"It's what British people say"

Here's the belief that makes the habit feel like culture. Everyone here says sorry. It's the national word. A book about it is a book about being British, and you're not going to stop being that.

Karina Schumann and Michael Ross, in 2010, set out to test a different stereotype, that women apologise more than men, and what they found is more useful for this book than the stereotype was. In a diary study, people recorded every offence they committed or experienced each day and whether an apology was offered. Women did report more apologies. They also reported committing more offences. And when the researchers looked at the proportion of offences that got an apology, there was no difference between men and women at all. People apologised for what they counted as an offence, at the same rate. The difference was in what they counted. In a second study, men rated the same offences as less severe than women did, and those ratings predicted both whether an apology was thought to be owed and whether one was given.

Set the gender aside for a moment, because chapter 15 is about that, and look at the mechanism. Apologies track perceived offences. People apologise for the things they count as having done wrong, and the difference between a person who apologises forty times a day and one who apologises twice isn't politeness or nationality. It's the threshold. The forty-a-day person counts forty of their own ordinary actions, standing in a doorway, asking a question, coughing, as offences. The twice-a-day person counts two.

That's the habit, and it's not about Britain. Dev, at the next desk, is as British as you are, and says "quick one" where you say "sorry to bother you", and the difference is that Dev doesn't count asking a colleague a question as an offence, and you do. The threshold is the thing to look at, and the threshold can move, because it's a judgement about your own actions and not a fact about your country.

"It's what British people say" is true and beside the point. Plenty of British people say it twice a day. What you're describing is a threshold set low enough that most of what you do all day clears it, and the sorry is just the sound that threshold makes.