An Initial Behavior Analysis of the Mental Load

Behavior analysts spend a lot of time thinking about how behavior is shaped by everyday contingencies. We look at response effort, competing demands, and why certain patterns persist even when they are costly. One environment where all of this is happening constantly, but is rarely named explicitly, is the household.

Household labor is not just background context. It functions as a pervasive contingency system that organizes daily responding, determines how effort is allocated, and quietly competes with behaviors related to rest, health, and recovery. If we are interested in sustainability and why behavior change so often erodes outside structured settings, the home is an environment worth slowing down and examining more carefully.

To do that, it helps to stop thinking about housework as tasks and instead look at the types of behavior required to keep things running.

Three kinds of behavior, only one of them visible

A helpful way to organize this comes from Eve Rodsky's Fair Play, which separates household responsibility into cognition, planning, and execution. A behavioral conceptualization of this work aligns cleanly with distinct behavior classes that differ in effort, visibility, and the consequences that maintain them.

Two of these classes tend to be invisible. Both are costly.

Cognition: continuous contact with the environment

Cognition here is not abstract thinking. It is the behavior of noticing. Detecting cues that signal something will need attention. Discriminating when a routine will break down if no one intervenes.

From a behavioral standpoint, this is ongoing monitoring under stimulus control. The environment is continuously signaling, and there is no clear endpoint to the response. You do not complete noticing. You either miss something, or you do not.

Because there is no defined offset, this kind of responding is difficult to disengage from. Even in moments that look like rest, the individual remains behaviorally “on.” Over time, the cost of this sustained responding shows up as fatigue that is often misattributed to poor organization or self discipline rather than to the structure of the environment itself.

Planning: arranging contingencies in advance

Planning involves arranging future conditions so that execution can occur at the right time and in the right order. It requires sequencing, anticipating barriers, and allocating limited resources across time.

Behaviorally, planning functions largely under negative reinforcement. When it works, problems do not occur. The consequence is the absence of disruption, criticism, or downstream stress. When it fails, the failure is highly visible and often socially meaningful.

This creates an uneven contingency arrangement. Planning requires high response effort, but success produces little reinforcement, while errors carry relatively strong consequences. Over time, this makes planning rigid, effortful, and difficult to share.

Execution: the part everyone sees

Execution is the visible layer. The errands, the cleaning, the meals, the driving. These behaviors have clear start and stop points and are easy to observe.

Because execution is visible, it is often treated as the entirety of the work. But behaviorally, it is the final link in a chain. Cognition and planning have already occurred by the time execution is possible. Shifting execution alone rarely reduces overall response requirements in any meaningful way.

This is why help does not always translate into relief.

Why these patterns fall unevenly

These behavior classes are not distributed randomly. Social contingencies shape who is expected to notice, plan, and absorb the consequences when something goes wrong.

Thébaud et al. (2021) show how order, smooth functioning, and household management carry more social weight for women. From a behavioral perspective, this means breakdowns in cognition or planning contact more immediate and more punishing consequences depending on who emits them.

Over time, these contingencies strengthen monitoring and contingency arrangement in some people while allowing others to disengage without cost. Once established, the pattern maintains itself. The cost of stepping back is simply too high.

Why this matters beyond fairness

From a behavioral standpoint, this is not just a division of labor issue, it is a question of competing contingencies. Cognition and planning are often maintained by immediate social consequences. Health-related behaviors, rest, and recovery usually are not.

When behaviors with delayed reinforcement compete with behaviors maintained by immediate negative reinforcement, the outcome is predictable. The invisible work wins.

Understanding this helps explain why advice to “prioritize self care” so often falls flat. The environment is already doing a lot of selecting.

Making the invisible analyzable

Looking at household labor through this lens is not about assigning blame. It is about making behavior visible.

When cognition, planning, and execution are treated as distinct kinds of behavior, it becomes possible to see where response effort is concentrated and why certain patterns persist. What often gets labeled as burnout or inconsistency is better understood as appropriate responding under contingencies that have gone unnamed for a long time.

And once something can be named behaviorally, it can be changed.

References

Rodsky, E. (2019). Fair Play: Share the mental load, rebalance your relationship and transform your life. Hachette UK.

Thébaud, S., Kornrich, S., & Ruppanner, L. (2021). Good housekeeping, great expectations: Gender and housework norms. Sociological Methods & Research, 50(3), 1186-1214.