I am pretty low on conscientiousness, but I know people even lower than me.
For me, an important lesson was living alone in my own place, for a few years. That allowed me to try different things, and see what happens. After a few iterations, I guess my System 1 learned that actually washing the dishes immediately is the option that requires least work, which made it my preferred option.
Seems to me that people who never lived alone are missing an important learning opportunity. (Not just about dishes but also other household topics: vacuuming the room, buying toilet paper, etc. You see the entire “metabolism” of the household, not just selected parts.) When you live with other people, the options are not only “do the dishes immediately, when you mostly just rinse them”, “do the dishes later, when you have to scrub the dry parts of the food”, or even “do the dishes much later, when you also have to remove the disgusting mold”, but there is also an option “if I wait long enough, someone else will do the dishes”. The presence of the last option, especially when one is in denial about how much they benefit from it, is one of the things that make bad roommates.
tl;dr—I believe it’s usually more about incentives than about conscientiousness; or rather that going against your incentives requires even more conscientiousness than usual.
I am pretty low on conscientiousness, but I know people even lower than me.
For me, an important lesson was living alone in my own place, for a few years. That allowed me to try different things, and see what happens. After a few iterations, I guess my System 1 learned that actually washing the dishes immediately is the option that requires least work, which made it my preferred option.
Seems to me that people who never lived alone are missing an important learning opportunity. (Not just about dishes but also other household topics: vacuuming the room, buying toilet paper, etc. You see the entire “metabolism” of the household, not just selected parts.) When you live with other people, the options are not only “do the dishes immediately, when you mostly just rinse them”, “do the dishes later, when you have to scrub the dry parts of the food”, or even “do the dishes much later, when you also have to remove the disgusting mold”, but there is also an option “if I wait long enough, someone else will do the dishes”. The presence of the last option, especially when one is in denial about how much they benefit from it, is one of the things that make bad roommates.
tl;dr—I believe it’s usually more about incentives than about conscientiousness; or rather that going against your incentives requires even more conscientiousness than usual.