"I'm beginning to find this conversation aversive, and I'm not sure why. I propose we hold off until I've figured that out."

I read this suggested line and felt a little worried. I hope rationalist culture doesn't head in that direction.

There are plenty of times when I agree a policy of frankness can be useful, but one of the risks of such a policy is that it can become an excuse to abdicate responsibility for your effect on other people.

If you tell me that you're having an aversive reaction to our conversation, but can't tell me why, it's going to stress me out, and I'm going to feel compelled to go back over our conversation to see if I can figure out what I did to cause that reaction in you. That's a non-negligible burden to dump on someone.

If, instead, you found an excuse to leave the conversation gracefully (no need for annoyed body language), you can reflect on the conversation later and decide if there is anything in particular I did to cause your aversive reaction. Maybe so, and you want to bring it up with me later. Or maybe you decide you overreacted to a comment I made, which you now believe you misinterpreted. Or maybe you decide you were just anxious about something unrelated. Overall, chances are good that you can save me a lot of stress and self-consciousness by dealing with your emotions yourself as a first pass, and making them my problem only if (upon reflection) you decide that it would be helpful to do so.

Yeah, absolutely.

Having been raised in a Guess culture and subsequently indoctrinated into a strong Ask culture, I have in the decades since evolved a strong personal version of what you're calling a Tell methodology here (what I personally think of as a high-context Ask culture).

I first noticed it explicitly in my twenties, upon hearing myself say to a departing guest "I invite you to think about how many times, in your culture, someone has to invite you to take leftovers home before you're allowed to accept, and then behave as though I'd invited you that many times." Which caused the entire room to burst into good-natured mockery, but many of them took leftovers.

My experience since has been mixed. It works well within communities where self-awareness is prized, and frequently elicits hostility elsewhere. Ask-culture people tend to appreciate it, Guess-culture people are frequently irritated or offended by my insistence on making explicit what is properly left obscured. (This makes sense to me... I, too, am irritated when people do publicly what I've been conditioned to treat as private.)

Tragedy of the commons, the shared resource being mutual trust. The first one to defect reaps the rewards of his faux signals being taken at face value ("I don't mind at all sticking around", wow, such pleasantness, many social laurels, wow), degrading the network of trust a "tell culture" relies upon.

It's like saying "wouldn't we as a society benefit overall if hidden negative externalities were internalized", yea well, first one to secretly pollute the river gets some bonus shares next quarter (wow, such money, many boni, wow)! Same with a trust culture ending in a race to the bottom.

Ya know, after thousands of years of trying it out in all kinds of environments, it seems as though almost every culture on Earth settles on "Guess", with maybe a touch of "Ask" in the more overbearing ones. A common modification to "Guess" is "Offer", where the mere mention of a possible opportunity to help out is treated as creating almost a positive obligation to notice the need and make a spontaneous offer.

From where I sit, that's pretty strong evidence that "Guess" or maybe "Offer" is more suited to collective human nature. There's a pretty heavy burden of proof on any "rationalist" who wants to change it.

It's also not so obvious that you can effectively change conventions like these by just starting in and asking others to change. If you tried your "developing trust" tactic with me, I'd probably play along to avoid conflict on one occasion, and avoid YOU after that.

This is a horrible thing to do to a Guesser. When you Ask out of turn, you're forcing them to either comply or be rude, and they resent you. When you Tell, you're imposing intimacy on them - making yourself vulnerable and demanding they do the same, and underlining exactly how a refusal would hurt you. That causes terrible guilt.

I use the tell culture with close friends, the ask culture with acquaintances and guess culture with everyone else, including family. Not on purpose - perhaps this isn't the best way of interacting with people.

I tried the tell culture when trying to get out of aversive conversations with my parents to disastrous effect. I do think that it is unfair, and a common failure mode, to use the guess culture and then get angry if the other person doesn't read you correctly.

The problem here is that, as far as I can tell, a "Tell" culture would immediately become a "Lie Ineptly" culture.

Most of the time, in my experience anyway, when you don't want to help someone it's usually for a reason you couldn't say without nuking or at least damaging the relationship. Even worse, the level of detail / emotion in the "Tell" is much higher than the straightforward "Ask" which makes the usual evasions seem hollow and requires more elaborate excuses. And most people suck at spontaneous deception, since usually the only ones of us who get any practice tend to get weeded out of normal society pretty quickly as is.

"Telling" sounds great if your goal is to quickly burn up your social capital for favors, which can be a smart move if you're not planning on seeing someone again anyway. But you can't really build a useful relationship that way; blunt honesty and bad lies aren't going to get you trust / comfort and without that you're fighting uphill for every little thing.

Front page worthy.

Relevant video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-son3EJTrU

Steven Pinker argues that things like guess culture exist so that while she knows I was "asking" to crash at her place, she doesn't know that I know that she knows that I was asking to crash at her place.

Who asks and who guesses has a lot to do with social roles.

If I'm out dancing Salsa it's usually men doing a lot more asking and on the other hand woman often being more indirect about wanting to dance. That doesn't mean that woman never ask a man to dance but usually it's the role of the man to ask.

It took me quite a while to get to the point where rejection in those situations doesn't trigger much in me anymore most of the time and there are still situations where it does. Some cases where I don't feel any pain then when I meet the girl another day and we dance I'm more held back and the intimacy between us is less even if the girl would want a bit more.

It quite easy to say: "You are completely free to say ‘no’". On the other hand it's hard to not feel rejected. When someone I consider unconfident says: "You are completely free to say ‘no’", I might translate that into that they might hurt emotionally from getting a "no" but won't actively hold it against me. Even if the don't want to hold it against me, they might still put up emotional shields that prevent further rejection from hurting.

I think the framework of Nonviolent-Communication works quite well. You are open with what you are feeling and don't judge. If the emotions are out in the open it's a lot easier to deal with them.

It seems to me that Tell culture is unstable: if there is no social cost for stating strong preferences, people will be incentivized to overstate their preferences, and it will de facto reduce to Ask culture. If stating strong preferences is costly, people will be incentivized to undrestate their preferences, and you'll end up with Guess culture.

I use Tell a lot and also think it superior if applied mutually but I also find that it has the following disadvantages:

• It has the highest cost on the Teller - you just have to tell more than in the other cases.

• The teller has the risk of telling things that can be used against him (think not of blackmail but rather small passed opportunities due to gossip etc.).

• Tell and Ask can also run into trouble: Tell: Ask: "Come to the point. What do you want? So I can say yes or no."

I think we have to identify in which environment each of those methods work best and use the appropriate strategy. That would be rational. Some thoughts:

• Tell is expensive (on both parties, but more on the teller) but allows quick establishment of rapport. It is suitable if initial trust has been established or can be assumed (e.g. in a date or in a rationalists meetup).

• Ask is cheap and efficient but puts a burden on longer relationships (any kind). Use it in highly dynamic situations or if you are under time or ressource constraints aka stress. Do not use it for longer time spans.

• Guess is extremely cheap on the receiver end but expensive on the teller. It is inefficient in situations where Ask wins but it is efficient where rules and norms are many and well-known as it minimizes conflict and overall cost. Use it for long term cooperation.

Of course it is probably hard to master all of these together.

EDIT: typos

Crucial Conversations promotes what you're calling Tell Culture, and is a useful primer for learning more techniques of how to do this, and various pitfalls that you can run into if you don't use this.

I'm mostly solitary, but even I've used these patterns before. It seems to correspond roughly to who has the power in a given conversation.

Tell:

Walter: I want to buy a pizza. It should have bread and cheese and pepperoni on it. Bring it to Address, and I'll give the delivery minion its cost, plus a tip if it is within time X.

Pizza Human: Alright.

Ask:

Walter: Am I in your way, would you like to use this exercise machine?

Gym Human: No, I'm waiting for a friend.

Guess:

Walter: Despite it being only 3 o'clock, many people have gone home for the day on this, the day we set aside to celebrate Martin Luthor King.

Boss Human: You may leave early.

For the record, I mostly regret posting this.

This seems a close relative to a culture clash I've experienced, which I'll call Pull vs. Push. It is well exemplified by how the culture handles passing food at the table. Note that the obvious ease of the task pretty much eliminates the guess/ask/tell distinction: "I'm out of rice", "Could you please pass the rice", and "I am out of rice and would like more" are all functionally identical.

I grew up in a Pull household, where, when you're out of something on your plate and want more of it, you ask for it. But my girlfriend's ... (read more)

A lot of the comments are ignoring the fact that this game has multiple equilibria. Saying "humans evolved into X, so therefore there must be a logic to X" makes as much sense as saying "Americans drive on the right side of the road, so therefore there must be a logic to using the right side of the road."

Also, when traveling outside the monastery, our first priority should be to figure out how the other people drive.

Here's a new strategy.

Use guess culture as a default. Use guess tricks to figure out whether other communicator speaks Ask. Use Ask tricks to figure out whether communicator speaks Tell.

Guess culture has, I think, been the standard way for humans to hume for many thousands of years. My inclination is to imagine that, therefore, it's probably optimal, at least for typical people.

Am I missing something? Is there some factor that is pushing rules of social etiquette in a bad direction throughout human history?