Psychology says people who say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ without thinking twice usually learned it so early and so thoroughly that politeness stopped being manners and became something closer to instinct, like breathing out before breathing in

My reflex fired before my thought did, which is a strange thing to notice about your own mouth. When researchers actually watched kids in the wild, they found children hardly ever produce a thank you on their own. Linguists who study this call these phrases unanalysed chunks, lumps of language you can operate long before you understand them. So if please leaves your mouth without a thought attached, that isn’t a character trait you built. Automatic doesn’t mean hollowLet me defend the reflex for a second, because there’s a lazy take going around that automatic politeness is somehow fake politeness.