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What was most striking in Asia was how few people held doors open for us. Every city except Hong Kong finished in the bottom ten in the rankings and no one had a success rate higher than 40 percent. Many Asians simply don't include door-holding in their notions of courtesy. "How can we measure someone's value simply by whether they hold a door open?" observed 19-year-old student John Christopher Padilla, in the Philippine capital, Manila.Yoon Mi-ri, a 43-year-old businesswoman, held open the door of a shop in Seoul only because "I often go overseas on work trips and it's basic manners over there. In Korea, people don't pay much attention to such things."
But we found plenty of discourtesy outside Asia too. Moscow, Russia, and Bucharest, Romania, ranked as the least polite European cities. When an affluent-looking lady in her forties failed to hold a door in Moscow's Prospekt Vernadskogo, she chided us: "I'm not a doorman. It's not my job to hold doors. If someone gets hurt, they should be quicker on their feet."
What can we learn from our results? While two of the world's most affluent cities -- Zurich and New York -- came top of our rankings, we found plenty of courtesy in poorer areas too. In Johannesburg, South Africa, our researcher concluded: "The better dressed the person, the less likely he or she was to help. This applied across the board, irrespective of race."
Nonetheless, it was prosperous cities that were at the top of our rankings. Charles Mosley, editor of British etiquette publisher Debrett's, ventures this explanation: "Wealthier cities aren't generally as crowded and competition for resources is less intense."
But being in a hurry isn't always a barrier to helping people. Tests carried out during morning rushhours produced almost as many positive results as those performed off-peak. For Gary Webber, a 46-year-old British local government worker who helped gather up our papers during the London rushhour, this was down to empathy. "You looked as if you were in a hurry. I was in a hurry. I thought, Let's work together and get us both on our way."
Many older people we encountered complained that courtesy was less prevalent among the young. But we found that the under-40s were, by a small margin, the most helpful of all age groups -- and the over-60s the least. "The younger, the more courteous it seems," says our researcher in Finland. "So, no more whinging about the younger generation not being up to standard!"
Women were slightly more courteous than men and, oddly, both groups were significantly more polite towards their own sex. Some men told us they worried about patronizing modern independent females. Perhaps that's why men over 60, supposedly brought up in a more polite era, were the least likely of any group to hold a door for our female researchers.
Courtesy levels in larger shops were roughly similar to those in smaller establishments. In a Sydney, Australia, branch of Woolworths, cashier Reena had a huge smile for every customer and thanked us very cheerily. But in a tiny music shop in Milan we were ignored for ten minutes by the middle-aged shop assistant, who pretended to be busy stock-taking before he deigned to sell us a plectrum.
Globally, around 74 per cent of shop assistants said thank you. The most common reason given was that if you were nice to customers they would come back. "After the Argentine economic crisis of 2002, I would never risk losing a sale," said Buenos Aires toy-shop owner Amanda Herrera.
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