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Ask vs. Guess Culture

jeanhsu.substack.com

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Re: Ask vs. Guess Culture

#271

Post by ggambetta »

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 just want to say I appreciate your humorous use of the trademark symbol. I love it, but not everyone does. There's dozens of us! Dozens!

Re: Ask vs. Guess Culture

#272

Post by silisili »

Tronno wrote: post #8

I disagree with the way these behaviors are portrayed as a cultural dichotomy. To me, the author's examples all fall under ineffective communication. Their example of "ask culture" involves stoking resentment by making unreasonable requests. This can be avoided by practicing a little empathy. Ask questions, provide some basic context, and offer an escape hatch: "What are you busy with? I need X because Y. It's fine i…

I tend to agree. I'm very much in the 'guess' camp by description, personally. I would never ask for something unless I found it reasonable and not difficult for the other.

However, when someone asks me something I don't want to do, I just say no, and don't think much more about it.

Re: Ask vs. Guess Culture

#273

Post by DoreenMichele »

The formal terms for this difference are high context culture and low context culture.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-context_and_low-context_c...

"Guess" culture would correspond to high context culture. You need to have a lot of shared context -- or be able to read a lot of clues to the context -- to infer what was really meant as a means to be adequately polite.

"Ask" culture would correspond to low context culture. It is often characterized as "rude" by outsiders but is also pro-diversity, such as New York City and American military culture.

Some people can navigate either type of culture, assuming they know what type of culture they are dealing with. Others assume the world works one way or the other and default to whichever one they grew up with, most likely.

Re: Ask vs. Guess Culture

#274

Post by lillecarl »

NavinF wrote: post #245
lillecarl wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Absolutely, I just disagree with trying to identify as being from somewhere else when you're born and raised in the US

Re: Ask vs. Guess Culture

#275

Post by margalabargala »

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.

This applies to other countries too.

One person from London, the other from Belfast? Both British.

One from Barcelona, the other from Madrid? Both Spanish.

One from Prague, the other from Bratislava? Both Czechoslovakian, until a couple decades ago.

Re: Ask vs. Guess Culture

#276

Post by bitshiftfaced »

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.

It may be that both are thinking in terms of considering the other person. People use their self as a reference point. When you try to model in your head how someone will take your request, you may be thinking in terms of how another asker would take being asked a request. In that case, you would think that the other person would be fine with it, since they're just as comfortable with asking for things that have a low chance of being granted.

Re: Ask vs. Guess Culture

#277

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: Ask vs. Guess Culture

#278

Post by contravariant »

reddit_clone wrote: post #164
sircastor wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There may be an obvious language barrier here, but the coupling of a positive with a negative response feels very odd to me in English. I'm reminded of the old song (it was used for an advertising jingle for a product or company I can't remember) "Yes, we have no bananas!" Adjacently, I really dislike the courtroom phrasing "Isn't it true?" that is sometimes depicted in legal dramas.

Indeed. >"Do you not have X?" In my head it sounds belligerent and accusatory. While the other form sounds polite. This negative phrasing to induce a positive response, may be a Japan only thing?

It's probably more like "You wouldn't happen to have any X?". I assume the idea is that you put the emphasis on the asker being the one to ask a silly question if they indeed don't have it.

Maybe it also helps that all the sentence markers that make a sentence polite, negative, interrogative all get added on to the end (to the verb) in japanese, which probably makes the construction slightly less awkward. In this case it may go something like motsu (to have) -> mochimasu (to have, polite) -> mochimasen (to not have, polite) -> mochimasenka (to not have, polite, interrogative).

I'm making a lot of assumptions here though, I don't know if this is anywhere close to correct.

Re: Ask vs. Guess Culture

#279

Post by overgard »

Hmm, I know it's frowned upon generally to say one culture is better than another, but I grew up in guess culture and I tend to gravitate towards that naturally, but a lot of my maturing as an adult has come from adopting more of ask culture and being more direct.

Guess culture sounds exhausting because it is. I can't count the number of times I've had a resentment towards someone for something they inadvertently did without even realizing. And the converse is just as annoying, when someone is upset at you and you have to play 20 questions to figure it out.

I think if you're high in agreeableness saying no to someone can be hard, which is where guess culture comes from IMO; but on the other hand, that's just a super important life skill even if you are highly agreeable.

Re: Ask vs. Guess Culture

#280

Post by caminante »

IshKebab wrote: post #267
caminante wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good point on nuance on a technical level, i.e., debunked != failure to support relationship. However, on a practical level, people throw this around as if it were empirically supported (which doesn't seem to be the case). If there have been hundreds of studies failing to make the connection, I won't take the bet that it will eventually get validated. On a meta-level, that's also a weird quote. > But the fact that co…

> Pick any theory. If you can't validate it, then that's a failure of the theory, right? Definitely not. 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. That doesn't mean they are invalid. For example my theory that UBI is unworkable. Basically impossible to prove because it's just too expensive to ever run a real UBI exp…

> 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 been run. [0]

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_basic_income_pilots#...

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