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Ask vs. Guess Culture

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Re: Ask vs. Guess Culture

#321

Post by second_brekkie »

Being from the UK, I feel its a generalisation to say the west is an ask culture. I really feel like there's more of a guess culture outside of close friendship in the UK, especially the higher up the social strata you go.

Also the further south you go the more guess culture it will get. The more north you go people will be more friendly but also tell you what they think. As a general rule of thumb.

In the workplace too, becuase asking is too direct sometimes commands are phrased as soft questions.

"Should this be here?" means "I have figured out what is wrong and this clearly shouldn't be here, I will not approve your PR until you change this"

This irritates me, but I've only found on extreme ends of the guessing spectrum.

Generally I find guessing culture more preferable. It places the burden of "is it OK to ask this?" on the asker which is as it should be. Otherwise you're putting the burden of saying no on the requestee, and also gives the requestee the task of saying no nicely.

However if your at the table around a strangers house and you feel that you have to wait for the host to offer you ketchup. Well that's just manners gone stupid, thats obviously an OK thing to ask, it's on the flipping table!

Re: Ask vs. Guess Culture

#322

Post by philwelch »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #252
red-iron-pine wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah im from the south and there is definitely a level of up-front-ness that i'm not sure the parent comment is talking about. like a level of exuberance and get-it-out-ness that often borders on belligerence "yall doin okay?"

Questions like that really... confuse me, because is it just a generic 'hello' or a serious question? In my own experience, I once had an obnoxious colleague who asked "How was your weekend?". I didn't like the question because one, I don't like to talk about what I do / did in my spare time, and two, it was leading because the guy was really really eager to talk about HIS weekend, but... I didn't care, or else I wou…

It sounds more like you just don’t enjoy small talk.

Re: Ask vs. Guess Culture

#323

Post by deanCommie »

It's also important to point out that this isn't just geographic.

Guess/High Context is Allstic/Neurotypical.

Ask/Low Context is Autistic/Neuroatypical.

Anyone on the spectrum feels that Guess culture is cruel and unnecessarily complex. And they're right. (i'm only moderately on the spectrum, but strongly prefer Ask culture)

Re: Ask vs. Guess Culture

#324

Post by pixl97 »

SoftTalker wrote: post #319
nicup12345689 wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the key is to inspect the childhood trauma, however small, BUT don't try and make it your identity. You are just making some things conscious, understanding yourself. The moment it becomes a crutch, it is just an excuse for not taking agency over your own life. In a way it is the perfect excuse, a childhood determinism of sorts. Blame everything just to avoid ANY change of the self.

Yeah I feel like a lot of this obsession over "trauma" is just looking for excuses for why one won't get up off one's ass and take responsibility for one's life. Not discounting that some people have terrible childhoods that are legitimately damaging, but losing a pet or a friend moving away or a grandparent dying is not that unusual and well within the scope of "normal things that happen" that normal people can (or…

Conversely things like not being taught how to have proper relationships, being taught how to ask for help, or things (for men) toxic masculinity are potentially trauma inducing in social creatures as humans are.

The 'taking responsibility for ones own life' has a perverse failure mode where an individual is genuinely incapable of doing something, yet at the same time incapable of seeking help for the issue. These tend to lead to harmful downward spirals in those peoples lives.

Re: Ask vs. Guess Culture

#326

Post by mock-possum »

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.

I think it’s more guess versus know - if you don’t ask, you can only guess, you can’t know. If you ask, then you know. That’s all there is to it. You can pay all the attention you like and still get it wrong - but if you ask, you can’t get it wrong, because you’ll have been told what’s right.

If your goal is to get it right, then you need to ask, guessing isn’t good enough.

Re: Ask vs. Guess Culture

#327

Post by wisty »

patmcc wrote: post #179

This always strikes me as funny, because I think the default interpretation (and the one shared in the article) is that it's largely a Western/Eastern divide - Americans are 'ask' and Asians are 'guess' - but from where I am in Canada I generally see exactly the opposite. I don't know if that's specific to my circles though. My friends who are immigrants (or children of immigrants) from Hong Kong, Taiwan, India are a…

Maybe in a family the guess mode is more common while at work the ask mode is more common.

Re: Ask vs. Guess Culture

#328

Post by georgeecollins »

deaddodo wrote: post #318
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 grew up in Southern California, and neither of your descriptors really apply to the general culture there. Social conventions in the area are far less structured nor regimentalized, so if you needed something serious (a loan from a family, help moving, a ride to work, etc) you should probably ask. If you had some minor issue, most people would keep it to themselves; not necessarily hoping for someone to "guess", bu…

Southern California is great (I live there) but its not exactly Western. My family is from Northern California, by way of the gold rush and very waspy, hence very guess culture. "I wonder if someone should open a window?"

So cal is in the west but most of the people didn't come over during western expansion or work on a farm or ranch. A lot came from the mid-west. So its sort of more like Arizona or even parts of Texas.

Re: Ask vs. Guess Culture

#329

Post by philwelch »

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…

What you have is a healthy and emotionally normal relationship with your past negative experiences. That’s good! It doesn’t mean that you’re perfect or that your interpersonal issues aren’t real; it just means that a monocausal theory of psychology that blames everything on “trauma” or, worse yet, “childhood trauma” doesn’t apply to you.

People by and large don’t understand how their brains work, but if they’re suffering or struggling psychologically, they seem to want some sort of explanatory model to make sense of it. So it’s easy for people to buy into these models. The trauma model is one of the more fashionable ones these days. The problems with this model, especially the more pop-psychology version, are (a) it doesn’t fit what we know about actual, serious trauma anyway and (b) it seems to encourage people to catastrophize their past experiences in order to try and make their life story fit the model. This is also counterproductive because catastophization is itself a cognitive distortion that should be corrected rather than indulged. Focusing on childhood trauma in particular also sounds suspiciously Freudian to me.

Another thing to point out is that even serious traumatic experiences don’t necessarily lead to psychological issues in the future. Most people have a natural resiliency to them. But if people believe that any unpleasant or negative experience is going to give them full blown PTSD, it’s more likely to happen. There are cases of this happening cross-culturally when well meaning western aid workers offer to counsel people in third world countries who experienced natural disasters.

Re: Ask vs. Guess Culture

#330

Post by duxup »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #314
duxup wrote: post #303

My guess culture in laws will not say where they want to go for dinner, but they will raise endless hypotheticals about where other people might want to go, even if other people didn’t say it. That way the discussion never ends and we end up somewhere nobody wants to go….

Ask them hypothetically where would someone like them typically want to go :)

I like this idea.
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