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.