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Ask vs. Guess Culture

jeanhsu.substack.com

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Re: Ask vs. Guess Culture

#241

Post by munificent »

boppo1 wrote: post #104
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I’ve learned anything in my 20 year mental health journey, it’s that until you’ve addressed your childhood trauma, nothing you do will be a lasting fix for any interpersonal issues you may have.

>addressed your childhood trauma This is pretty frustrating as 90s-kid who had a Good Childhood™ and struggles with interpersonal issues. I have a close friend from childhood who also had quite a Good Childhood™ and he can't shut up about "trauma" and it seems like every two years he has this big epiphany about how he addressed some "trauma" he was previously repressing and how now that he's done so he's All Better N…

> I have had people (including the friend from the first paragraph) suggest I need to "work on my childhood trauma" but really and honestly I can't think of a single thing that was legitimately traumatic.

Let me just copy/paste an older comment of mine:

---

Imagine you've lived in the same house your entire life. There's a big couch taking up half the living room, but one of the legs is broken. When you were really little, it tipped over when you sat in it, so you just learned to walk around the couch over to the not-very-comfortable armchair and sit there instead.

This was so long ago that you don't even remember learning not to sit in the couch. You don't think about how much room that couch is wasting or how much time you spend walking around the couch to get to the chair. Sometmies you stub your toe on the way around, but everyone trips every now and then. You've been doing this so long that it is completely unconscious. Hell, you can and do navigate the room in the dark.

Friends ask you about your living room furniture and you—completely honestly as far as you know—say it's all fine. You describe your chair in detail. It's not perfect, but it's serviceable. Certainly lots of other people have furniture that's in worse shape. At least you don't have any of those problems.

Then you sit down with a therapist for a few hours and they say, "Hey, what's up with that couch?"

Re: Ask vs. Guess Culture

#242

Post by watwut »

hosh wrote: post #112
nostrademons wrote: post #89

I've also heard of "Tell" culture. To use the moving example: You call up your best friend and say, "Hey, I'm moving on Saturday, come over and help me." Your friend either says "Sure, I'd love to" or "Sorry, got a hot date, catch you at your housewarming party." Ironically, Ask culture is usually used in transactional settings where you barely know someone, Guess culture is usually used in smaller community settings…

Also, in certain groups, people will deliberately troll each other in order suss out how they’d act under pressure… and whether they can be trusted to perform as part of a team under pressure.

None of that is about seeing a person under pressure, because they do nothing useful with the information. At best, information is ignored and at worst, used to pick bullying targets.

Re: Ask vs. Guess Culture

#243

Post by taurath »

adamweld wrote: post #153
boppo1 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>addressed your childhood trauma This is pretty frustrating as 90s-kid who had a Good Childhood™ and struggles with interpersonal issues. I have a close friend from childhood who also had quite a Good Childhood™ and he can't shut up about "trauma" and it seems like every two years he has this big epiphany about how he addressed some "trauma" he was previously repressing and how now that he's done so he's All Better N…

FWIW the data agrees with you, for milder cases of anxiety and depression, which often correlate with interpersonal issues, talk therapy (e.g. dissecting childhood trauma) is much less effective than cognitive behavioral therapy (analyzing behavioral and emotional patterns, trying to catch and redirect cycles of thought and action that lead to negative outcomes).

CBT is designed around outcomes that can be easily measured. It can also be actually harmful in cases where there’s actual trauma or neglect underlying the behavior or thought patterns. It has a tendency to paper over them.

It helps a lot of people, but it’t also a trap for those who have more deep things to work through, having spend 6 years stalled out in CBT before coming to grips with the deep trauma and neglect, and the dissociation that was so prevalent in my life that CBT therapists never even bothered screening for. Ask anyone with an emotionally neglectful or abusive upbringing what CBT did for them and you’ll get quite a few nasty answers.

Re: Ask vs. Guess Culture

#244

Post by williamdclt »

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…

At the end of the day, if you’re firmly on either end of the spectrum it comes down to the same thing: you’re putting all responsibility of the social interaction on the other person. Because your position is fixed and theirs is (possibly) not, you’re making it their fault if the communication style doesn’t work. It leads to much frustration on both sides.

In your example, if you have a fixed position of « Let people offer things, don't ask », you’re putting all responsibility on the other person: they have to adapt to your style or they’ll be the bad guy. Even though the other end of the spectrum (« express your desires, don’t make people guess ») is just as self-consistent and valid.

Camping at either end of the spectrum is putting yourself as a victim, it’s using the other person’s brain rather than your own to make the interaction pleasant. As in most things: extremes and inflexibility don’t work with the subtleties of reality

Re: Ask vs. Guess Culture

#245

Post by NavinF »

lillecarl wrote: post #238
quacked wrote: post #7

I am from the northern US (Protestant Scandinavian/German) and my wife is from the southern US (Protestant English/German) [1]. In the first several years of our relationship, we had several big disputes about how to treat each other, and how to treat guests. After a while we realized that she had been brought up to feel extreme insecurity over responding to the needs of guests, and I had been brought up to be blithe…

> I am from the northern US (Protestant Scandinavian/German) and my wife is from the southern US (Protestant English/German) You're American, your wife is American.

You're not wrong, but there are some pretty big differences between south, east, and west. In a lot of ways US states are like independent countries that share a military

Re: Ask vs. Guess Culture

#246

Post by alexjm »

wccrawford wrote: post #62
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…

While I was studying Japanese, I learned that they go out of their way to make it so the other person doesn't have to refuse with a "no". For instance, they'll ask, "Do you not have X?" instead of "Do you have X?" The person can answer "Yes, we don't have it" or "It's over here". I actually made this mistake, asking for a product directly instead of negatively, when I was in Tokyo. The clerk took me to the aisle and…

I've heard that the "do you not have" phrasing was used in polite Soviet-era Russian, leading to a joke about a customer who walks into a shop and sees all the shelves are empty:

- Excuse me, do you not have any bread? - Sorry, this is a butcher's shop. We don't have any meat. The bakery is across the road. They're the shop that doesn't have any bread.

Re: Ask vs. Guess Culture

#247

Post by trailingComma »

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…

It's rude to expect other people to be able guess what you want.

If you want something, ask me. I don't have crippling confidence issues so saying no is not a problem for me.

Re: Ask vs. Guess Culture

#248

Post by candybar »

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…

I would go even further - it's complete nonsense. I'm going to guess the author never wondered why Americans feel uncomfortable asking for a discount at a store and would rather just not buy when they would've happily bought it at half the price, whereas in many parts of Asia, it's common for customers to ask for what seem like outrageous discounts to a westerner. Norms are highly contextual - in every culture there are things you can ask for and there are things you can't - and there's huge individual variation in the willingness to adhere to norms and the willingness to make others uncomfortable to get what you want.

> [Because of something something Asian culture] My parents rarely had to make explicit asks of me,

It baffles me how anyone with any kind of awareness could write this.

Re: Ask vs. Guess Culture

#249

Post by sourcepluck »

Did no-one else cringe at the gargantuan oversimplifications necessary to keep this alleged cultural distinction afloat?

Was no-one else a little queasy seeing a U.S. person talk about the entire continent of Asia - pushing towards 4.8 billion people - as if they were an easily generalisable singular entity?

Seems utterly nuts to me. Perhaps it's related to the feeling U.S. people sometimes seem to have that they aren't just the centre of the world, but actually in some sense literally the whole world. Or something else, I don't know.

Re: Ask vs. Guess Culture

#250

Post by caminante »

carabiner wrote: post #222
caminante wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are always fun "pop-sci" discussions, but the wiki says this whole dichotomy has been debunked [0]. I can't think of any company that doesn't have some low-context interfaces. It can be expensive for top executives to constantly address every question with "clear and effective communication." Some people make it look easy, but it's hard! [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-context_and_low-context...

I worked at an Indian tech consulting firm. Even though India is considered a high context culture, our working environment felt fully low context with endless meetings trying to get all stakeholders on the same page, clearing out assumptions, nailing down timelines and aligning resources. When I moved to a normal US company it felt like downright mind reading how we got shit done much faster because we did have a mu…

I agree.

I was critiquing the parent and indirectly asking for an example of a firm that has *ONLY* "high context." Things become very abstract with unwritten rules as you move up the org chart.

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