What’s the magic word?
According to a new study of American etiquette, it’s no longer “please.”
After combing through recordings of 1,000 different people interacting with loved ones, colleagues and others, researchers at UCLA found just 7% of us are still prefacing requests with the polite phrase.
According to the findings, published this month in Social Psychology Quarterly, men and women used the p-word about the same amount — 6% and 7%, respectively — but adults across the board used it more often when requesting something from a man.
Children, the study found, only said it 10% of the time when asking for something.
And while adults used the word 8% of the time when talking to children, they only said it 6% of the time when conversing with other adults.
“There is not much older data to give us a sense of how the rate [of use] might have changed over time, but we suspect that this isn’t really a recent development,” study co-author Andrew Chalfoun, a UCLA PhD candidate in sociology, told Yahoo News.
Approximately half of the time, researchers observed that “please” was employed in an attempt “to overcome resistance or willingness” to adhere to someone’s request.
“A lot of ‘please’ is definitely used to basically put pressure to comply on the other party,” he said.
He used the example of real-life scenario the team observed, of a daughter asking her mom for a new dress and using the word “please” after her mother initially declined.
Chalfoun explained that people think of it as a word “we use when we’re making a request that we shouldn’t be making, but we’re going to do it anyway.”
“It’s acknowledging … the fact that it’s kind of a problematic thing to be asking,” he said, adding that the word is not subconsciously considered a standard “politeness token.”
Instead, the word, study authors found, is used as a strategic way to get what you desire, almost like a pre-cursor to the other person’s concession, as it would be “impolite” to refuse someone’s request if they ask nicely.
“We know that people find it hard to say no to requests because it is impolite to do so,” Vanessa Bohns, a Cornell University professor of social psychology who was not involved in the study, told Yahoo News.
“By adding ‘please’ to a request, the asker is essentially reminding the target of those politeness norms. It is essentially saying to the target of the request: ‘Remember your manners.’”
Is it futile, then, to teach kids to to use the seemingly old-fashioned niceties?
It’s complicated, since these don’t necessarily yield polite intentions or behavior.
Chalfoun advised parents to educate their children about virtues, such as patience or waiting their turn.
“It’s not necessarily the most helpful thing to try to get people to follow really strict rules about what’s good behavior and what’s bad behavior,” he said.
“Rather than trying to get kids to follow a code of rules, we should push for thinking about what it means and look at broader principles.”
