helper or helpee?

today is the 7th of may, 2012.
i've just moved out from sheares hall, my humble abode of C612, calling a close to the year 2 life i have spent at heng mui keng terrace.
and perhaps this calls for a bit of pensive reflection (as i like to term it).

on my way home in the unusually slow-moving traffic today, i asked myself: when you help someone, do you remember it? or is it that when somebody does you a favour, you will be more likely to remember it?

i have an inkling, that most of us tend to believe we are more likely to remember moments when we are helped, rather than when we helped someone else. and this of course should be the case, as i often remind myself of the ever-so-meaningful phrase that i once chanced upon: "take without forgetting, give without remembering."
yet perhaps it is the innate pessimist in me, who feels that the truth is in fact, the opposite - that people tend to remember it more when they were the helper, rather than when they were the helpee.

i guess it works both ways... maybe it's a 50-50 split between the two kinds.
one might be more likely to remember moments when they were helped, if they were in dire straits at the time, or if the favour really impacted and improved their lives in a significant way.
on the other hand, one might be more likely to remember it when they were the ones helping, if they didn't really want to offer their assistance in the first place (but did), or if the favour caused substantial losses/sacrifice.
and then of course we could factor in the identity of the other party (whether it was a close friend or a stranger/acquaintance), current mood/temperament, recent events, stress levels, time constraint factors etc... to determine whether the moment would be transferred to long-term memory...

at the end of the day, i suppose you could ask yourself the question of which one are you more likely to be. the one who remembers being the helper more often, or the helpee?

however, do take your own answer with a pinch of salt, because the perceived view, as we know, may sometimes prove to be very different from the actual fact (analogous to the meta-bases and structural bases of attitudes in social psychology).

just my two cents' worth today.