Chores

Try this. Ask a wife and a husband (or yourselves if you happen to be married) to estimate what percent of the time they each do the dishes, fold the laundry, walk the dog, make the bed, turn out the lights, and all the humdrum chores throughout the day. Can you guess what the answers would be? Their estimates will usually sum to more than 100 percent. This reminds myself how we human accept more responsibility for good deeds than for bad, and for successes than failures.

One of psychology's maxims is that most of our responses and behaviour can be explained by this self-serving bias. I think there is a lot of truth here. I have just used couples sharing house chores as an example to illustrate the point, not because they are the worst one being infected by the bias (they aren't) but because my domestic helper happens to resign recently. Be honest, medical doctors exhibit similar - if not more - degree of self-serving bias. We are keen to take credit for patients' improvement but tend to blame (treatment) failure on the patients. Sometimes our patient has cancer, say, and then suffers from relapse of the disease after one cycle of cancer drugs. Guess how we doctors describe the aforementioned fact, "Ms A fails the induction therapy."

You see. Is Ms A who fails or the drug prescribed by we doctors fails?

P.S. The guy who is writing this blog is not immune to such bias (Ouch!) – I tend to rate my writing as better than others.