#263 なぜ自分の方ががんばっていると思ってしまうのか
Psychological research shows that virtually everyone holds the illusion that they are working harder than the people around them. When psychologist Michael Ross surveyed married couples on how they split household chores, the combined percentages reported by each spouse exceeded 100% for almost every task on the list — a systematic bias rooted in how memory works. Fermondo Saito (フェルモンド斉藤) and Tenor Saito (テノール斉藤) unpack this "availability heuristic" and offer gratitude as the practical antidote.
Listen to this episode Go to the show page
What this episode answers
Why do we convince ourselves that we are working harder than others?
Our own actions replay in vivid, video-quality detail while others' actions exist in memory only as secondhand text — that gap in recall quality triggers the availability heuristic and inflates our self-assessment beyond reality.
What did Michael Ross's household chores study reveal?
When couples each estimated their own percentage contribution to 20 household tasks, the totals exceeded 100% for nearly every item, showing that people don't merely rate themselves above their partners — they overestimate their contribution in absolute terms.
Are there more convenience stores or hair salons, and what does that illustrate?
Hair salons outnumber convenience stores by roughly 4–5 to 1, yet most people guess convenience stores are more numerous because they visit them far more often, making them easier to recall — a textbook example of the availability heuristic.
What problems arise when the need for recognition becomes too strong?
Not receiving praise no longer feels neutral; it registers as a negative, and watching a colleague get praised feels as bad as being scolded yourself, producing emotional swings that make everyday calm feel like suffering.
How can we correct the illusion that we are working harder than everyone else?
Consciously practicing gratitude — appreciating what a colleague did for you, or noticing that a busy manager still took a moment to acknowledge you — shifts the cognitive balance and gradually corrects the skewed self-appraisal.
Everyone Thinks They're Working Harder
Fermondo Saito and Tenor Saito open the episode by naming an inconvenient truth: the feeling that you work harder than the people around you is a psychological illusion shared by almost everyone. Workplace and household grievances — "Why am I putting in all this effort and getting no credit?" or "There's no way they deserve more praise than me" — are not signs of an unjust environment. They are signs of a universal cognitive error.
Michael Ross's Household Chores Research
Psychologist Michael Ross set out to measure this error in a domestic setting. He surveyed married couples on 20 household tasks — dishwashing, vacuuming, and so on — asking each spouse separately to estimate what percentage of the work they personally handled. If perceptions were accurate, husband and wife together should account for exactly 100% per task. In practice, nearly every task came back over 100%.
Take dishwashing: a husband might answer 30% while his wife answers 99%, for a combined total of 129%. The husband may even feel he has slightly understated his contribution, while the wife is certain 99% is the honest truth. The crucial insight is that this is not merely a relative illusion — each person thinking they outdo the other. It is an absolute overestimation: each person genuinely believes they contribute more than they actually do.
The Illusion Created by "Ease of Recall"
The underlying mechanism is the **availability heuristic** — our tendency to judge the frequency or magnitude of something by how easily examples come to mind.
When you estimate how much you contribute, your own actions flood back in high-definition video: "That evening I was exhausted but still did the dishes." "I ran the vacuum right after working late." Your partner's actions, however, you know only secondhand — brief reports heard in passing, text headlines rather than full footage. The information gap is roughly the difference between a YouTube video and a Yahoo News headline, and the richer source naturally feels like much more effort.
A vivid parallel from everyday life: most people, when asked whether there are more convenience stores or hair salons in Japan, guess convenience stores. In reality, hair salons outnumber convenience stores by roughly 4–5 to 1. Because people visit convenience stores far more often, those visits are easier to recall, and ease of recall gets mistaken for actual frequency of occurrence.
The Pain of Approval-Seeking and Emotional Ups and Downs
When the belief that "I'm working harder" goes unchecked, dissatisfaction with how others evaluate us intensifies. Even a fair, objective assessment from a manager lands as inadequate because the internal benchmark — inflated by the availability heuristic — is set too high.
This fuels an outsized need for recognition. Once approval-seeking becomes the default mode, not being praised no longer feels neutral; it registers as a net negative. Watching a colleague receive praise feels equivalent to being reprimanded yourself. A brief compliment produces a spike of elation, but the fall back to baseline feels even harder to bear. The wider these emotional swings become, the more ordinary, calm days start to feel like suffering.
Gratitude Resets the Cognitive Balance
The episode's proposed remedy is deceptively simple: practice gratitude. When a colleague handles a task, instead of thinking "Why am I always the one doing everything?" try "I'm glad they took care of that." When a manager offers a word of encouragement, instead of "I deserve more recognition than this," try "They noticed me despite being busy."
This shift in framing makes others' contributions visible and countable, directly counteracting the one-sided self-assessment the availability heuristic produces.
The target state the hosts describe is one of **calm steadiness**. Praise is welcome, but its absence leaves you at neutral rather than in deficit. The analogy offered is practicing a musical instrument: if you finish a session knowing you played well today, that internal satisfaction is enough — you do not need an audience's approval to feel the effort was worthwhile. Autonomous satisfaction, independent of external recognition, is the most durable foundation for sustained effort over time.
Takeaways
- When married couples each reported their percentage of 20 household tasks, the totals exceeded 100% for nearly every item — proof of an absolute overestimation of one's own contribution, not merely a relative one against a partner.
- We replay our own actions in vivid, video-quality memory while others' actions register only as secondhand text, and that recall gap is what drives the availability heuristic to inflate our self-assessment.
- Shifting to a gratitude mindset — recognizing others' contributions as genuinely helpful rather than resenting them — corrects the cognitive imbalance and moves us toward the calm, approval-independent state where sustained effort becomes possible.
This article is edited from a machine transcript of the first 30 minutes of the episode. It is not an official summary — please listen to the episode itself.