You are part of a community.

Let us define a community as a group of two or more people, and include (for the sake of comparison to the house) objective functions. These community objective functions can be anything; for example:

• to not live in a pile of rotting trash
• to have successful social events
• to be happy

Consider that each objective requires W work to accomplish. With N people in the group, each person must do w=W/N work, on average, to accomplish an objective, correct?

incorrect.

If we think that w=w', where w'=own_perceived_work, then this fails. Why? Because it has been shown (and is very easy to show, by experiment) that w'<w. There are all manner of studies that show this: it is extremely rare, unlikely, and difficult for people to do anything other than value any given incremental unit of their own time and effort (eg., for a given task) more than they value other peoples' time and effort. This is natural, because if you constantly had other peoples' responsibilities in mind, you would be an eternal ball of stress, and would probably implode. Since you take into account all of your own responsibilities when valuing your own time and effort, it's intuitive (and verifiable) that w'<w.

So what? In order to be a functioning member of a community, you should feel like you contribute more than your fair share of work. If the trash is dealt with in a satisfactory fashion, and there's some fairness in work distribution, then most people will feel that they take out the trash more often than they should if the work was evenly divided. If everyone thinks that they are doing their fair share, then the trash will pile up. Happy couples are known to have an attitude of generosity towards their partners.

There is an organizational management practice that we might call: "secret samaritan societies." The society exists as a subgroup, whereby most members know a limited number of members of the society (this is most easily centralized, but can be accomplished in a decentralized fashion when there is an extrinsic organization that provides a framework for efficient graph spanning... but I digress). Further, most members are led to the false belief that the subgroup is significantly smaller than the entire community. The objective of the group is for each member to secretly help other community members with their tasks, in addition to their own - in order to maintain a positive environment and help the community towards achieving its goals. When implemented properly, everyone in the community belongs to the secret samaritan society (but believes otherwise). This works really well, especially with children. A sign of maturity is the ability to see intrinsic value in helping others, without having to be told that you're special (because you know you are, anyway, in particular, because you're willing to help others).

Lastly, this principle still applies, even if your evaluation of w' qualitatively takes into account this principle.