Richard Nisbett and Dov Cohen argued in a classic study that (US) Southern politeness is a reaction to high levels of aggression:

"(The authors also theorize that Southern politeness could be a response to Southern aggression—if Southerners are more likely to take offense than other regional cultures, it follows they would be less likely to give offense, for safety’s sake.)"

http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/The-312/July-2012/American-Violence-and-Southern-Culture/

That seems to be very much in line with your line of thinking. According to this line of reasoning, "honour" cultures in which people are likely to take offence easily, should generally be more polite.

They made two kinds of experiments that seems to support this line of thinking. In the first, they compared how Southern and Northern young males reacted if you bumped in to them in a conspicuous fashio. Unsurprisingly, the Southerners got more angry. In the second experiment, the experimenters' collaborators nearly bumped into Southern and Northern young males - in which case the Southerners would be more likely to go out of way to avoid bumping. This makes sense - you should be more careful to avoid bumping into people in a culture where people are more likely to be upset, one would think.

(I can't find these experiments now though, but it is in line with the quote above.)

So the question is a bit complicated. At the same time, it was interesting to read this very useful comment in the wait vs interrupt comment thread, on French (interrupt) vs American (wait) culture:

"Americans often expressed surprise in my presence at the fact that French people, “who claim to be very big on manners,” are themselves so “rude”:"

http://lesswrong.com/lw/j5n/wait_vs_interrupt_culture/a3c2

What the Americans were thinking of was that the French were not good at listening and frequently interrupted the speaker. At the same time, my guess is that French culture is generally more aggressive - it is more of an "honour" culture - than the US is. In any case, I know for a fact that French culture is more aggressive than my own, Swedish, culture, and Swedes are likely to make similar comments as Americans to this kind of behaviour.

So it seems to me that the whole issue of politeness is quite complicated - there are several different aspects of politeness. I'm thinking many traditional "honour" cultures focus heavily on adherence to some polite "rituals" - titles, never bump into anyone, always pay the bill at restaurants, etc; really salient things - whereas more modern cultures don't focus on that. Swedes don't use titles at all, for instance. On the other hand, Swedish traffic, conversational style, etc, are very polite. Perhaps it reflects the fact that Protestantism (Sweden is a Protestant country, as is the US to a large extent) focuses less on rituals than most other religions (e.g. Catholicism). (I realize that this might sound a bit prejudiced; sorry about that.)

I also think there might be several different reasons for why you could end up a guesser or asker. One reason might why you end up as a guesser is that you know that people around you are very easily offended. In this case, guessing is driven by fear. But it might also be that you are a guesser because you're considerate - you don't want to hurt other people, and you know that if you're not trying to put yourself in the other person's shoes and imagine what they're thinking, there is a risk that might happen when you start asking them things.

Conversely, you might end up an asker because you're just unusuall candid. But there is also another kind of asker - the pushy domineering types. Their questions aren't really questions but a kind of semi-orders. Now my guess is that the latter kind of askers are much more common than people in this thread seem to think. Also, because they're so common, people are likely to interpret the first kind of askers as being domineering, even though that wasn't their intention. This is a fact, and something that people who wish our culture to be more candid and open will have to take into account. They cannot blame the interpreter if they're interpreted in this way, since that's the normal interpretation of asky behaviour in our culture. Perhaps the "tell" proposal is an attempt to deal with this fact, but I'm not sure I think it's very succesful.

In any case, it would be interesting to hear or read more empirical stuff on this question. The Pinker video and the quote on French vs American conversational styles were really good. I really think this is the way to go since otherwise there is a risk that we just end up trading anecdotes and prejucided images of ask/guess culture with each other.