In 2015, Simeon Floyd, then of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, gave a lecture in Antwerp about expressions of gratitude in eight cultures around the world. I was lucky enough to be there, and have been thinking ever since about the videos he showed. In one, a Cha’palaa speaker in Ecuador goes to a hole-in-the-wall shop and asks for some cooking oil. Receiving it, he turns away and leaves. In another, a British student eyes up another’s biscuits and asks for one. As he reaches into the proffered packet, he smiles and says, “Sweet!”

The upshot of the research was that people in general do not express thanks when someone else fulfils a request for them. Of the cultures studied, the most apt to voice appreciation were the two in western Europe: Italy (13.5%) and Britain (14.5%).

This week, Royal Society Open Science published Floyd and his colleagues’ work, and caused a flutter. The Times headlined its piece “Britons really do say ‘thank you’ more than anyone else”. The Independent referred to Britain’s famed “unrelenting penchant for politeness”.

If Britain is famed anywhere for “unrelenting politeness”, it is nowhere more so than in Britain itself, where the national reputation for good manners is treated as a badge of honour. While there’s plenty of British self-deprecation in the use of words like “please”, “thank you” and “sorry”, it comes with some implicit self-congratulation: we use these words because we’re so polite, the reasoning goes. The unspoken assumption is that others are less so.

Some humility (not the same as self-deprecation or politeness) might be in order here, since the research does not show that the British thank “more than anyone else”, but that they thank more (in certain situations) than seven other cultures. Whether British English speakers thank more than people in China, Japan, India or the Middle East is yet unknown – and whether the British thank more than other English speakers is yet another matter. Research for the Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English, for instance, found that Americans say “thanks” or “thank you” twice as much in conversation as Britons, while Britons say “please” twice as much as Americans.

The prevalence of thanks in English-speaking cultures doesn’t show we care more about others

That doesn’t mean Britons make politer requests or that Americans are more grateful. It means that we’ve acquired different habits. With Rachele De Felice of University College London, I’ve been trying to dig down into those numbers. If “thank you” is used at different rates in two cultures, it probably means different things to those cultures. Indeed, in our studies of British and American email correspondence, we’ve found that Britons are more apt to begin emails with thanks for the previous message, while Americans are more likely to thank people for their time or interest. We’ve also found that the lesser American use of “please” is offset by more expressions of appreciation in making requests.

British “thanks” comes into its own at the shop till. I was inducted into this thanking culture in the early 2000s, when I was a fresh immigrant from the US, and volunteered in a Brighton charity shop. There, to my surprise, I learned that English shop assistants and patrons can begin an interaction with “thank you”; the customer who places a box of Christmas cards in front of the shop assistant can use “thank you” to indicate that they are ready to start a transaction. The assistant may then say “thank you” as they take the item to ring up. Before the end of the interaction, what with the back-and-forth of credit cards or cash, pin machines or change, receipts and bagged goods, there may well be half a dozen more thanks. Do these thanks show gratitude? An alternative reading (made in the 1970s by sociolinguist Dell Hymes) is that the British “thank you” sometimes means “I am asking you to take the next turn in this interaction” or “I am accepting that it is my turn to do something in this interaction”.

When we visit other cultures that don’t use thanking to manage their interactions in the same way, it can feel off-putting. But to conclude from ample “thanks”-giving that “we’re more polite” is only to conclude that “we do the things we consider polite more often than other cultures do the things we consider polite”. Hardly a surprising finding.

The prevalence of thanks in English-speaking cultures doesn’t show we care more about others and the impositions we make on them. It may instead be a side-effect of our culture’s individualism. I have to thank you because I cannot assume that we’re close enough for you to naturally be generous towards me. In a more intimate situation or collectivist culture, expressing “thanks” can imply “I hadn’t trusted that I could count on you for that.”

Anyway, thanks for reading.

• Lynne Murphy is professor of linguistics at the University of Sussex and author of The Prodigal Tongue: the Love-Hate Relationship between British and American English