Sorry, but we Brits may not be quite as polite as we think

WE pride ourselves on minding our manners – but we would surely have something rude to say about a study that claims British are far from polite.

Apparently, we say ‘thank you’ on only one in seven occasions after the granting of a request. On a more positive note, researchers reckon that’s higher than anywhere else in the world, where, on average, ‘thanks’ is used just one in 20 times.

An international team including representatives from the universities of Sydney, York, and Helsinki studied recordings of conversation in eight languages in five continents. They looked at more than 1,000 examples of responses to requests such as ‘Could you pass some water?’.

The authors, writing in the Royal Society journal Open Science, found that ‘even in languages where children are aggressively taught to say “thank you” – such as English – the rate of thank-yous is very low in cooperative events in informal interaction’.

The researchers claim humans are naturally co-operative and people rarely remark on a lack of gratitude anyway – so thank-yous are unnecessary. They say: ‘Social life thrives because it’s in our nature to ask for help and pay back in kind, rather than just in words.’ Around the world, they found that people express gratitude typically just one in 20 times. In some languages, including Cha’palaa spoken by natives in Ecuador, nobody ever said thanks, while in Lao, spoken in countries such as Thailand, it was used once in 50 times. Co-Author Simeon Floyd, of York University, said that finding no phrase equivalent to ‘thank you’ in Cha’palaa, suggested they must have ‘very close-knit community ties allowing people to cooperate without ever needing to say thanks’.