"It's only a word, nobody hears it"

Here's a belief that lets the day's sorries pass unexamined. They're background. Nobody registers them. The colleague hears the question, not the sorry in front of it. The waiter hears the order. You're the only one keeping count, and you're only counting because a book told you to.

Two things. The first is that somebody did hear them, because somebody told you to stop. Most people who pick up this book have been told, by a partner or a friend or a manager, that they apologise too much, and that sentence is evidence that the sorries were registered, counted, and found worth mentioning. People don't remark on things they haven't noticed. The person who said "stop apologising" had been hearing every one for months and finally said so.

The second is how the read gets built, and it's the same way anything gets known about anyone. Not from what's said once. From what's said most. Chaudhry and Loewenstein's trade in chapter 3 is a small thing, per sorry, and the smallness is exactly why it's dangerous, because small things repeated are what people learn from without knowing they've learned. Nobody sat down and concluded that you're junior. They heard sorry forty times a day for three years and the conclusion assembled itself, and if you asked them why they think what they think about you, they'd struggle, and they'd think it anyway.

Consider the reverse. If nobody heard the sorries, the read wouldn't exist, and you'd be treated exactly as Dev is. You aren't. Something has produced the difference in how the two of you are treated, and the difference in what the two of you say forty times a day is the only candidate on the table.

So the sorries are heard. Not as events, but as weather, which is the way the most important things about a person get heard. You've been broadcasting a small message all day for years and assuming the volume was too low to carry, and the message has arrived, and it's the read, and the read is why you're reading this.