471–480 of 493 posts
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I have a friend from the western US who was explicitly taught by her (white) mother that you always refuse a favor the first time it is offered. There were many months of me never doing any favors for her before we figured that one out...
Get this: in Japanese culture, you are expected to refuse three times .
"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…
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 "culture" of making truly unreasonable requests of others is, by my reading, culture-less.
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Or in this case don't ask yes/no questions. Don't give them he option to give the answer they think you want to hear. What have you done? What is your next step?
Oh, good advice. Reminds me of another tidbit: A lot of people will hear "why" as accusatory: "why did you do it this way?!" becomes a question about culpability rather than causality; "what" is (apparently) what you want to use: "what led you to make these choices?" (it's probably a moving target tho, although one that moves slowly)
The most important thing I got from this was from the original Ask post forever ago. “Thing is, Guess behaviors only work among a subset of other Guess people - ones who share a fairly specific set of expectations and signalling techniques. The farther you get from your own family and friends and subculture, the more you'll have to embrace Ask behavior. Otherwise you'll spend your life in a cloud of mild outrage at (…
It seems the Ask culture's norm is more favorable in welcoming new members whereas the Guess culture's norm is more favorable in building loyalties to the community among members. IMO curiosity and fear are underlying factors of the cultural differences. An interesting thought exercise is when Ask people somehow happen to live in a Guess culture. It's like all the guess culture members are working with their own cryp…
It goes deep too. All the way down to the fear of hearing a ‘no’ answer. So it’s self reinforcing all the way down.
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I'm from Appalachia and we have the same thing, and yeah at least for us it's like you're agreeing with them that they don't have it. "Do you not have bananas?" is like "is it true that there are no bananas?". Then if there are bananas, the host can gleefully surprise you with them and feel like they solved a problem for you. This is only if it's said in a constantly upwardly-shifting tone, though. It can be said ano…
I read somewhere that a good negotiating strategy is to start with something that both can agree to.
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My grandmother said you’d offer food to guests because you knew they were hungry and they’d refuse because they knew you didn’t have enough for yourself. If you actually had enough food for a meal you needed to convince your houseguest.
That's the reason, I avoid going to relatives home as guests. They would compel and force me to eat something that I don't prefer. I won't be able to politely decline them as I'm from guess culture.
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A common example of this is the US servicemen that had come back from tours of Iraq or Afghanistan telling stories of how lovely and "welcoming" the locals were. E.g.: the locals would make a token offer to the soldiers, expecting them to politely refuse. The Americans would take that offer at face value and accept, to the surprise of the locals.
Whereas in Turkey if you're offered tea it's impolite to refuse. If you finish it, they will keep topping it up.
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> There are a ton of theories that are very difficult to validate because you simply can't run the experiment due to practical or ethical reasons. But they HAVE run high/low context experiments. > For example my theory that UBI is unworkable. Basically impossible to prove because it's just too expensive to ever run a real UBI experiment. Are you referring to Universal Basic Income? If so, countless experiments have b…
> Are you referring to Universal Basic Income? If so, countless experiments have been run Sure, but those experiments are fundamentally flawed because they are of such limited duration, and because they only apply to a small portion of society. Obviously people's behaviour is going to be different if they know they can't abandon their careers, and the economy is obviously not going to be affected at all by these tria…
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It is also true that for some (many?) people it is very hard to say 'No'. I don't know any psychological/technical name for this but it is simply true and it is in their nature. When asked directly, they will give in even if they don't like doing what is being asked. 'Asking' in these cases is actually exploitation (if done with prior knowledge).
People Pleaser
Simple example, when somebody cuts into a line in a super market, how many people actually speak up? Most of the time I see eye-rolls, angry shrugs but people just move on.