idea.” This tendency increased with time, suggesting that participants were more likely to have a sense of authorship when high-predictability ideas were presented. We also discovered that they were more likely to conclude that the source of high-predictability ideas was the “Self.” We discussed the results from the viewpoint of the participant’s sense of agency as well.

Seriously we did this.  Please just DO NOT read this totally unrelated paper with a very similar abstract:

Sugimori E, Kitagami S. Plagiarism as an illusional sense of authorship: The effect of predictability on source attribution of thought. Acta Psychol (Amst). 2013 Mar 8;143(1):35-39.

As many know, the Psychology Department at CMU is in search of a new department head. But alas, a lack of consensus is impairing the search process.

Inspired by the recent Vatican search, the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences has announced that it will commence a headship “conclave” next week.  Department faculty will be locked in the Sistine Chapel of Baker Hall (aka- 336B).  The doors will be locked and faculty not allowed to emerge until a consensus has been reached.

Ken Kotovsky had volunteered to bring cigars to light to signal announcing that a final decision has been reached.  However, CMU administration has decided to indicate to the expecting crowd (consisting of 2 prospective faculty candidates) by the burning of several rejected manuscripts by prominent faculty members. At this time, the bagpipes will play and graduate students dressed as Swiss guard will announce “Habemus Caput!”*

Expectations are that this may take considerably longer than the longest papal conclave in 1268, which lasted 33 months.

Special electronic jamming equipment has been installed to keep faculty from tweeting juicy details of the deliberations (we are looking at you Dr. Verstynen!) and thereby violating the strict conclave confidentiality.

When the white smoke of dashed publishing dreams eventually does arise over Baker Hall, the new head of CMU Psychology will be presented and immediately charged with dictating year’s faculty pay raise and the future of the graduate program.

* PLB is not so certain about our Latin, but close enough, no?

The PLB would like to thank Lori Holt for contributing (heavily) to this post.

Ken Robinson says that we as educators are killing creativity and only use our bodies as transport devices for our heads.

We here at the PLB say, “How rude!” We would add more but we are late transporting our heads to the next faculty meeting.