Social Elevation
Weaponized Incompetence
Strategic helplessness as a labor dodge.
Grounded in the research on weaponized (strategic) incompetence
the gist
Also called strategic incompetence — doing a task so badly, or claiming you 'can't,' so someone else takes it over for good. It's not inability; it's offloading the work while keeping your hands clean.
the science
It maps onto research on the unequal division of household and emotional labor — the invisible "mental load" that quietly lands on one person. Feigned incompetence is one of the mechanisms that keeps that split lopsided.