How much do you contribute to housework relative to your significant other?

This question was the subject of a 1979 study that asked married couples to select on a continuum their relative contribution to 20 activities around the house. Things like cooking dinner, doing the dishes, shopping for groceries, caring for children, etc.

If the spouses were perfectly calibrated on their relative contributions, their responses should add up to 100%. But that’s not what happened. The researchers found that the responses usually totaled more than 100%, meaning that they overestimated their own contributions.

This finding that members of groups overestimate their own contributions has been replicated many times beyond the context of marriage. Studies have found that basketball teams see themselves (rather than their opponents) as the main drivers of wins and losses, college roommates overestimate their own contributions to keeping their dorm room tidy, and even members of trivia teams overestimate their proportion of correct answers as compared to other team members.

Why do we overestimate our contributions?

The main culprit is an ingrained human bias called the Availability Bias which says we underweight or ignore what we don’t see or experience. Wharton professor Adam Grant explained how availability bias causes the results found in these studies in his book Give and Take:

We have more access to information about our own contributions than the contributions of others. We see all of our own efforts, but we only witness a subset of our partners’ efforts. When we think about who deserves the credit, we have more knowledge of our own contributions. 

This reminds me of what my friend Cece refers to as the “paradox of the clean house”: we tend only to notice messes and don’t stop and appreciate the absence of a mess and the efforts that lack of mess took. The same thing occurs when we work in teams at work — we know how much effort we’ve put in but don’t see the full extent of others’ contributions.

To combat this, we need to remind ourselves that other members of our team — whether at work or at home — are contributing outside of our attention.