Remember Just Not Sorry? Yeah, that add-on for Gmail that told you when you were typing like a weedy little weed. It flagged up every time you put ‘sorry’ in an email where it wasn’t totally necessary. Which is… when, exactly?
YouGov has gone the extra mile for us, polling around 1,600 people to find out how often we say ‘sorry’ and why.
The question in there – do British people really apologise too much? – is a sad victim of Betteridge’s Law Of Headlines. Ask a question in your headline, and the answer is probably ‘no’. Indeed, from our perspective everyone else doesn’t say ‘sorry’ nearly enough. For every 100 apologies made by Americans, as the standard benchmark, we make more.
Uttering the S-word as a catch-all in social situations emerges from the polls looking like a definite British ‘thing’. (I mean, hey, look at Justin Bieber. Or don’t. Up to you.) We’re more likely to apologise when it’s not even our fault, for example. Or if someone else sneezes. Maybe ‘bless you’ is too difficult to interpret for atheists.
So far, so doormat. But wait.
In a shocking turn of events, our willingness to say ‘sorry’ may not be as selfless as it seems. Being ready to apologise makes you appear more trustworthy. There’s some evidence that offering an apology before asking for something increases the chances you’ll get what you’re after. Look:
“In one study, Harvard Business School’s Alison Wood Brooks and her colleagues recruited a male actor to approach 65 strangers at a US train station on a rainy day and ask to borrow their telephone. In half the cases, the stranger preceded his request with: “Sorry about the rain”. When he did this, 47% of strangers gave him their mobile, compared to only 9% when he simply asked to borrow their phone. Further experiments confirmed it was the apology about the weather that mattered, not the politeness of the opening sentence.” (from the BBC article)
God, we’re sneaky.
Some people might describe the British ‘sorry’ as a reflex. You know what that is? Evolution. Survival of the fittest. We Brits have learned to apologise more because it gets us further in life. Winning by making the other side feel like they’ve won already. That’s pretty clever.
The YouGov study also shows that women tend to offer more apologies than men do. I think we all know what this means, ladies. Get yourselves down to the nearest train station and borrow some phones. Only borrow, mind, for the display of power. And hand them back with a few ‘nyah-nyah’ selfies in there for good measure.
