A recent survey of more than 1,000
Brits found that that the average person says ‘sorry’ around eight times per day – and that one in eight people apologise up to 20 times a day.
“The readiness of the English to apologise for something they haven’t done is remarkable, and it is matched by an unwillingness to apologise for what they
have done,” wrote Henry Hitchings in his aptly-titled Sorry!: The English and their Manners.
Do as I say, not as I do
However, asking someone what they’d do in a theoretical situation is very different to measuring what they’d do in real life. Take the last example; in the YouGov survey, 36% of British respondents said they would apologise for someone else’s clumsiness, compared to 24% of Americans.
But in her book Watching the English, social anthropologist Kate Fox describes experiments in which she deliberately bumped into hundreds of people in towns and cities across England. She also encouraged colleagues to do the same abroad, for comparison.
Fox found that around 80% of English victims said ‘sorry’ – even though the collisions were clearly Fox’s fault. Often the apology was mumbled, and possibly people said it without even realising it, but compared to when tourists from other countries were bumped, the difference was marked. “Only the Japanese seemed to have anything even approaching the English sorry-reflex,” Fox writes.
The above taken from this link...interesting study comparing British, Canadian and American ''apologies''
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20160223-why-do-the-british-say-sorry-so-much
