A New Study Suggests That Saying Please May Be A Thing Of The Past

Southerners can abide many things—heat waves, mosquitoes, even a drop of sugar in the cornbread, if it was made by a friend’s memaw. One thing that will not be tolerated, though, are bad manners. That’s why a new study may be particularly troubling for those of us raised in the South because it revealed that “please” may be vanishing from modern life. 

To make this upsetting discovery, researchers at the University of California Los Angeles set out to determine how often folks of all ages were saying “please” during a normal day. The UCLA team recorded 1,000 participants as they went about their lives. They collected 17 hours of video of folks playing board games or eating meals with their families or heading to a salon or a shop and interacting with clients and employees, according to Yahoo!, who spoke to one of the authors of the study.

The researchers shared the results in a new study and it turns out that, not very many folks remember to ask nicely. According to the team from UCLA, “please” was used only 7% of the time when people were making requests. That means that, bless their hearts, 93% of people either forgot some very basic manners or never learned them at all.

This wasn’t just children needing to be gently reminded to say “please” when asking for something. In fact, the study found that kids were slightly better about saying please than adults, managing to remember the magic word 10% of the time when they asked adults for something, while adults used the word in 8% of requests to children and only 6% of the time when they asked something of other adults.

According to Yahoo! , the study authors also found that women were just as bad as men, using “please” in 6% vs. 7% of requests and it didn’t matter about race or socioeconomic status—saying please just wasn’t very common. Sounds like folks need a reminder in good old-fashioned etiquette.