598 - Over-Functioning in Relationships: Why Taking On More Makes It Worse
Will it fall apart without you?
We’ve all been in the position of being part of a group project where someone does the majority of the work. Maybe you’ve been the person to take it over and think that if you don’t do it, everything will fall apart. Research actually shows that that might be half true, but it’s still not healthy to continue to take on more and more.
It’s like a see-saw: one person takes more and more (over-functioning) and the other taking on less (under-functioning).
Over-functioning is about caring combined with anxiety about what happens to the relationship if you don’t give in. That can put a lot of strain on a relationship.
It turns out two things are usually true: your frustration that nobody else is stepping up is legitimate, and your belief that it’ll all fall apart if you don’t step up is inflated.
Social loafing is a legitimate thing: it refers to how people put less into a shared job than they’d put into the same job alone. But our perception is often skewed, and it’s important to constantly remember that your partner survived before they met you. Most people who are over-functioning are overestimating how much more they do.
What to do?
First, figure out which seat you’re in.
If you’re the over-contributor, ask yourself:
When I imagine not doing this, what exactly am I afraid will happen? Is it about control? Assuming your partner will be bad at it? Or anxiety about the relationship itself?
If you’re the under-contributor, ask:
What makes stepping in feel unsafe?
People will switch seats between relationships. If someone over-functions at home, they may be the one to step back at work, for instance. It depends on how much agency you feel in different situations.
Second, test the story before you act on it:
Your estimate of your own share is inflated, and so is theirs. Both people can be telling the truth and both can still be wrong. You don’t see all their work, especially the mental part of it.
Don’t build a scoreboard. This only serves to start fights.
The collapse prediction is just a prediction. Your partner was perfectly functional before they met you. How much is “social loafing” and how much is different priorities or standards?
Redoing their work is what makes their contribution redundant, and redundant contributions are the best-documented case of someone easing off. This way, the over-functioner builds the condition they resent.
Third, change the conditions, not the person:
Make the work visible in both directions. Work that is obvious done alone and invisible done together is the least confrontational lever available and moves effort on its own, but it has to be mutual and ongoing.
Hand something over whole, including the noticing. If you are still the one who remembers it needs doing, you haven’t handed it over. Handing it over includes planning and execution.
Agree a standard first, then be willing to accept a different result than you would have done yourself. When someone takes over a new task, they will be worse at it at first and it will be harder for them. That is the price of the handover, not evidence it failed.
Separate “you don’t care about this task” from “you don’t care about us.” They look identical, but they need different conversations.
Finally, here’s how to raise it and not get steamrolled:
Say the see-saw out loud. “I think I’ve taken over, and that’s made it easy for you to step back, and I don’t think either of us chose it” starts a different dialogue than “you never help.” It describes a pattern instead of assigning a defect.
Name the fear as yours. “I’m scared if I stop tracking this, it falls apart, and I don’t actually know if that’s true” is more accurate and harder to argue with than a complaint about their behavior.
Ask, don’t assign. Assigning keeps you in the manager’s seat, which is the position you’re trying to vacate.
Transcript
If you find any transcription errors, please let us know at info@multiamory.com and we will fix it ASAP.
Jase: This is the whole group project thing. This is the, you're in a group so you can loaf. You can let others take the work, right? Or maybe you're the one that ends up doing the work and everyone else is loafing. They'd seen that social loafing, this phenomenon, this idea that the more people there are in a group, the less likely anyone is to carry their weight or do their part. And they were trying to answer two big questions. One is, does it happen? And then also, what conditions make it more likely to happen than others. And that's the one that I found to be really interesting. And first thing is that the amount of effort that people did on average, roughly four out of every five, the effect showed up, right? People did work less in groups. That's just a fact. That just happens.
Jase: Welcome to the Multiamory Podcast. I'm Jase.
Emily: I'm Emily.
Dedeker: And I'm Dedeker.
Emily: We believe in looking to the future of relationships, not maintaining the status quo of the past.
Dedeker: Whether you're monogamous, polyamorous, swinging, casually dating, or if you just do relationships differently, we see you, and we're here to help.
Jase: On this episode of the Multiamory Podcast, we're talking about that moment when you're overwhelmed and stressed and think, "If I don't do this, nobody will, and it's all going to fall apart." So it turns out that the research shows you're probably half right, and figuring out which half changes what you should actually do about it. We've got some really interesting studies from business as well as studies done with married couples to help us understand this classic problem with things like group projects, or how anxiety affects us in negotiation and how accurately we estimate our own contributions to a relationship. Stick around to the end and we'll have some tips on how to take these findings and then apply them to improve your own relationships and maybe even your work-life balance. I know I'm hoping for that for myself, at least. If you're interested in learning more about our fundamental communication tools that we reference on this show all the time, you can check out our book Multiamory: Essential Tools for Modern Relationships which covers some of our most used communication tools for all types of relationships. You can find links to buy it at multiamory.com/book or wherever fine books are sold. Also, Emily is not joining us for this episode. She is off working right now, so this is just Dedeker and myself.
Dedeker: It's me and Jase having to pick up the slack. If we don't do it... yeah, Jase, your intro disturbed me. Will said that that rant that passes through my mind quite often, and it sounds like also passes through your mind sometimes, you teased the fact that it's half true.
Jase: Yeah. And what part upset you? The fact that any of it's true or the fact that not all of it's true?
Dedeker: Because I feel over the years I've really had to train myself. I've had to do a lot of work to realize that's not true. It's not all on your shoulders. The whole world is not riding on you. It's okay. You can let go. I've had to do a lot of work. And so if you're telling me actually maybe some of it is true, I don't know how I can handle that.
Jase: I see. Okay. That's interesting because I thought you were going to be upset that I implied it was not 100% true.
Dedeker: Oh, geez.
Jase: So I guess for listeners coming from either side, this could be a shock. I should clarify that we're not talking about the world falling apart, which I do think is where this can go in extreme cases of the entire social structure of the world will collapse if I don't do my parts and keep doing it 127%. That's a little different than what we're talking about here. This is just stuff within your relationship. So the opening question I want to start with here, because we can definitely both relate to this and we've talked about this in our own relationship as well as in various work relationships or group projects, or I'm on the HOA board for where we live, I find this coming up in that context too, where I feel like something needs to get done. I don't feel like everyone else is going to do it, so I take it on and then I get stuck with it where I don't feel like I can ever give this to anybody else or I can ever let go of this because now if I don't do it, it's not going to get done and everything's going to fall apart and the whole building will burn down or something like that.
Dedeker: It's going to be a disaster. We can agree, right?
Jase: It'll be a disaster. Yeah. So I'm just curious to set the stage for you. For me, I noticed this coming up with the HOA. And when we were talking about it the other day, we were talking about something with my work. And I was like, and if I don't do this, the whole company is going to collapse and go bankrupt. And you were like, hold on a minute, buddy. You might be overestimating a little bit of what you actually think is going to happen here. I'm curious for you. What's your relationship to this kind of thinking?
Dedeker: Oh boy. Well, definitely going way back for sure. I was always the kid the most stressed out with the group project.
Jase: Ah, they're the worst.
Dedeker: They are the worst because I was always the A student, the overachiever, and I always knew if I was put into a group project, I'm going to do the bulk of the work. Not necessarily because anyone directly asked me to do the bulk of the work, but if you want it done and done on time and done well, I have to be the one doing the bulk of the work. So I picked up that group project baggage very early. And then it's definitely creeped into my relationship history for sure. Now some of this is a personality thing and the way my brain works. I'm someone who is very good at thinking ten steps ahead even when we don't need to be thinking ten steps ahead, and I'm very good at catastrophizing and seeing the way that things go wrong. And so that means in pretty much all my relationships, I do tend to be the planner or the one with maybe the manager brain, especially if we're talking about household stuff, because this shows up a lot, the discussion about mental and emotional labor within the household.
Jase: Right.
Dedeker: I tend to be the person who gravitates toward that. Now, in your and my relationship and our cohabitation together, I think it's gotten a lot better, which I'm sure we'll talk about later. But I would say that I do trend towards that sense of if I'm not thinking about it or worrying about it, nobody else will. And I have had that come up also in just relationship maintenance and relationship tending too, sometimes.
Jase: Like with friendships and stuff, you mean?
Dedeker: Less with friendships, more with romantic partners.
Jase: Okay.
Dedeker: Again, a little bit of, am I asking the right questions? Are we having the right conversations? Have we repaired after this conflict? I know, Jase, you and I have had this joke about who's going to be the radar daddy, as in who's going to be the one responsible for scheduling the next radar and making sure it happens, or rescheduling if it has to. I think I'm the person who—just my brain burns at a mean rate is what I'm trying to let people know. I have an amazing brain. An amazing, organized brain.
Jase: Workaholic brain. You have an amazing brain. Sometimes a troublesome brain. It can cause some problems.
Dedeker: Yes. Yeah.
Jase: So I have a number of different studies and different angles for us to explore in the first half to two-thirds of this episode so that we can put it all together at the end. And the place I want to start is with something called Bowen family systems. Are you familiar with this?
Dedeker: Yes, I have heard of it before.
Jase: So this is from Murray Bowen, who is a psychiatrist who built this theory of families out of his clinical observations. So this is a framework for understanding family dynamics, not specifically an experiment or something that's been studied. Parts of it have obviously been studied and used in interventions and things like that. But the idea is that the family is not a collection of individuals, but that it's a single emotional unit and that the members are connected so that changes in one affect the others, that they're all collectively managing the levels of anxiety or fear or security. So to look at our example of this over-functioning, if one person ramps up what they're doing, the other people in the family system—this could be two people or it could be more—they'll predictably ramp down. Not as a choice. It's usually unconscious. And under tension, anxiety increasing, there's some sort of fear, there's some sort of concern, the theory claims that the person that accommodates the most absorbs the anxiety for the whole system, which then releases that pressure on the other people in the system.
Dedeker: Do you have real-world examples or even theoretical real-world examples?
Jase: Well, the specific wording for how it applies to what we're talking about is that the over-functioning person says, 'If I control this, I feel calmer.' So your example of, 'If I'm thinking about this, if I'm worrying about this, I feel calmer.' It takes that anxiety down.
Dedeker: Calmer-ish.
Jase: Okay, sure.
Dedeker: It's kind of a messed up kind of calm.
Jase: Okay, that's a good way to put it. And then the other people in that family system would feel like 'knowing that somebody else is handling this, I feel calmer.'
Dedeker: Okay, right.
Jase: In both cases there was this anxiety over a thing, and it's whether you're wanting to control it yourself or letting someone else control it, right? And I think why this is important, and we'll see this shows up in group dynamics and things like that as well, is that the pop advice out there right now—I feel like we're always fighting against all this bad pop psych advice on Instagram and TikTok—is this idea of, 'oh, if someone doesn't function at your level, you gotta drop them. They're not good enough for you. There's a problem there.' And the idea here is that the system's more integrated than that. And I think that's a core piece that you'll see throughout the rest of the studies we're going to look at is that it's not every person working in isolation and this person's just better than this person, and so they shouldn't be together. There's a whole system at play here. Does that make sense? Does that track with what you've seen in your relationships or with clients?
Dedeker: Well, yes, I think theoretically it does. When I think about my own personal lived experience, it's hard to see it as a system and not to see it as, 'oh, it's all on my shoulders as an individual,' right? So that's why I'm hoping to be educated today.
Jase: Sure. So something that comes up with this, thinking about these systems, is that you might fill a different role or fit this differently depending on the system that you're in. So what I'm curious about for you, and I've been thinking about this for myself as well, is are there any relationships or certain groups or professional scenarios where you do find that you are able to take more comfort in knowing someone else has this handled, whatever this is, right, has some things handled?
Dedeker: Yeah, for sure. I think outside of my own business, as in my own coaching business, I definitely have other professional scenarios where I have a little bit more of that, not my circus, not my monkeys kind of take on it, or a little bit more like, this is okay, somebody else is making some of the high-level decisions so I can chime in when it's necessary for me. But otherwise I can also sit back and just take some comfort in knowing somebody else is handling this, or somebody with maybe more expertise or more knowledge than me is handling this. I think that comes up a lot behind the scenes at Multiamory as well with, Jase, you have the most technical expertise, right? And so there's a lot of things on the back end of this show that I do not understand whatsoever, but take a lot of comfort in knowing that you do. And we've joked for many years that if you die, I don't know what we're going to do. Knock on wood, God forbid.
Jase: Knock on wood. Let's hope that doesn't happen.
Dedeker: But you are a bottleneck.
Jase: Sure. I think honestly with a company our size, we're all bottlenecks in our own special way.
Dedeker: In our own special way.
Jase: Yeah. No, and I've thought about that too. There are certain things like with certain scheduling things or parts of the editing or publishing process where I'm like, Emily and Carson got that handled, so I don't think about it except for those rare times when Emily's busy and asks for my help with something, and I have to go, "Shit, how does this work? I don't know. I don't know what I'm doing. This isn't normally my area." So yeah. So now I want to pivot to something that I'd never heard of before called unmitigated communion. Have you—
Dedeker: That sounds like a horror film, maybe?
Jase: That's good.
Dedeker: Unmitigated communion.
Jase: Yeah.
Dedeker: Or maybe like a spell from a JRPG? No, clearly I've never heard of this.
Jase: Yeah, so this tends to be related to people-pleasing. And the idea is that within psychology, the word communion has to do with caring about other people, being warm, being involved in their lives. And this is a healthy thing. But unmitigated communion is a term that was come up with in the late '90s to talk about caring about others to the exclusion of yourself.
Dedeker: Okay.
Jase: To the point where you're downplaying your own needs or your own desires, and then can lead to distress. So this was originally created by Helgeson and Fritz in 1998 to answer a specific question, which was about why women are diagnosed with depression more often than men. And the usual explanation that was given, which is traditional feminine gender role traits—
Dedeker: we're too emotional. Right. Too unstable naturally.
Jase: Yeah. That they were like, "That answer doesn't hold up because communion on its own, that caring about other people doesn't predict depression."
Dedeker: That makes sense.
Jase: And so their argument was there's something else here, that researchers were measuring the wrong thing. And that's where they came up with this idea of unmitigated communion, and that measuring that does predict psychological distress, more likelihood of depression, things like that.
Dedeker: So the idea is not about— yeah, so communion caregiving, being connected to people that you care about is usually related to better, more positive mental health outcomes. But it's this idea of when it comes at this extreme cost of sacrificing your own needs, your own wants, and your own happiness, that then the depression comes in.
Jase: Exactly. Exactly. And so once they identified this, we've had other studies that have then looked at this trait and seen how it relates to other things. So something to note here is that this isn't exactly just people-pleasing and it's not exactly over-functioning. It's something that overlaps with both of those. And so as we're talking about it, you might think, oh yeah, I've got some of this even though I don't think I'm an over-functioner, or maybe I do think I'm a people-pleaser, but I don't have this. This is a separate dynamic that tends to overlap though. So what they came up with through their research was this 9-item questionnaire. And then based on your answers of how strongly you relate to this or not, a Likert scale. And the questions are things like, "I always place the needs of others above my own," or "For me to be happy, I need others to be happy." And what's interesting about it is a lot of those questions in isolation sound like virtues.
Dedeker: Sure.
Jase: Right? It's like, oh, what a wonderful person you are. That's so great. But by scoring too high on this, what it's showing is actually that this is not about love and affection and affinity. It's about fear, and that it comes from this fear of losing relationships, and that the fear of not doing enough and the relationship will fall apart. So not about the things not getting done, but about the relationship itself not being maintained. And there have been multiple studies that have replicated this and also tried to compare it to traits like agreeableness and found that just agreeableness on its own does not correspond to this, that it's its own thing where it's at the cost to yourself. So it is this different thing. And that brings us to this study called Negotiators Who Give Too Much, and this is by Amanatullah, Morris & Curhan in 2008 from the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. And this study is interesting because it's looking at business people. So this study was done with MBAs who've had around 5 years of experience in their field, specifically because the researchers wanted to do a study that was not just on students, which I can appreciate.
Dedeker: Yeah, yeah. Respect. Yeah.
Jase: And so what they did is they had them do the Big Five personality traits survey. They did this unmitigated communion test as well as a few others like anxiety and things like that. So they had a baseline for them, and then they had them play these three different games. And they compared the results for the different groups in these games. So here's the 3 games. The first one is called the Dictator Game, and this is where you are given a set amount of money, fictional money, and you choose how much of that to hand to a stranger that you have no history with and you'll never meet. So you have nothing to gain out of it. And the idea is this game is to isolate just pure generosity.
Dedeker: Okay. Right.
Jase: How generous are people? The second one is the Trust Game, where you're the first move. And this is, you have again, $200 fictional dollars to choose how much to send to someone that you don't know. Whatever you send gets tripled, and then they decide how much of that tripled amount to give back to you.
Dedeker: Hmm.
Jase: So this is sort of a calculated investment where you don't know how the other person's gonna behave necessarily, and this is more about strategy. And then the third one is the Trust Game if you're the second move. So now this is someone has just given you money, you triple that and decide how much to give back to them. And so the idea is that that third one alone is the one that's trying to measure your obligation that you feel to the other partner in this relationship, even if it's someone that you don't really know.
Dedeker: Okay, so as in someone that you don't know has been arbitrarily kind to you, what's your instinct around how to be kind back? Or not kind back.
Jase: Yes, exactly. And what they found is that people who scored high in that unmitigated communion, that third game was the only one where their results differed from everyone else, and they gave more in that situation.
Dedeker: All right.
Jase: Something I did think was interesting is that in all of these, people actually were fairly generous. In the Dictator Game, as well as giving these, people were fairly generous. But the idea is that people scoring high in unmitigated communion gave more. Potentially to their own—
Dedeker: but then the argument is not, oh, it's just because they're amazing, generous, kind people. The argument is that underlying it is some fear, anxiety.
Jase: Yeah, the sense of obligation, of I owe this to society or to this other person, that that factor is outweighing the other parts separate from agreeableness and just generosity in general. And so that key piece of obligation is where we should keep that in mind. Then they also did a third study as part of this, and this is one where the participants were going to go into a negotiation. And before they went into the negotiation, and I don't know the specific terms of what they were negotiating, again, these are MBAs, so I'm sure they set up some kind of fictional business negotiation for them to do. And before going in, they would set a target point, which is what they're aiming to get out of the negotiation. And then they would also set a reservation point, which is kind of the lowest they'd be willing to accept in order to still make a deal rather than just walking away entirely.
Dedeker: Okay. So kind of what you would like to have happen versus what's your bare minimum.
Jase: Right, exactly. And unsurprisingly, the people that scored high in that unmitigated communion set a much lower reservation point, even though they set the same target points as everyone else.
Dedeker: Okay.
Jase: So it wasn't like they wanted less, but they were willing to accept much less. Yeah.
Dedeker: Interesting. Okay. But what if I don't know if I necessarily relate to that? I don't care about pleasing people. At least my self-identification, I don't think I'm a people-pleaser. So I don't think that's my issue.
Jase: Well, that's what was interesting to me about this is I don't generally think I identify as a people-pleaser, but as I read more about this, I see myself in it.
Dedeker: Oh, interesting.
Jase: I see myself doing some of these behaviors when it comes to negotiations in professional circumstances, and I think also sometimes in relationships of still wanting something but being willing to take a lot less than that.
Dedeker: Interesting.
Jase: Out of this fear of the cost to it. And so the fourth thing that was part of this was they looked at how that person estimated the potential cost to the relationship for having this negotiation at all, and that the unmitigated communion people also tended to rate that cost as higher.
Dedeker: I see.
Jase: This is going to strain our relationship more than other people.
Dedeker: Right. Okay. So there's already coming in this sense of— and maybe this could be about making some kind of request of a partner, or asking for some kind of need to be fulfilled, or some kind of change of behavior or something. And if you already go in perceiving this is going to cause some strain me asking at all, which could be the result of the circumstances with your partner. Maybe that's been the case, or could be just your own internal circumstances, your own personality, right? I guess of coming in with this sense of horror film, unmitigated communion, that suggests you already have some fear around these things. Yeah.
Jase: So I just found this fascinating because I'd never heard this concept before, and I was surprised how much of it I related to. And it's definitely something I want to explore a little more myself in terms of how I show up in business negotiations, as well as maybe some outsized fear that I might put on negotiations within relationships or things like that.
Dedeker: Right.
Jase: Before we go on to looking at studies about how accurately we actually see the work that we do in relationships, we're going to take a quick break to talk about our sponsors. Please do check them out. They do help support our show and let us do this every week for free. Of course, if you would rather have ad-free episodes and access to our amazing community and much more, you can go to multiamory.com/join and sign up there. We would love to have you as part of our community.
Jase: And now this is the half-true part. So in this part, we're going to look at that question of how true is it that you're doing all the work and nobody else is, or that your partner isn't? And then also, how do we evaluate how much there is there? So this first one comes from a 1993 study. This is about group projects, so again, not specifically relationships. So we're looking at this as a way to interpret some of these results and see how they might apply within romantic relationships and families. But this one is called Social Loafing, which is a great—
Dedeker: yeah, wow—
Jase: Social Loafing: A Meta-Analytic Review and Theoretical Integration. And this is from the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. So social loafing, when I say that word, what do you think this means?
Dedeker: I think, okay, if unmitigated communion is the horror film, social loafing is clearly like the buddy comedy film.
Jase: It's pretty good. It's two buddies just hanging out.
Dedeker: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Does it refer to— considering context clues, what, just people who are freeloading?
Jase: Kind of, yeah. This is the whole group project thing. You're in a group, so you can loaf, you can let others take the work, right? Or maybe you're the one that ends up doing the work and everyone else is loafing. They'd seen that social loafing, this phenomenon— I've also heard it called diffusion of responsibility.
Dedeker: Yes.
Jase: This idea that the more people there are in a group, the less likely anyone is to carry their weight or do their part. And they were trying to answer two big questions. One is, does it happen? Which seems to be validated, but they wanted to look at specifically how does it happen? And then also what conditions make it more likely to happen than others? And that's the one that I found to be really interesting. So for this, they looked at 78 different studies that included 163 different comparisons across a wide range of tasks and populations. And first thing is that the amount of effort that people did on average. In 128 out of those 163, so a very large percentage of them, roughly four out of every five, the effect showed up, right? People did work less in groups. That's just a fact. That just happens.
Dedeker: Do you have examples of the comparisons or of the tasks?
Jase: Yeah, so some of these were things like people working on a lab project together in a university. And how much of the tasks of writing up the reports, putting the study data together, scheduling things happened. Others were— I think a lot of this was done with students because it was from 78 different studies, and there's a good chance a lot of that students. So these would be most likely group projects like that, group writing, group research, things like that. Academic stuff is what this was mostly looking at. There was a little bit of a variety, but I got the sense it was mostly that kind of academic work. One thing worth noting though, before we all cry doom and gloom here, is that they found this effect to be very consistent, but it's only small to moderate in its effect. So it's not like people completely loaf, completely freeload. So the effect is small to moderate, but it is real and it does show up. And I'm just going to tease this now and we're going to cover it more later, but we're going to look at in their studies what caused it and what things could be in place that would make that loafing effect go away. I think those will be really interesting to apply in a group project.
Dedeker: Yes. I really wish to know. I really wish to know.
Jase: All right, so that's a teaser. We're gonna come back to that later. But first we're gonna go to a much older study about how much credit people take for their contributions in a relationship.
Dedeker: Hmm.
Jase: So this is from Ross & Sicoly in 1979.
Dedeker: Long time ago.
Jase: Quite a while ago, called Egocentric Biases in Availability and Attribution. And this was a study that was done with Canadian married couples, 37 couples. So it's not a huge study, but what they did is they wanted to see how much people think they contribute to the relationship and try to understand why that might be. And so what they did was they took these 37 married couples and then had each spouse separately and anonymously rate how responsible they were for 20 different household activities or relationship events. That'll make more sense in just a second why I'm saying it so vaguely like that. One thing that's just a fun aside is that originally when they started this study, they had them ask for percentages like, what percentage of this would you say is husband versus wife? And so the way that the scale worked is you would say this is 57% husband, and then the rest is wife. It always had to add up to 100 on your own answers. What they found is that when they did percentages, that when they did the debriefing afterward, the couples would end up getting into fights because they remembered the numbers that they had put down and then would disagree about those and have arguments.
Dedeker: Uh-huh.
Jase: And so they changed the methodology of the study to instead to just be a 150mm long line, so a 15cm long line. And you just put a mark on it.
Dedeker: I see.
Jase: Of how much is husband, how much is wife.
Dedeker: Okay.
Jase: And that when they did that, people couldn't recall specific numbers, and so they wouldn't argue about it afterwards.
Dedeker: Gotcha. Okay.
Jase: I just thought that was a fun—
Dedeker: Yeah, that's hilarious.
Jase: Random little aside here.
Dedeker: Yeah.
Jase: So what they found here is that averaged across the tasks, 27 out of the 37 couples, so the majority of them came out above the line, meaning if you add their responses together, it equals more than 100% of the points.
Dedeker: So everybody thinks that they're pulling more, like the majority. Yes.
Jase: Right. And now what's interesting is that this study wanted to separate out, is this ego that's making us think we contribute more, or is it something else? And so the reason why I said relationship events is that they also included negative things here, like causing arguments that occur between the two of you.
Dedeker: Oh, interesting.
Jase: Or irritating the spouse or making the house messy. And what they found is that people over-claimed their own on those too.
Dedeker: Oh, interesting.
Jase: Yeah. And so the conclusion that they drew here is that it isn't ego making us think we contribute more, but it's just memory. We remember the things that we did.
Dedeker: Right.
Jase: And we don't always remember the things our partner did, and we probably don't even see a lot of them.
Dedeker: Hmm.
Jase: Yeah.
Dedeker: Right?
Jase: Like, if you think about making the house messy, or irritating my partner, you probably really starkly remember, oh, I said that thing that irritated my partner.
Dedeker: Yes.
Jase: And the time you got irritated with them, maybe you're not remembering each of those as specifically.
Dedeker: I mean, that's context-dependent. I think I've definitely witnessed some bad relationships where you're very, very hyper-aware of the ways that your partner made the house messy or whatever. But this seems to track generally.
Jase: Yeah. And then when they asked people to write down examples of contributions, they also could come up with a larger number of their own contributions in all of these than their partners, right? So again, this was a small study. I just thought it was interesting and really drives home something we've talked about before many times on this show, which is sort of the invisibleness of certain types of labor.
Dedeker: Yes.
Jase: And that goes both ways, that this happened with both the husbands and the wives in this 1979 study, right? That this isn't just a gendered thing. So I did think that was interesting to look at as well, that we all have this bias. How it really shows up in the relationship could be different, but just that we all have this bias toward what we remember and what we have a clearer picture of having happened because we did it, right? So with all of this, as we're getting into how we can put this into effect, I think the thing to keep in mind here, and this is something a lot of us can forget is unless this is your child— so maybe there's an exception there— but unless you're talking about a relationship with your child, this person or this group or this company existed before you came along, right? They fed themselves, they paid their rent, they got to work on time. Or this company has been in business for a while before you, or the building hasn't burned down at your HOA, or whatever it is. These people have functioned before you. And so if we look at this sense of I'm overestimating how much I do, and I may be overestimating how important that is, that is true. You probably are. There's a lot of evidence to back it up.
Dedeker: Okay, yeah, so it is true that you were probably overestimating.
Jase: Yes.
Dedeker: How much— not only how much you're contributing, but also maybe how much those contributions have an effect.
Jase: But it's also true that you doing stuff is probably leading to other people not doing it.
Dedeker: Mm-hmm.
Jase: Whether it's your partner or group projects.
Dedeker: I always knew it. I always knew it.
Jase: Exactly. And so with all of this, I think it's time for us to get into the data about how do we apply this? How do we learn how to stop this from happening when we don't want it to?
Jase: But again, we're going to take a quick break to talk about our sponsors. Really do give them a listen. Use our promo codes. That helps us a lot. If you'd rather support our community directly, you can go to multiamory.com/join. You can sign up there for as low as $5 a month to get ad-free episodes and access to our amazing community on Discord, as well as our video discussion groups, things like that. We would love to have you there, and that helps support our show the best way possible.
Jase: Okay, now the answers you've been waiting for. So going back to that meta-analysis about social loafing. So I'm going to start off with one that took me a while to process what this means. So again, they were looking at a lot of different studies. What they found is that not all the studies showed loafing happened. And what they found is the single biggest predictor of whether loafing happened was whether the original researchers had predicted that loafing would happen when they did the study.
Dedeker: Wait, hold on. Yeah. Really?
Jase: I know, I had to—
Dedeker: Yes.
Jase: Yes. And so the reason for that, because they looked into this to say, why is it that a study looking for loafing finds it and one that's not doesn't? And the reason for it is studies that were looking to just measure loafing in general ended up setting up scenarios that encouraged loafing. And the ones that were looking at ways to deliberately prevent loafing did setups to prevent that, and they didn't observe it. And so it kind of had to do with how they structured their study based on what they were going for. And so this meta-analysis is interesting, is that it's able to look at all of those and kind of see what were the shared factors, right? The main takeaway here is that effort in a group— this could be a group as small as two, but most of what they were studying was a little larger than that— isn't a fixed trait of people that we just do it for sure, but that there are certain circumstances which lead to it more than others. And so let's look at those 6 conditions and understand those. And I think you might have some guesses as to which ones have the biggest effect. So I'm gonna do this in a random order for you. Okay.
Dedeker: Okay. So they are ranked as in which ones have the biggest effect, but you're just gonna present them randomly and then we gotta guess. Yes.
Jase: And then I'll tell you.
Dedeker: Right.
Jase: Yeah. Okay. I should say that all of these do have an effect. The question is which has the biggest effect?
Dedeker: Okay.
Jase: So first one is the group being small. Okay, that a smaller group means everyone loafs less.
Dedeker: Okay, right.
Jase: Next is that the task itself matters to the person involved, as in to all the people involved. To the one— remember, you're measuring each person's loafing.
Dedeker: Okay, individually, right?
Jase: So if the task matters to you, okay, you're less likely to loaf than if it's a whatever task you don't care about.
Dedeker: Okay.
Jase: Next is related to that, which is the relationship itself. So the relationship to that group matters to you.
Dedeker: Okay.
Jase: Next is that your contribution is visible either way, meaning your work or lack of work is visible at the end. Next is what you would contribute is— they said distinguishable, but I would say unique, as in the thing you could contribute is something you don't think others could do.
Dedeker: Okay.
Jase: Or that they could just repeat or do over or whatever. And this is if we're judged separately or as a group at the end. Essentially, do we each get our own grade or does the group as a whole?
Dedeker: Yeah, okay, are gonna be evaluated separately or together?
Jase: Yeah, okay.
Dedeker: And as in—
Jase: Do your guesses.
Dedeker: Okay, hold on, hold on. Okay, as in they find that if you're evaluated separately, people are less likely to loaf?
Jase: Correct, yeah.
Dedeker: Okay.
Jase: Yeah, what you'd expect, yeah.
Dedeker: Okay, guesses of which one has the most impact. Can I ask by what degree? As in, is there by far and away one that has a gigantic impact, and the rest are much smaller?
Jase: So all of these have an effect on the amount of social loafing that happened, but some were a little more solidly evidenced than others, or some were stronger than others.
Dedeker: Okay, without overthinking it, just shooting from the hip, I think having the unique contribution is maybe the biggest factor because I think people want to feel needed and wanted and like they are uniquely needed and wanted and I think if you have that sense of, oh, this is something that only I can do, or maybe I'm the only one who's good at doing this, that maybe you're more likely to be like, okay, then I have to do this. And maybe that's regardless of whether or not it's visible, whether you're going to be evaluated together or as a group, regardless of the size of the group. That's my thinking.
Jase: Yeah. So that one is significant, but actually not one of the most of this list. However, it is really worth noting that the key there is not so much in feeling like you have a unique skill, but feeling like you're redundant or not. That if you feel like you're redundant or that someone might redo the work after you did it—
Dedeker: Ah, sure.
Jase: makes you much less likely to do it in the first place. Sure, makes sense. And I think that's a key that for Over-Functioners we could look at is I do think we also have the tendency to redo other people's work. Yes. Yep. And that by doing that, we are falling prey to one of these 6 things that's really going to ensure they don't ever try to work again.
Dedeker: Mm. Perfect. Good to know.
Jase: So I do think that one's interesting. Now, one that had the most studies backing it up was actually the thing about your contribution being visible. So even more so than being graded separately was just your work being visible. And distinguished of who did what. And I think that's an interesting one when it comes to relationships with invisible labor that happens of the planning of something and not just the doing of something. That's something we'll talk about in a little bit here too. And I think it also relates to the study where we talked about people overestimating their own contributions. I think it's tied to this visibility thing. Hmm. Okay.
Dedeker: Because it's very visible to yourself. Whatever it is that you're doing.
Jase: Yeah. Okay. Right. Yeah. But that perhaps your partner could feel like their work is invisible. And so they might be less likely to do it then, because it's like, well, no one appreciates this. No one sees this as me. Or maybe you just don't notice they're doing it. So it's kind of like two halves show up in that one right there. Now, the one about the task itself mattering to the person, this one had the fewest studies that looked at this, but it was by far the strongest effect. I don't want to give too much weight to that though, because only 5 of the studies actually had data that could be extracted to validate that, versus that one about your condition being visible showed up in 115 different samples that they had from all the different studies. So just take that with a grain of salt, but the task itself being important to you matters a lot. And I think that's another one worth thinking about. The task itself. Yes. Sure. Yes. And then The conditions about valuing the task and then valuing the relationship, those ones I think are interesting because they both have an effect. How important the task is though seems to be the stronger effect than how important the relationship is. Interesting. And I think that one's especially interesting because when we get mad about that in relationships, we're usually conflating the two. Of you not doing the dishes means you don't care about me.
Dedeker: Me. Sure, right? Instead of you just don't care about the dishes. Right, right.
Jase: Okay, so I think that's an interesting one to note there, that they both have an effect, but that caring about the task itself matters a lot more.
Dedeker: Well, it makes sense why it's always been freaking hell also in group projects in school, that when all the little overachiever students get put into the group with the students who maybe aren't necessarily bad students, but maybe just don't care as much about getting the straight A, right? For them, it's like the C is good, you know, or the C is enough.
Jase: I get a B, that's fine. Yeah.
Dedeker: Or maybe a B is an improvement, right? That's good. That's what I want to aim for, right? But Yeah, interesting. Yeah.
Jase: And then the last one about the size of the group, that one I think makes sense. I think we've seen that before, but it's worth it when we think about, oh, well, if I just had a big polycule family that all lived together and shared the responsibilities, everything would be easier. That's actually a situation where this might become even more of a problem if you're not aware of it, if you're not taking other steps to avoid that. Yeah. One other side finding that they had here is this scenario, and I'm curious if you can relate to this, is what happens in a group when you expect that the other people in the group or the other person in the relationship will do a bad job at this. Yep. Uh-huh. Yep. So with this, the researchers were looking at this, and so they manipulated these scenarios by either telling participants that their partner was unskilled or unmotivated in this particular thing. Or they set up a scenario where only one person was clearly an expert in something, where one person in the group was a competitive swimmer. And so the other people in the group—
Dedeker: And you have to go swim the English Channel together as a duo.
Jase: And— I think in that case it was a relay. Oh, okay. Gotcha. Right? But where, because you are an expert and you know that you are and you know that they're not, they're going to be relatively worse than you.
Dedeker: This is why I can never have any relationships ever.
Jase: Oh goodness, goodness gracious. So a couple things. One is if you know or you think that the other people will be worse at something than you, you don't slack on that. So expecting that your partner in a task will do badly at something made it so people didn't loaf, they didn't slack on that. But what's interesting is it also didn't make them work harder. And so a quote from the study, or from this meta-analysis, says effort levels were not significantly higher collectively than when participants expected their coworkers to perform poorly.
Dedeker: Okay, so they wouldn't necessarily put in more effort, it was just that they just would not loaf, they wouldn't slack. Okay, right.
Jase: What's interesting though is they did find a scenario where people did put in even more work than they would have otherwise, and that was a combination of thinking that the other people would be bad at the task and that the task is meaningful to you.
Dedeker: And it's the freaking group project trauma all over again. Oh my God. Right? Yeah.
Jase: So if it's a meaningful task to you and you expect your partner to underperform, that's what caused people to go above and beyond the box.
Dedeker: Dude, honors English sophomore group project. We had to do this multi-stage, very complex group project that was all about the explication of one particular poem that we would pick as a group. And I don't remember all the things that we had to turn in. Let's say there were 6 things that we had to turn in, and it was a group of maybe 4 or 5 of us or whatever. And there was one, one, oh, what was it? It was just a little one-page essay or maybe a one-page explainer of something. I don't remember what it was that we had to turn in. You know, when the day came that we had to turn in this group project, we're all sitting together, getting our stuff together. And bear in mind, folks, this is the early 2000s. So we're limited in what we're able to share with each other. We're bringing printouts to class and stuff like that. Right. And someone else in the group looks through the list of everything we have to turn in and they get to the last thing on this list, this one-pager or whatever it was. And they're like, oh my God, did anyone do that? Oh my God, we didn't do that. And I was like, I did it. Here it is. I did not even bother to delegate it. Cause I was just like, I'm just going to do it. Right. That moment lives in my soul. It lives in my body, Jase.
Jase: Yeah, no, this explains so much about you.
Dedeker: And of course then my group was all, "Oh my God, thank goodness," right? 'Cause they were having a panic moment and I got to be a hero. Maybe that's part of it.
Jase: Boy, you've got all the factors really contributing to reinforcing this pathway. There's a lot.
Dedeker: There's a lot, Jase. So what do I need to do?
Jase: What do we all need to do? We don't need to make this just about you here.
Dedeker: Okay, 'cause yeah, I can see the ways that this plays out in relationships between a dyad. I can see how this could play out in a polycule. Right? Trying to make plans for the group outing or whatever it is. How do we avoid this?
Jase: Yeah. Okay. So I've broken this down into 4 sections. The first is figuring out where you sit in this whole morass that we've just talked about. You probably already know from listening to this episode. The next is how do we test our stories about it? How do we get some more information?
Dedeker: Wait, hold on. Hold on. Pause. Rewind. Rewind. Because, okay, so the first is you gotta evaluate where you sit in all this. Are you an overachiever, over-functioning, or are you a loafer? But that seems like that's hard to do if everyone has that bias thinking that they contribute more than they do. I mean, I think all the overachievers know. However, that seems tricky to be able to actually tell.
Jase: Well, okay, so let's start with that. So the question, if you think you're the over-contributor is to not ask the question, am I doing too much? But instead to ask, when I imagine not doing as much, what am I afraid of happening? Oh yeah. Oh yeah. And this relates to some of what we talked about before, because we saw there are different reasons why you might be picking up more of this slack or taking on more for yourself, even if there isn't slack. So is it about control? I think that one can come up. Is it about assuming your partner will be bad at it? I think often control and assuming other people will be worse at things than you often go together. I know they do for me. Or is this related to anxiety about the relationship itself? Or is it just about this one particular thing not getting done, and that's something that matters to you?
Dedeker: Okay, yeah, so those could all be tangled together, but I could also see their distinct flavors. That, yeah, it's if there's fear and anxiety about the relationship itself, if you're feeling compelled to take on more labor on a particular task because you're like, if I ask them to do more, that's not going to go well for me, or I'm going to feel bad asking them to do more, so therefore I need to step in and overcompensate even though they didn't ask me to. That's one particular flavor versus if it is no, this particular thing is very important to me and it's going to get done my way, hell or high water. And so I'm just going to take charge on it, which doesn't— I mean, I frame it in a negative way, but it doesn't always have to be negative, right? It could just be— I don't know, I was thinking about when I pulled together a group of us to go to a screening of The Room a couple weeks ago, where I was just like, I want to go do this silly thing. And so I'm happy to take the lead, you know, and the scheduling and the ticket buying and stuff like that, because I'm super motivated and I don't feel resentment around that. It was just it mattered to me.
Jase: Right. And I think that's a key discovery right there is that if something is important to you and you think you'll do a better job than anyone else, maybe that should be your task. But it's, again, it's just more data, right? Gotcha. Now, on the other side, if you are either being accused of being an under-contributor or you're afraid that you might be, some questions to ask yourself is what makes taking on some of these feel unsafe or unavailable to me? Sure. Is it that I don't feel like I know how? Often it's some result of a mix of unwritten standards that seem impossible to hit. If your work is getting redone, yeah, right? If you put something away and then your partner comes and reorganizes it, do you feel like your work was redundant? Are your past attempts received as failures? Thinking about what might be there underneath this. Again, none of this is about pointing blame, but just trying to understand what might make me resistant to doing this, or this might feel harder to me. Or it could just be habit. It could just be, well, they always do it, so I don't think about it because I don't have to. Yeah. And me thinking about it would be redundant because I know that they're already thinking about it. Yeah. Okay, so then the second part of this is to test the story that you're telling yourself. So that's the whole, you're overestimating your share of everything, and so are they, most likely. And so just keep in mind that both of you could be telling the truth, and you can also both be wrong, right, when it comes to this. I know, Dedeker, you and I have had various things where one of us has finally complained about, I feel like I'm always the one that does this, and the other person goes, wait, what? I always do that thing.
Dedeker: Usually it's about the dishes. It's always about— it always comes back to the dishes. Well, and I'm glad that we've highlighted it as a phenomenon that happens, because then that often works as a repair attempt, right? When we can notice, oh, we're in this thing where you think you've done the dishes more, and I think that I've done wishes more, right?
Jase: And then we're both telling the truth, but we're both wrong somehow. Yeah, exactly. Another key thing here is don't build a scoreboard. Remember that study, Ross & Sicoly from 1979, where they removed the 100% thing? Yeah, don't try to make this a direct comparison. You're just gonna fight, and that's not helpful. That's not the point of this. Then remembering to separate your catastrophic fears and predictions from what you actually have evidence for, or reality. So again, that's the whole, your partner fed themself and paid rent before they met you. They were living before you came along. They could keep living without you too. So if it is this feeling like that I have to do this or everything will fall apart, is probably not true. But at the same time, there might be some things that if you stop doing it, they wouldn't get done, at least for a while. And that's where we need to have communication about it. We need to talk about that. And then also look at how much of the work you're doing is work your partner's doing. You're just redoing it because you want it done differently. And examining, do I need to be doing that? Or is this something I should take over so that they're not doing redundant work? Or is this something I need to let go a little bit of doing it one particular way? And then we move on to changing the conditions. So rather than this being about you as a person are bad and not doing enough, or you as a person are doing too much and obviously the best, that is not about that. It's about changing the conditions. So one is about making work visible. And so again, not with a scorecard, but doing something. And we've talked about this before on the show, but not in a while. Eve Rodsky has this book called Fair Play that we've recommended before and She went on this journey based on her own experience and then working with a lot of clients and things like that to try to come up with a good way of dividing household labor, including the invisible labor, as well as the more physical labor, like taking out the trash or something that's more tangible like that, and finding a way to make it visible and help distribute that. That's not just making lists or scorecards or assigning numbers to things which don't really capture the full nuance of it all. Mm-hmm. This is also something doing a radar can help with, where you're just checking in regularly every month about household, about money, about work, about kids, about whatever it is, so that you are just sort of making it more visible to each other on a regular basis.
Dedeker: Yeah, I want to put in the personal testimony for Fair Play, because Jase and I read through the Fair Play book and kind of did her system during the pandemic when we're just stuck at home doing domestic labor, basically. And yeah, I absolutely recommend it to so many people. It's very, very hetero, so just bear that in mind. I know some people still don't like it, but yeah, I think, I think of— obviously, if we're going to talk about the whole classic heterosexual division of labor that's plagued so many people, a lot of people have tackled this topic, but I do think she's been one of the most unique ones to offer something actually really tangible and really helpful that people can do again to make some of that invisible labor visible. And also I think to— and not just about getting your slacking, loafing partner to see that, but I think also if you're the overachiever, to get you to more fully be able to disconnect from certain things or hand over certain tasks. So I found it was really helpful, I think, kind of for both sides of the equation. Yeah, absolutely.
Jase: And so one of the key parts of that is she talks about the CPE which is the conception, the planning, and the execution. And that a lot of times when we're trying to address an imbalance with tasks, we go to just the execution part where it's, okay, tell me what to do, make a list for me of what needs to get done and I'll do it. But that is keeping the conception, which is keeping it in mind, worrying about it, knowing what needs to happen, planning ahead, and the planning of when it needs to get done, all on the original person. And it's only that third part, the execution, that's being outsourced. And so her idea is when you're looking at this, hand over all three at once. Mm-hmm. And part of that is one is coming up with what is the standard for this being done and accepting that they're gonna do it differently from you and accepting that, especially if it's something they haven't done before that they're taking over, it's gonna be harder for them at first because they're not used to it. They don't have their systems for it. It's gonna be more overwhelming. And they're probably going to do a worse job at first. But to find that—
Dedeker: or at least a different job than you are.
Jase: At least a different job, yeah.
Dedeker: There's a different way of doing it.
Jase: Think about if you started a job, you're going to be worse at it than you would be after having done it for a couple of years. So just realize that's part of the cost of handover. That's part of the process and it's not a failure. Don't abandon it right away because of that. And then also separating someone not caring about a task from them not caring about you. That's still a conversation to have of, I would like you to do this thing because that makes me feel cared about. That's a good conversation to have, but to realize they aren't a one-to-one by default, right? And now, how do we bring this up? So doing Fair Play or something like that's interesting, but if we want to just have a few tips of how to have this conversation, one is to acknowledge the fact that it's like a see-saw, like that Bowen family dynamics thing, where if I've been taking on more that makes it easier for you to step back and not do things and disincentivizes you to do them. Because I'm already going to do them, so if you do it, I'll probably redo it. Acknowledging that, being aware of that, and kind of saying, it's not that I think you're a moral failure, but we've created a scenario together, and I don't think either of us consciously chose this. And that's a very different conversation starter than, you never help out around the house. Sure, right. 'Or you never plan things.' And then also acknowledging your fear about it. So naming your fear out loud. So that's something like, 'I'm scared that if I stop tracking and planning when we're going to have a date next, we'll never have a date.' And I don't actually know if that's true, but that's the fear that I have, right? To kind of own that's your thoughts that go there. And hopefully that opens it up to be safe for your partner to say, No, you're totally right. You do plan all of those. And if you did stop planning it, we probably wouldn't have one for a while before I realized and tried to pick up the slack. It kind of opens that up to be safe to say instead of the fear if they admit it, then that means they don't care about you and then you're mad at them. Right. And then be making sure as you have the conversation to try handing over the whole thing, not just the execution of it, but the planning and the conception, the keeping it in mind. And I think if you're a high control person, letting go of that CPE can be hard, but it can also be really liberating and freeing when you're able to do it. I know this is something right now I'm trying to figure out how to do more of in work and on my HOA board. I think it's something that Dedeker and I have talked a lot about through doing Fair Play and just talking about this stuff a lot. But I think in other relationships I've seen that be much harder to give or to take on something that a partner has traditionally done. And feeling like I'm failing at it or doing a bad job of it.
Dedeker: Well, I've been spending a good maybe several decades avoiding group projects as much as I possibly can, but maybe now you know the secrets. Now I know the secrets. I do think this is going to change my perspective next time I am in a situation where it's like, I don't know, yeah, you're in the group thread and y'all have to make a decision about dinner plans or whatever. Yeah, I think this will be helpful.
Jase: The one that I think is the most interesting for groups, and I could see this applying in friend groups as well as a polycule or a work scenario is the whole making your work visible. Yeah. Making each individual person's work visible, of having something like kind of like we do for Multiamory Podcast, where each week we have a meeting with the three of us about what we need to get done, and we put it on a Trello board is how we do it. But basically, we each have our items, and then the next week we all have to say whether we finished those and give a little explanation of what we did or what we found. And even if you had a busy week, you feel the pain of, I didn't do that thing. I've got to redo that. And it's making it visible so it doesn't just disappear. Like if we didn't have those meetings.
Dedeker: Well, also maybe a good hot tip for any of you out there, if you are in a friend group, just taking the time to thank whoever did the planning. Right? So someone doesn't necessarily have to toot their own horn. But you can also be the one to make somebody's invisible labor more visible with gratitude, right? And I think that probably helps.
Jase: I love that. That's great. Well, hopefully everyone is now so excited to do group projects, or at the very least to have better, more constructive conversations within their own relationships about when they feel like they're doing it all and the world's going to collapse if they stopped. We would love to hear from all of you. We're going to be posting our question of the week on our Instagram @multiamory_podcast, and that is What's one thing you're convinced would fall apart if you didn't do it? Oh, good, good one. Very curious to hear what people have to say about that. The best place to share your thoughts in more depth with other listeners is in the episode discussion channel on our Discord server, or you can post in our private Facebook group. You can get access to both of those groups and join our amazing community by going to multiamory.com/join. And of course, you can share publicly on Instagram as well.
Jase: Multiamory is created and produced by Dedeker Winston, Emily Matlack, and me, Jase Lindgren. Our production assistant is Carson Collins. Our theme song is Forms I Know I Did by Josh and Anand from the Fractal Cave EP. The full transcript is available on this episode's page on multiamory.com.