False attribution may refer to: One particular case of misattribution is the Matthew effect.
This leads the quotation to be more famous, but the real author to be forgotten (see also: obliteration by incorporation and Churchillian Drift).
[2] Such misattributions may originate as a sort of fallacious argument, if use of the quotation is meant to be persuasive, and attachment to a more famous person (whether intentionally or through misremembering) would lend it more authority.
In Jewish biblical studies, an entire group of falsely-attributed books is known as the pseudepigrapha.
For example, the "Levitt Institute" was a fake organisation created in 2009 solely for the purposes of (successfully) fooling the Australian media into reporting that Sydney was Australia’s most naive city.