Intuitive credit attribution and the priority rule

When a good idea is discovered, who gets credit for it? This is an important question in science, the arts, law, and everyday life. We suggest that people have intuitions about credit ownership that depend on three factors: (i) whether the idea suggests the discoverer is competent; (ii) whether the discovery elicits gratitude toward the discoverer; (iii) who the first individual to come up with the idea is. We test these intuitions in three vignette experiments with UK participants, in the context of priority disputes in science. In Experiment 1, participants find a discoverer less competent and award less credit to them for a scientific idea if they perceive that the discoverer could have plagiarized another discoverer, but attributions of credit are also shown to differ from attributions of competence. In Experiment 2, participants are more grateful toward, and award more credit to a discoverer who makes their discovery public. In Experiment 3, participants are more biased toward the first discoverer in terms of credit attribution than in terms of competence attribution or feelings of gratitude. In conclusion, we suggest that intuitions of credit ownership help explain the popularity and endurance of the priority rule in science, by which all the credit of a discovery is supposed to go to the first discoverer.