Egocentric Bias

Ask each member of a household what share of the chores they do, and the answers add up to well over a hundred percent. No one is lying. Everyone is honestly reporting a biased ledger.

The mechanism is attention. You were there for every dish you washed — each one is a vivid memory, dated and filed. The others' work happened out of your sight and was never recorded. Your contribution lives in high resolution; theirs in fog.

The same arithmetic corrupts every shared enterprise: marriages, partnerships, group projects, national histories. Each side remembers its own costs and the others' failures, and both sides feel cheated by the same arrangement.

The cure is not effort — it is accounting. When you feel you are carrying the team, go look at what the team did while you were not watching. The feeling is real. The ledger it was drawn from is not.