At first glance it seems a slight on the polite: recordings of more than a thousand casual conversations from around the world reveal that people hardly ever say “thank you” when others help them out.

The everyday social exchanges, which played out in eight different languages on five separate continents, highlight a global reluctance to acknowledge trivial favours, such as passing the salt. Overall, people expressed their thanks only once in every 20 occasions.

While the English language emerged as an outlier in the study, with thank yous being used more than in any other language, the phrase or similar ones were still only witnessed in 14.5% of the conversations recorded.



Rather than reflecting manners, or a descent into rudeness, the findings say more about linguistic traditions, the researchers said. Across cultures, close-knit groups of people take it for granted that people will cooperate with each other, to the point that saying thanks is no longer needed.

“In informal everyday interaction across the world, the general norm is to respond to another’s cooperative behaviour without explicitly saying thank you, but by simply continuing with one’s activities,” the scientists say in the journal, Royal Society Open Science.

The researchers studied 1,057 conversations recorded by fixed cameras and microphones in people’s homes or in places where the communities gathered. All the exchanges were casual and between people who knew each other well, such as friends and family. In more formal settings, such as buying food at the shops, the scientists believe expressions of thanks are likely to be far more commonplace.

Across all eight languages, including Cha’palaa in Ecuador, Siwu in Ghana, Lao in Laos, Polish, Russian, Murrinh-Patha in Australia, Italian and English, people were highly likely to help others when asked. On average, people responded immediately 88% of the time, suggesting they were happy to cooperate.

The scientists cast a wide net to capture any phrase that indicated thanks when someone did what was asked of them. In English, that meant terms like “sweet” and “good job” as well as “thank you”. In Murrinh-Patha, it included phrases such as “Yukuy murruwurInyima”, which translates as “That’s right, you’re beautiful”.

While cooperation was the norm, expressing thanks was not. Thank yous appeared most in English (14.5%) and Italian (13.5%), but far less in Polish (2%) and Siwu (0.8%). The Chachi speakers of Cha’palaa, in common with the horse-mounted nomadic Dothraki in Game of Thrones, have no word for “thank you”. It is not unusual for languages to lack the phrase, the scientists said.

“This doesn’t mean that people are universally rude, nor that speakers of English are less rude than speakers of other languages,” said Nick Enfield, a lead researcher on the study at the University of Sydney. “We should not conflate the feeling of gratitude with the act of expressing it.”

What the study leaves open is why people say thank you on the rare occasions they do. One idea the researchers propose is that saying thanks is reserved for when requests go beyond the call of duty.

“In everyday interaction, cooperation is the rule: social life thrives because it’s in our nature to ask for help and pay back in kind, rather than just in words,” said Enfield. “There is literally an unspoken agreement that people will cooperate.”

• This article was amended on the 23 May 2018 because an earlier version said the research was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It appears in a different journal, Royal Society Open Science.