Experiment No. 36: The Chore Check-In

By Rachel Drapper, Fairshare

The Basics

We’re Trying to Solve: Giving partners common ground

Target Audience: Couples, parents, partners

Ages: Adults

Category: Household chores, mental load

Estimated Time: 1 minute

Difficulty Level: Piece of cake

When members of a group report their own contribution to a joint project, they tend to overestimate their share of the work. Researchers have seen time and again that this means people’s perceived contributions add up to well over 100 percent. The same thing happens when couples estimate their shares of housework and child care.

Partners overestimate their own share due to good old fashioned egocentrism. We’re only human after all, and it’s easy for us to see what we do and harder to notice others. That’s especially true in the context of housework, which includes a lot of invisible mental labor, where the times we completed household chores are more visible and more easily recalled than tasks completed by someone else.

That’s why, it can be helpful for couples to check in, and see if they are overestimating their own share and/or underestimating that of their partner, and to assess their current split of physical and mental effort, and whether it is a balance they are happy with.

Research shows that everyone’s tendency to “over-claim” their own contribution can be reduced when people explicitly consider others’ contributions. That’s exactly what this quiz helps to do.

Directions

1. Check out this 1-minute quiz. Try Fairshare’s Chore Check-In quiz to see if you and your partner are on the same page about how much you each contribute at home.

2. Share the quiz with your partner. The quiz works best when both partners complete it, so send the link to your partner, and ask them to fill it out as soon as they can.

3. Check out your results. Within a week Fairshare will send your results over emaila. We’ll include a breakdown that looks something like this:

Take some time to consider your estimated shares of your contributions at home, and how you see things vs. how your partner does. What can you learn from this? Rather than focusing on who is right and who is wrong, take a step back and think about where you differ and why that might be. What are you seeing that they aren’t? What are they seeing that you aren't seeing?

4. Chat about your results. Take a moment to speak with your partner about your results. Were they at all surprising? Do your responses match? Are there differences in the physical versus the mental load? Are you each happy with your shares? If you need some guidance on how to chat about what can sometimes be a tense topic, check out our conversation guide. We recommend starting with your experiences of chores growing up, so you can think through how your differences came to exist.

If there is some room for improvement in your division of labor, consider revisiting BLLx experiment No. 19, The Choreganizer, to see what tasks you could re-allocate for a happier and fairer set up.

5. Check back in in a month. Make a note in your calendar to revisit this experiment in a month, and retake the quiz. Have your shares changed at all? Did the past month feel fairer? Are there further adjustments to make? Rinse and repeat until you land on shares that you are both happy with :)