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jkaufman comments on Ask and Guess - Less Wrong Discussion
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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 yadda yadda" with the implicit expectation is that someone will correct me if I'm wrong. In "Guess" culture this sort of thing carries the equally implicit expectation that nobody will correct me. Here both groups are guessing, but they guess differently.
"Guess" culture also has an implicit expectation in some cases that you do ask, but that an honest answer is not actually permitted... the answer is constrained by the social rules. For example, growing up if a guest says "Well, we should get going." the host is obligated to reply "Oh, but we're having such a good time!" and none of that actually lets you know whether the guest is still welcome or not (or, indeed, whether the guest has any desire to stay or go). (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?")
And "Guess" culture has all kinds of rules for how you communicate to someone exactly what it is you want them to do without being asked.
In situations where I suspect multiple people want something but will also all politely say "no, you take it" if asked explicitly I've tried something like "how many ways should we split this piece of cake?" This makes it clear you expect multiple people to indicate they want some, releasing them of some of the politeness burden of hiding their preferences. Chicken, at least chicken on the bone, is indivisible, so this wouldn't work as well here.
That's interesting... what kind of results do you get? I think my Guess-culture roots would insist that the proper response to that question is "oh, I'm fine, no cake for me," much as it is to "would you like the last piece?" but I can see how others might react differently, even given the same upbringing.
I've only tried it maybe twice, but I remember it working. As in, I ended up splitting the last piece with multiple people. But maybe I just ended up splitting with the askier people while the guessier people stayed quiet and thought we were being pushy?
(nods) That makes sense. And sure, that's a possible failure mode.
From field experience as a Korean-American and thus someone closer in many situations to Ask, (or even TELL!) I have found a lot of success on just pretending to be endearingly forthright: making a big show of asking all the other people whether they want the last dumpling a couple of times, asking whether they're sure, etc. The fact that my uncle, my mother, and I are similar in this and that they will often take me up on this to split/outright take the dumpling, showing clearly that I am, indeed, serious about my ask, helps too.