Most parents Try teaching your children to have good manners and be kind often before they are old enough to read. But in reality, neither children nor adults say “please” very often, a new study reveals. The word was used just 7 percent of the time when people of all ages made requests, according to UCLA researchers. Research also suggests that in some cases, you may not actually be polite when you ask for a please.
Here’s what’s going on with manners and why psychologists think saying “no thank you” instead of saying “please” might be the polite thing to do.
People say please less than 1 in 10 times when asking for something
Given how many people are taught to say please, you would think the word would be a staple of conversation. But that’s not what the UCLA team found when they recorded 17 hours of video as more than 1,000 participants interacted with their families at home over meals and board games, or chatted with employees and customers during visits to beauty salons or grocery stores. retail, among other activities. .
The study authors wrote that, based on previous research, they expected women to say please much more often than men. Instead, they found that men said please just as often as women – in 6% versus 7% of requests. However, people of any gender tended to please more often when they asked men for something. But ultimately, regardless of races, genders, ethnic groups and socioeconomic status, no one said the word very often.
Have kids these days forgotten their manners?
Children were just as likely to say please as their parents and other adults. The study found that children said please 10% of the time when asking adults for something, while adults used the word in 8% of their requests to children and 6% of the times they asked other adults for something.
“There is no much older data that gives us a sense of how the rate [of using ‘please’] may have changed over time, but we suspect this is not actually a recent development,” André Chalfoun, co-author of the study and doctoral candidate in sociology at UCLA, told Yahoo Life. “This is older,” he adds, citing similar findings about the use of please by 4-year-olds in a to study published in 1984.
Please, it is as likely to be used for pressure as it is for education
In about half of the cases in which someone asked for a please, it was “attempts to overcome resistance or the urge” to comply with a request, explains Chalfoun. “A lot of ‘pleases’ are definitely used primarily to pressure the other party into compliance.”
For example, in the study, a daughter asked her mother to “please” buy her a dress after her mother had already refused. Chalfoun says this is an example of why he and his colleagues “often think of ‘please’ as [something] We use it when we make a request we shouldn’t make, but are going to do it anyway.” In this sense, using the word has more to do with self-interest than courtesy. “It’s acknowledging… the fact that it’s a problematic thing to ask,” almost like a partial pre-apology, “but it’s still basically us prioritizing our own needs,” says Chalfoun. “That’s why we don’t think about [‘please’] as a paradigm [or standard] sign of politeness.
Vanessa Bohns, professor of social psychology at Cornell University, says that our use of please as a form of pressure to get what we want also has to do with our discomfort in saying no. “We know that people find it difficult to say no to requests because it is rude to do so,” she says. “By adding ‘please’ to a request, the person asking the question is essentially reminding the target of these polite norms. It’s essentially saying to the target of the request, ‘Remember your manners.’”
So is it polite to say please?
Although please is typically considered polite, this is not always the case. Instead, the study suggests, please is often used as a strategic tool when patience would actually be more polite.
What this highlights, says Chalfoun, is that having a strict code of manners – ever say “please” and “thank you”; Never saying “no” openly, just “no thanks” – doesn’t necessarily result in the most polite behavior.
Whether please is a sign of good manners or a way to pressure someone is “very context specific,” he says. “It’s not necessarily the most helpful thing to try to get people to follow really strict rules about what’s good and bad behavior. Rather than trying to get children to follow a code of rules, we should insist on thinking about what that means and looking at broader principles like being patient and attentive to other people and waiting our turn rather than asking. to someone who does. please – do exactly what we want, exactly when we want, says Chalfoun.
