I was raised in a strong Guess culture, then went to a tech university where Askers predominated, and it took me some years to come to terms with the fact that these are simply incompatible conversational styles and the most effective thing for me to do is understand which style my interlocutor is expecting and use that.
This, amusingly, often leads me to ask people whether they are using Ask rules or Guess rules. Except, of course, in situations where I intuit that asking them would be inappropriate, and I have to guess instead.
Bringing college friends home for dinner was the most wearing version of this. On one occasion I had to explicitly explain to a friend that, for her purposes, it was best to assume that the last piece of chicken was simply unavailable to be eaten, ever, by anyone. (There actually was a method for getting it, but it was an Advanced Guess Culture technique, not readily taught in one session.)
Incidentally, my own experience is that Ask and Guess are sometimes misleading labels for the styles they refer to (though they are conventional).
For example, "Ask" culture is often OK with "So, I'm assuming here that A, B, and C are true; based on that yad...
(On one occasion, when highly motivated to have a departing guest take leftovers home with her if and only if she actually wanted leftovers, but not knowing her default rules, I ended up saying "So, among your tribe, how many times do I have to repeat an offer to have it count as a genuine offer?")
I once saw a friend ask our host, upon leaving a party, if he would like her to leave the rest of the cake she brought, which we'd eaten some of but hadn't finished. She's very asky, he's very guessy. However, she knows this, and immediately followed up with: "Please don't feel you need to take it--we'll happily eat it at home. I know I don't like it when people foist leftovers on me that I don't really want." He considered, and said since there was so much of it, he'd take a couple of pieces for himself and his roommate and let her take the rest home. Very asky question, very guessy answer, all parties satisfied.
What field do you go into if you want to study this stuff? Anthropology of some flavor? I find it fascinating.
Sociologists and sociolinguists study this sort of thing a lot. In particular, there's a lot of work in sociolinguistics on registers of politeness, and how different cultures construct and interpret questions.
My husband and I took over a decade to evolve a pattern where I can answer "What do you want to do for dinner?" with "Well, left to my own devices I would probably just heat up some soup, but if you want to go out that's OK with me too, but I don't feel like cooking anything."
On one occasion I had to explicitly explain to a friend that, for her purposes, it was best to assume that the last piece of chicken was simply unavailable to be eaten, ever, by anyone
Thinking about how this works in my household, I realized why this doesn't come up: if there is a last piece of chicken then the host has made a mistake. In my culture there should always be enough food that everyone feels comfortable to eat as much as they would enjoy without worrying that this will limit other's consumption. The host cooks sufficient food to ensure this, with the expectation that there will be leftovers. And then leftovers provide lunches, and occasionally dinners if they accumulate sufficiently. Of course this requires being rich enough to have enough food for everyone to have what they want, but (a) food is much cheaper relative to the rest of life than it used to be and (b) if the cost would be an issue you deal with this by having larger quantities of cheaper food.
In the rare occasions when the host miscalculates, because extra people showed up, people ate more than expected, or something else, my culture's general askiness means we talk about it pretty explicitly ("who else would like more chicken?") and generally divide what's left equally among everyone who wants it.
(There actually was a method for getting it, but it was an Advanced Guess Culture technique, not readily taught in one session.)
I'd love an explanation of the technique.
Ferd's method works, assuming you can actually manage to help with the dishes (the trick to that is to just start doing it, rather than ask... if you ask, the host is obligated to say "no, of course not," since it is understood that you don't actually want to help with the dishes), but the one I had in mind is you take a serving implement, pick up the last piece of chicken, catch the eye of someone else at the table, and offer it to them. They, of course, are obligated to say "No, you take it" (as are you, if someone offers it to you). If you are a guest, or the youngest person at the table, it's OK to accept at that point. Otherwise, you can look around to the table -- with the chicken still on the serving implement in your hand -- and ask if anyone else wants it. They all say "no," of course. Then you can serve yourself.
Which was all way too complicated to explain to someone who was having trouble with the idea that "Oh, can I have the last piece?" was rude by local standards.
Volunteer to help with the dishes, then ask whether you can take away the plate the chicken is sitting on. If nobody else claims it, it's yours.
Clear another plate before you touch the one with the chicken on it. Clear something else after. Clear your plate when you're done eating.
Don't do more work than your hosts. You're being helpful, not trying to work off the price of dinner.
FWIW, among my friends--whom I might describe as "polite askers" or "assertive guessers"--it's common to ask "does anybody want to split this with me?" That way, you're both asking for what you want (more of the thing) and making an offer in a guess-culture-compatible way. It's easy for other people to accept, because now by taking it they're not preventing you from having it. If no one does, you can be reasonably confident no one else actually wanted it.
A variant on the same thing is: "Would anyone else like this?" which is a shorter version of the offering ritual that TheOtherDave described. Because it's skipping most of the ceremony, it's much askier, but it's still not polite to say "yes" and take the thing, because you'd be taking it out of the hands of someone who clearly wanted it. (An exception might be made if you hadn't actually had any of the thing yet, and said so.) But you can say "I'll split it with you," achieving the same result as the above.
Of course, this only works for plausibly divisible things. I've had a friend laugh at me--good-naturedly--for offering to split something bite-sized. Surprise, surprise: he's much askier, I'm much guessier.
Converse Umeshism: "If you never miss an opportunity to get something by asking, you're asking too much."
Second-order Umeshism: "If nobody ever says no to you and you never miss an opportunity to get something by asking, you're worrying too much about when to ask for things."
Converse Umeshism: "If you never miss an opportunity to get something by asking, you're asking too much."
Possible more colorful version: "If you've never missed out on something you needed because you didn't ask, people find you too greedy."
Overlapping Umeshisms: If you don't ask for enough, people will still think you're greedy. If you ask for too much, you'll still neglect to ask for things you could've gotten.
Reminds me of The Screwtape Letters, which seems to come down hard on guess culture (not so much rejecting it as not considering it in those terms to begin with, which seems to be common on both sides):
...Later on you can venture on what may be called the Generous Conflict Illusion. This game is best played with more than two players, in a family with grown-up children for example. Something quite trivial, like having tea in the garden, is proposed. One member takes care to make it quite clear (though not in so many words) that he would rather not but is, of course, prepared to do so out of "Unselfishness". The others instantly withdraw their proposal, ostensibly through their "Unselfishness", but really because they don't want to be used as a sort of lay figure on which the first speaker practices petty altruisms. But he is not going to be done out of his debauch of Unselfishness either. He insists on doing "what the others want". They insist on doing what he wants. Passions are roused. Soon someone is saying "Very well then, I won't have any tea at all!", and a real quarrel ensues with bitter resentment on both sides. You see how it is done?
Wow. The "Generous Conflict Illusion" describes so many of my interactions with my in-laws. And I'm in the wrong.
I voted you up for simply quoting The Screwtape Letters. I read it over the summer, and despite its assumptions of Christian theology, I don't think I've found a better work of fiction on the topic of human psychology.
I have a bias in that I really, really don't understand the "guess" mentality. Or rather, I see how it could develop but I don't understand how people once they are aware of the breakdown don't immediately say "hey! Ask is more efficient and less likely to lead to misunderstandings." While a culture that is a mix of Askers and Guessers will have a lot of misunderstandings (and likely more than a pure Ask or pure Guess culture), it seems that Guessers frequently have more serious misunderstandings due to poor guessing even when interacting with other Guessers. In contrast, Askers rarely have a problem interacting with other Askers in the same way. So it seems that utility is maximized with Askers. There's likely some biases coming into play in constructing this argument in that I'm heavily an Asker, and I've tried in areas I was more of a Guesser to move towards being more of an Asker because it just seems to work better. I'd be enlightened if someone could point out where my logic about ideal cultures breaks down.
Consider an "ask culture" where employees consider themselves totally allowed to say "no" without repercussions. The boss would prefer people work unpaid overtime so ey gets more work done without having to pay anything, so ey asks everyone. Most people say no, because they hate unpaid overtime. The only people who agree will be those who really love the company or their job - they end up looking really good. More and more workers realize the value of lying and agreeing to work unpaid overtime so the boss thinks they really love the company. Eventually, the few workers who continue refusing look really bad, like they're the only ones who aren't team players, and they grudgingly accept.
Only now the boss notices that the employees hate their jobs and hate the boss. The boss decides to only ask employees if they will work unpaid overtime when it's absolutely necessary. The ask culture has become a guess culture.
Guesser culture affords much more signaling of how well you understand people. People who correctly guess will come off as more intelligent, observant and understanding. It's like the difference between offering money and offering carefully chosen presents; money may be more efficient, but efficiency isn't the only factor coming into account.
Interestingly, Chinese culture seems much more guess-based than American culture, but in China gifts are usually in cash, not in presents. Maybe societies all need a way to signal understanding and social suaveness, but choose different mechanisms.
This is because sheer confidence and pushiness also work, to an extent. Just behaving enough like a leader is enough to get people to follow you. To encourage repeat following, be sure to deliver.
Upside: people do in fact go along more often than not. It's somewhat disquieting how well it can work. Downside: you get a reputation as a pushy sod, which may be problematic later.
(I have specifically warned the staff at my daughter's nursery to keep an eye out for her dominating the other kids too much and directly encouraging her to play cooperatively where feasible. She's 3 1/2 and she successfully pushes the 5yo's around and makes them play her games with her. Her pantomime theatresports variation of hide and seek - where you pretend to hide and pretend to seek, and the game is to be as creatively theatrical in the hiding and seeking as possible - particularly confuses them.)
pantomime theatresports variation of hide and seek - where you pretend to hide and pretend to seek, and the game is to be as creatively theatrical in the hiding and seeking as possible
Awwwwwwww.
I really like Yvain's answer!
But I'll add to it that Guess cultures mostly don't involve guesswork. They involve inferring likely conditions based on evidence that isn't explicitly articulated.
More precisely: Culture A is an Ask culture relative to Culture B with respect to a subject if A explicitly articulates things about that subject that B doesn't articulate.
So I think your question is isomorphic to "Why would anyone prefer not to explicitly articulate all their evidence?"... that is, "Why are some things rude to talk about?"
Not that that answers your question, but it might provide some useful directions.
I've seen it suggested that "Guess" is an unfair portrayal-- it's how Infer cultures look to people who don't know the rules.
Yup. This became particularly clear to me when I dated someone in college who was from an equally "Guess" but different culture than the one I was raised in (1). I understood perfectly well what was going on, but I didn't know the cues.
It would not surprise me too much to discover that the whole idea of "a Guess culture" is actually an illusion, similar to the idea that one's own native language is inherently easier to understand than other people's, and that all cultures are equally opaque to outsiders. (I don't think that's likely, but it's not impossible.)
(1) I came from a Hispanic immigrant background, she came from an upper-class New England background. Together, we fought crime.
Heh. It was twenty years ago, I'm probably confabulating more than I'm recalling.
To pick an example... I remember observing that both my family and hers had highly specific ways of communicating the difference between a demand, a request, and a question, but the mechanisms had almost nothing in common. In my family, if it was phrased as an interrogative it was either a question or a demand, but never a request. and I was expected to recognize demands by context. In her family, it seemed everything was an interrogative; whatever the cue was, I never really figured it out.
There are some things which it's impolite to say, in any words, because the sentiment is impolite--for example, "I don't want you to come to my party." Guess culture, applied well, allows you to avoid having to say those things or cause the attendant hurt feelings. (Guess culture applied poorly avoids the hurt feelings but puts you in the awkward position where they're at the party anyway because you felt compelled to invite them.) The same situation in ask culture requires you come out with it.
This may sound like a good thing in the long run--especially if you are yourself asky--but sometimes there are valid reasons both that you don't want someone at the party (they smell bad) and that you don't want to hurt their feelings (they're your boss/family member/other person you'll be spending more time around, especially in a position of authority).
Another thing guess culture is good at is keeping secrets. In ask culture, if someone asks you something you've promised not to tell, it's certainly valid to say "Sorry, I can't tell you." But then they know there's a secret, and sometimes that alone is enough to cause harm--through speculation and deduction, or asking someone else, for example. (You could also lie, but that might cause its own problems.) In guess culture, there are things you don't ask about. This is part of why.
It may be worth observing that being a good Guesser in an Ask culture is a minor superpower.
In all human cultures, being able to read people accurately is advantageous.
(I recall reading a hypothesis or theory that our huge brains were quite specifically evolved by pressure of dealing with each other, and that this was intense enough to require even more social acuity than our otherwise politically similar chimpanzee brethren have. These things on our necks are peacocks' tails. I can't find the link, however. Anyone?)
In Guess cultures, how much estimation of other people's desires goes on, and how much is following rules about how desires can be expressed? This may vary from one culture to another, and it may be very hard to get an answer to the question.
Do Guess cultures tend to have etiquette creep, where, if going through a ritual is equivalent to making a request (demand), then the ritual must be made more ambiguous?
I'm definitely an asker, and this - as I see now in retrospect thanks to this post - caused me a lot of grief with a friend with whom I was otherwise closely mentally aligned. She insisted on "reading" people and playing "guess my intent", often accusing me of things that I never even thought of, and complaining that I was difficult to read. When I asked her why she couldn't just ask me about my thoughts instead of trying to infer them, she said it was not culturally common in her country (Holland). I have no way of verifying that last assertion, though.
I've trained myself to be an Asker - I consider it one of life's cheat codes. It does lead to friction with my wife who's more into Guessing.
See also Rejection Therapy.
I've always preferred an ask culture for its efficiency. However, as Yavin pointed out, someone in a position of authority or influence can't expect to ask with no consequence because people aren't free to refuse. I'd expect a boss to understand that, but if you're a guest of someone from a hospitality culture, you might have trouble because the rules of hospitality mean that if you give the slightest indication of a desire or preference, they're obligated to fulfill it. Unfortunately, this means that the more "hospitable" someone is, the less co...
This is one of those contexts in which it helps to understand that "Guess" culture is a very Ask-culture way of describing Hint culture. As a guest/subordinate in a Hint culture you don't express desires or preferences unsolicited. It's the responsibility of the host/boss to indirectly convey to you what the range of appropriate choices are, and you select from those. (Which of course requires being able to recognize that this is what's going on in the first place.)
I remember reading tangerine's* ask_metafilter answer when it was posted and got hundreds of upvotes (favorites in their jargon) and I thought it was a brilliant few paragraphs.
A couple years later it got some publicity in The Guardian and there was a complete thread on the single topic of the ask versus guess thing.
I am interested but I am not at all convinced. Anthropologists have been writing about gifts and exchange and reciprocity since as long as anthropology has existed. It is very complex. After family and clan relations, it is perhaps the second ...
Thinking about this game-theoretically: Let's say you get awarded points for getting what you want (+10), subtracted points when a Guesser refuses your request and is miffed that you even asked (-10) and you get no points (+0) if you don't ask, or if you get a friendly refusal from an Asker.
Askers always ask; guessers decide, on a case-by-case basis, whether or not to ask. In principle, this means guessing ought to dominate as a strategy.
On the other hand, in real life, Askers probably are less upset than Guessers by rejection in general. Even when an ...
So, I'm an ask person. Oftentimes, I don't even sing "Happy Birthday" to people unless I know they appreciate it, because my experience is people seem to find the burst of concentrated attention more offputting than they enjoy the well-wishing, and thus I have little desire to take part.
One consequence is that I generally don't give people gifts on occasions. That doesn't mean I don't give gifts- just that I don't give something to someone unless they have a readily identifiable need that I can fill. And so my parents, who have gotten me somethi...
Guessy: Etiquette. Fashion. Religion. Favor trading & extent of trust. Social status. The attitudes, abilities and intentions of others. Taboos.
Asky: Monetary economic transactions. Contracts. Science. Engineering. Medicine. War. Philosophy class.
Guessy suggests small groups and the exclusion mechanisms to maintain them in a populous world. Asky just looks modern.
Things women and men tend to do in unmixed groups, respectively.
Other ideas?
Having different levels of ask cultures makes so much sense to me now that I've heard about it. It explains why I felt creeped out the first couple of time I heard a woman say, "There's nothing less sexy that a man who asks to kiss you."
If rationalists should win, then we should have a secret signal that lets others know whether we want to be asked or guessed at. So the older I get the more I want some of Yvain's Rakiovik status beads to tell people, "Ask me anything, please criticize me, and don't worry about offending me." On the Internet, maybe those 'how to treat me' labels go in my profile?
There's a concept (inspired by a Metafilter blog post) of ask culture vs. guess culture. In "ask culture," it's socially acceptable to ask for a favor -- staying over at a friend's house, requesting a raise or a letter of recommendation -- and equally acceptable to refuse a favor. Asking is literally just inquiring if the request will be granted, and it's never wrong to ask, provided you know you might be refused. In "guess culture," however, you're expected to guess if your request is appropriate, and you are rude if you accidentally make a request that's judged excessive or inappropriate. You can develop a reputation as greedy or thoughtless if you make inappropriate requests.
When an asker and a guesser collide, the results are awful. I've seen it in marriages, for example.
Husband: "Could you iron my shirt? I have a meeting today."
Wife: "Can't you see I'm packing lunches and I'm not even dressed yet? You're so insensitive!"
Husband: "But I just asked. You could have just said no if you were too busy -- you don't have to yell at me!"
Wife: "But you should pay enough attention to me to know when you shouldn't ask!"
It's not clear how how the asking vs. guessing divide works. Some individual people are more comfortable asking than guessing, and vice versa. It's also possible that some families, and some cultures, are more "ask-based" than "guess-based." (Apparently East Asia is more "guess-based" than the US.) It also varies from situation to situation: "Will you marry me?" is a question you should only ask if you know the answer is yes, but "Would you like to get coffee with me?" is the kind of question you should ask freely and not worry too much about rejection.
There's a lot of scope for rationality in deciding when to ask and when to guess. I'm a guesser, myself. But that means I often pass up the opportunity to get what I want, because I'm afraid of being judged as "greedy" if I make an inappropriate request. If you're a systematic "asker" or a systematic "guesser," then you're systematically biased, liable to guess when you should ask and vice versa.
In my experience, there are a few situations in which you should experiment with asking even if you're a guesser: in a situation where failure/rejection is so common as to not be shameful (i.e. dating), in a situation where it's someone's job to handle requests, and requests are common (e.g. applying for jobs or awards, academic administration), in a situation where granting or refusing a request is ridiculously easy (most internet communication.) Most of the time when I've tried this out I've gotten my requests granted. I'm still much more afraid of being judged as greedy than I am of not getting what I want, so I'll probably always stay on the "guessing" end of the spectrum, but I'd like to get more flexible about it, and more willing to ask when I'm in situations that call for it.
Anyone else have a systematic bias, one way or another? Anybody trying to overcome it?
(relevant: The Daily Ask, a website full of examples of ways you can make requests. Some of these shock me -- I wouldn't believe it's acceptable to bargain over store prices like that. But, then again, I'm running on corrupted hardware and I wouldn't know what works and what doesn't until I make the experiment.)