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Ask vs. Guess Culture

jeanhsu.substack.com

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Re: Ask vs. Guess Culture

#31

Post by sircastor »

noahlt wrote: post #2

The "Ask vs Guess" name rhetorically frames it in favor of the Askers. Asking sounds reasonable, guessing does not! But really it's not about "Guessing", it's about understanding. It's about community, and relationship, and trust. What this culture really wants is for you to pay attention and understand the people around you, rather than treating everything as a transaction.

What term would you use to describe it? Respectfully, I think you're projecting an opinion onto it. There's no inherent value in the word "Guess". A "guess" culture isn't without transactional interactions, it's just shifted the transaction to implicit expectations instead of explicit.

Re: Ask vs. Guess Culture

#32

Post by bryanlarsen »

jedberg wrote: post #9
NeoTar wrote: post #5

Isn't this just a manifestation of high-context versus low-context cultures? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-context_and_low-context...

Yes, it's just another name for that. But this article paints high-context as bad and low-context as good, when they're really just different (and opposite ends of a spectrum, not a black or white one or another).

Does it? That's not what I got from the article at all.

The author is from a "guess" culture trying to operate in an "ask" culture world. She's adapting, but not because any particular culture is better than the other, but because "when in Rome, do as the Romans do".

Re: Ask vs. Guess Culture

#33

Post by aqme28 »

chasing wrote: post #10

I don't really care for the "Ask vs. Guess" framing. More like "make demands without considering the other person at all vs. think for a second about not imposing yourself on other people unnecessarily." But mostly this article is about the virtues of being a clear communicator and having decent interpersonal skills, which is neither an "ask" nor a "guess" thing.

I disagree with that framing even more. "Asking" is not "making demands." Guess culture people only think that asking is a demand, because that's Guess culture.

Re: Ask vs. Guess Culture

#34

Post by tracerbulletx »

People actually DO feel annoyed when people ask them for unreasonable things. So it's not unreasonable at all to take that into consideration and predict if a question will put them out. People are tuned to favor one strategy over another, but there is a real social cost to asking, and a real cost to not asking. There is no one right strategy, just another optimization problem that our brains have solved with emotional weights. Also the people who ask for things get offended all the time when people say no, so that's a problem too.

Re: Ask vs. Guess Culture

#35

Post by bee_rider »

noahlt wrote: post #2

The "Ask vs Guess" name rhetorically frames it in favor of the Askers. Asking sounds reasonable, guessing does not! But really it's not about "Guessing", it's about understanding. It's about community, and relationship, and trust. What this culture really wants is for you to pay attention and understand the people around you, rather than treating everything as a transaction.

The author mentions a couple times coming from a “guess” culture and adjusting to an “ask” one, so I think they are in some sense in favor of “ask,” at least in the workplace. I mean they are clearly trying to adopt some of the habits.

It is interesting—I think thoughtful people like the author tend to see the limitations of the habits they’ve grown up with, and the advantages of the ones they are trying to adopt. But of course both tendencies have advantages and disadvantages.

Re: Ask vs. Guess Culture

#36

Post by mabbo »

> Deciding what to eat for dinner with guess-culture people isn’t as simple as asking people what they want to eat for dinner, because they will not tell you what they actually want to want to eat for dinner.

This was nearly a deal-breaking problem early in my relationship with my wife. I am "ask", she is "guess". We just want to figure out what we're going to order for dinner, why on earth is this turning into a fight?

What we came up with was a simple system.

Person A presents three options, all of which they like. Person B picks from those three options. If they don't like any of the three, swap roles, and person B presents three options. If person A doesn't like any of those three options, give up and just go get dinner separately (this has never actually happened, yet).

Everyone is getting their preference in some way. No one has to guess what the other person wants. Fights are avoided.

Re: Ask vs. Guess Culture

#37

Post by kdmccormick »

rconti wrote: post #11

> Western society is very much ask culture. I want to push back on this, but since I was raised in the US, I don't feel like I have a leg to stand on. Perhaps it's more ask culture than the Japanese, but I still feel like it's very heavily on the Guess side. This all resonates with me, though, because I haven't grown up saying "no". My parents didn't ask much of me, but it didn't cross my mind to say no to any reques…

To be completely anecdotal: I grew up, live, and work in northeastern US, which according to this comment section seems to be as ask-culture as it gets, but when I work with Europeans I feel like I'm the one bumbling around with assumptions and implicit context, whereas they are more comfortable plainly asking for what they need and politely saying no.

(Or maybe it's function of who I work with from each continent? I work with a range of seniority levels in the US, but the European engineers I get to work with tend to be on the more senior side, and I imagine western business experience and ask-culture-adeptness are corollated).

Re: Ask vs. Guess Culture

#38

Post by throwanem »

smeej wrote: post #18
noahlt wrote: post #2

The "Ask vs Guess" name rhetorically frames it in favor of the Askers. Asking sounds reasonable, guessing does not! But really it's not about "Guessing", it's about understanding. It's about community, and relationship, and trust. What this culture really wants is for you to pay attention and understand the people around you, rather than treating everything as a transaction.

Hmm. I think I've primarily experienced the really dark side of guess culture, so I appreciate your framing of it as a desire for understanding when it's in a healthy context. I've experienced it in the contexts of narcissism and borderline personality, where the underlying thought is, "I am so obviously the center of the world that anyone with half a brain who's paying a whit of attention should to intuit my needs w…

What you're describing is abusive behavior, which is something I would hesitate very strongly to characterize as part of any cultural norm.

Re: Ask vs. Guess Culture

#39

Post by keiferski »

I feel like this should be directly correlated with how much "tradition" plays a role in local culture. The more tradition, the more you're expected to "just get it" and guess the other person's thoughts via cultural context. The less tradition, the less rules there are to follow, and therefore the less connection you have to the other person.

An extreme example being: the interactions between two foreign cultures are (or at least ought to be) almost entirely ask-based, as they have no prior understanding of how the reciprocal cultures work.

Re: Ask vs. Guess Culture

#40

Post by chromoblob »

jzb wrote: post #12

"It’s rude to put someone in a position where they have to say no to you" I feel this in my bones. When I was a kid my dad went off on me after we visited someone's house and I saw cake on the counter and asked for a slice. That was just unacceptable. (Context: He was raised by people who lived through the depression. Food scarcity was a real thing in living memory.) Even though his reaction was way overboard, I stil…

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