One aspect of that which is interesting is that what the article calls "Guess culture" is fundamentally exclusionary. If you aren't initiated into how the signalling system works by an insider or in a position of sufficient stability to fail socially many times there isn't a good way to break in. That gives the culture a lot of interesting properties that promote its ability to identify and coordinate against out-groups (which to the people involved would manifest as a "these barbarians just don't know how to be polite and we can't work with them"). One of those adaptions that is a bit crazy in the micro (could just ask for what they want, geeze) but makes a lot of sense in the macro.
I found this 10+ years ago, and it was one of the most important things I ever read. As a consummate Guesser, it reframed my perspective completely. I started to be much happier and understanding with Askers.
I also realized how frustrating, as a Guesser, I could be to Askers, and shifted more toward being clear about what I want or need.
My family is almost 100% Asker. When I got to college, I drove Guessers nuts. They thought I was so selfish and would blow up at me (from my perspective) out of nowhere.
"No" is always a perfectly fine and polite answer from my perspective
It's a shame more people don't assume good faith so we can have more direct and honest communication with each other.
Guessers don't believe Askers are asking in bad faith at all. If Guessers did believe that, it would be way easier for them to say no to Askers. It's precisely because the Guesser believes in the sincerity of the request that it becomes painful to deny it.
Indeed. It's the immediate assumption that since you're asking me, it must be important to you - otherwise you wouldn't be asking in the first place.
I want to be the kind of person that helps others where it matters, and here you are, asking, thus proving it matters. Refusing becomes really uncomfortable, so I'd rather go out of my way to make it possible for me to agree, or failing that, to help your underlying need as much as I can.
I realize now this is a form of typical mind fallacy - I wouldn't ask you for something if it wasn't really fucking important or I had any other option available, therefore I naturally assume that your act of asking already proves the request is very important to you.
I guess I just learned I'm a Guesser :).
Here is my personal observation. Humans start by default as “Askers,” but society shapes them into either the “Askers” or “Guessers.” Kids don’t guess, they ask.
I have also observed that Eastern countries/regions are generally “Guessers,” while Westerners are generally “Askers.”
Growing up as an introvert, I remember many times when my guardians (uncles, aunties, grandparents, and parents) would interpret things differently than I thought they were. “My friend’s mom told me to come, play, and eat at their place today.” “No, they don’t. You need to come back after a while, not spend the whole day there.”
I learnt a lot of Guesses in school and social settings: Yes, that meant No, and Nos that were weirdly Yes, etc.
When I started working in the early 2000s, I worked with almost all US (and some UK and Australians) Companies and customers, from teachers and physicians to founders and businesspeople. Things were straightforward, “cut to the chase”, “get to the point real fast”, and the like.
Eventually, I have also worked with many Indian companies and teams. We are mostly Guessers. My colleagues and bosses have called me aside to explain the interpretation of quite a few interactions, which I thought I was doing the right thing, but I should not have (even when the clients agreed). I’ve also worked with the Japanese, and they were all Guessers to a degree, and I would love to, hopefully, take the time and effort to learn the culture a lot more.
I found a good discussion that I keep referring to on Jean Hsu's blog: https://jeanhsu.substack.com/p/ask-vs-guess-culture and https://jeanhsu.substack.com/p/bridging-the-ask-vs-guess-cul...
It's been quite illuminating for people in multicultural teams...
Did you see the HN comments for Jean Hsu's 1st article?[1] Did any stand out?
Discussed (in a singleton sort of way) at the time:
Askers vs. Guessers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1956778 - Dec 2010 (1 comment)
Edit: plus this!
Ask vs. Guess Culture - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37176703 - Aug 2023 (479 comments)
A 2023 submission of a similar article received 481 comments.[1]
Good catch—added. Thanks!
I think it requires emotional intelligence to know if you should ask or guess.
I've encountered a few people that just won't stop asking for unreasonable things, and it destroys the relationship very quickly, because they just won't take no for an answer. I also have one child that I used to have to firmly say "stop asking for things" once it would get out of hand.
But those are extremes in ask vs guess.
I am timid: I conduct myself like a Guesser, and treat others' requests as though they are Askers.
I don't necessarily think it is how you were brought up, and probably more to do with personality. As an introvert, I don't have the talk time to continuously put out feelers, I just gotta ask.
Interesting, I feel the opposite. I always tend to associate askers and extroverts, and feel us introverts are tired all the time because of all the guessing going on during human interactions.
But of course, your opposite takeaway also makes sense!
I'm going out on a limb and say that pretty much all human cultures are guess cultures. What if every woman was sexually propositioned thousands of times per day? Maybe I should ask every person I ever see if they'll give me $1,000, maybe some will say yes. And then I'll expand my horizons, since my normal day routine doesn't take me by enough potential benefactors. Spam is essentially an ask-culture failure.
Indeed. Most of human social interactions, throughout a lifetime, are non-verbal. That does not mean it's the most efficient or socially expedient way to communicate. I would say that it has a larger domain of communication failure states than direct questioning. Perhaps that's part of why language has persisted and supersedes non-verbal communication in most social domains.
As mentioned in the article, it's a spectrum, not a dichotomy. What you're describing seems to be on the very extreme end of ask culture.
This is really interesting to me because I don’t think I fall into either category, but I can easily place a majority of people in my life into these two categories pretty solidly.
Edit: this whole theory seems to come from some internet forum comment! I know a lot of people here are seduced (I was a bit too) but basing your social interactions and how you see others and yourself on this stuff might not be the best thing to do!
Original comment below for posterity and because there are answers.
----
I'm not sure this stuff is really that helpful. You might be tempted to put people into these categories, but you might have a somewhat caricatural and also wrong image of both which could worsen interactions.
By the way, that article doesn't cite any studies!
It's probably helpful to know people are more or less at ease asking direct questions or saying no or receiving a no, but it's all scales and subtleties. It could also depend on the mood, or even who one interacts with or on the specific topic).
The article touches this a bit (the "not black and white" paragraph).
We human beings love categories but categories of people are often traps. It's even more tempting when it's easy to identity to one of the depicted groups!
I wonder if this asker-guesser thing is in the same pseudoscience territory as the MBTI.
In the end, I suppose there's no good way around getting to know someone and paying attention for good interactions.
This was discussed on HN in 2023 . The whole "high context v. low context" model doesn't have scientific backing.[0]
> The model of high-context and low-context cultures offers a popular framework in intercultural communication studies but has been criticized as lacking empirical validation
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-context_and_low-context_c...
Not that helpful?
Yes, it is not a black or white thing, more a spectrum. But for many people, including me, just naming the categories is very clarifying, even eye opening, akin to beginning to know an alien civilization. It allows you to consider a different point of view, a way of interacting, taking decisions and actions very different to what you are used to.
The closest, actually academically studied concept that I know of is that of high versus low context cultures: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-context_and_low-context_c...
> The model of high-context and low-context cultures offers a popular framework in intercultural communication studies but has been criticized as lacking empirical validation.
Damnit, that seemed interesting! Thanks for sharing though, I'll still read about this.
Indeed, I personally take all this stuff not as scientifically merited theory, but just as some sort of artistic social commentary that at least has enough truthiness to be interesting/helpful. Sometimes the illusion of control and understanding is all you need in order to feel more secure in your social interactions, benefiting everyone as long as you don't fly off the handle with pseudoscience.
Not to spam, but the 2023 HN discussion brought up the excerpt from the first paragraph on Wikipedia:
> The model of high-context and low-context cultures offers a popular framework in intercultural communication studies but has been criticized as lacking empirical validation.
The dichotomy feels true enough even if the data is fuzzy.
>By the way, that article doesn't cite any studies!
That's fine. I think we need to get away a little bit from the implication that any thought not connected to studies or statistics makes it borderline worthless. We need to lean a little bit more toward humanism ("we" as in ostensibly thoughtful people - the average person definitely needs to lean a little bit more toward studies/statistics).
Thought not well grounded in objective evidence has a place, both on matters that are not subject to empirical inquiry and in preliminary speculation about matters that are.
But it also runs the risk of building palaces of elaborate BS with no relation to reality and pure garbage filler content, like article presenting three different non-evidence-based ideas of how a dichotomy itself not grounded in evidence supposedly plays out in reality, with no effort to do look at any evidence or do any analysis as to whether any of them or the underlying dichotomy is connected to reality.
Humanity / humanism and science aren't opposed.
Wrong social models can have bad human implications. It seems to me that being careful with these models and requiring rigor is the humanist thing to do.
Go ahead and present hypotheses, that can be very interesting, just don't present them as facts.
(Now maybe this asker-guesser thing is indeed studied, I don't know)
> Go ahead and present hypotheses, that can be very interesting, just don't present them as facts.
The article called it a provocative opinion described in a comment which became a meme.
Indeed! I didn't remember this (yes, I had already read that article a long time ago, I only scanned it quickly this time).
At least the article is honest with its source.
Thanks for emphasizing this.
> ("we" as in ostensibly thoughtful people - the average person definitely needs to lean a little bit more toward studies/statistics).
I'm not sure what you're getting at here by suggesting an elite class of people above the "average person" who do not require objective evidence. That's not really aligned with the core tenets of humanism.
Labelling people this way is a blunt instrument.
It seems like the introvert/extrovert split, where few people are near the poles and there's a lot more going on in the middle.
E.g. I might check if someone has weekend plans before asking if I can stay with them. Or, I might ask outright, but specify it's not important, I just want to catch up, and the nearby hotel looks nice.
These seem like important differences even though they're both in the middle of ask and guess.
Yes, I don't support labelling people as one or the other, but defining and articulating the two kinds of behaviors and expectations relative to each other is incredibly useful for communication and understanding.
If these behavioral models are indeed good and close enough to the reality. But that whole stuff comes from some internet comment!
I agree it's better to label behaviors or situations than people.
But it is useful if you apply that labeling to yourself. It also helps with empathy.
Labelling can be a shortcut around empathy. Empathy is the real deal.
It’s hard to imagine what a guesser is feeling if you don’t understand the differences between their expectations and yours as an asker, and vice versa.
You are presupposing that the internet forum comment on which all this is based has correctly modelled the world and that this asker-guesser thing is indeed real.
Usually it takes one or ideally several studies, with large groups of people, with a solid hypothesis and some strong, rigorous protocol.
Until then, it's not worthless, but it's at best an inspiration.
Social stuff is rarely that easy, seducing, cute, with two clear, beautiful categories of people.
All models are wrong. Some are useful.
It makes sense to judge models by how useful they're in some situation, and compare them by usefulness in context[0]. It doesn't make sense to ask which is right, because they're all wrong.
Here, at least for me, but I guess(!) many other HNers, the "Askers vs. Guessers" model is very useful.
Would some RCT studies be nice? Sure. I don't expect them to prove the model to be accurate. But it doesn't have to be, that's not the point. Just pointing out that there's some variability between people along these lines is very useful.
Diverse modes loosely held, eh?
--
[0] - Consider Newtonian vs. relativistic motion. The latter is more accurate and gets you better results at large scales - but in almost all circumstances in life (up to and including landing a probe on the Moon, or landing a shell in someone's back yard), the Newtonian model is much simpler and therefore much more useful.
Indeed. There is likely more of a spectrum. That said, I think applying the label to a given scenario, or a person's tendencies can be useful.
I agree, but the fundamental problem is a blunt one to begin with. It should not be a way to label people, but decisions.
Guess culture is playing defense against the outcrowd. Ask culture is playing offense to achieve higher-level thinking and goals.
This isn't always a deliberate thing. Still, everyone has to pick their plays with every interaction they have.
Why is it "guesser" rather than, say, "hinter"?
I guess it's because they expect others to operate at the same level so they will expect to guess what others want.
But I agree with you, it should switch to align from the perspective of the person wanting something.
I've also seen responses saying that the framing of "ask" culture makes it sound as though it's all "ask" and no "tell", which is counterproductive.
> Your boss, asking for a project to be finished early, may be an overdemanding boor – or just an Asker, who's assuming you might decline.
I don't pay for the Atlantic and thus am limited by paywall, but this ignores power dynamics.
Power dynamics are definitely a factor. There have been many scandals around people in power asking subordinates to sleep with them, and it appears that the majority of the (Anglo) public now considers this morally wrong.
Only if you’re a Guesser ;-)
Seriously though, it depends on the boss and the relationship you have with them. It can really fall into either camp and it might even be situational with the same person!
I would say that, generally, I would prefer to be direct in these relationships unless you both know each other really well. It does make things easier for all involved.
> Seriously though, it depends on the boss and the relationship you have with them.
Those are the power dynamics the GP is referring to.
These both work for me (copied from the top):
https://web.archive.org/web/20250831074424/https://www.theat...
It’s conventional around here to share these sites. But they are basically unauthorized copies of the articles, right?
IMO it is totally fair and fine to just respond to the part of the discussion that the publication decided to make publicly available.
> IMO it is totally fair and fine to just respond to the part of the discussion that the publication decided to make publicly available.
This wastes the time of people who read the article.
The publicly accessible article is the article, it isn’t the reader’s fault that the publisher decided to only make a little bit of it accessible to us.
> The publicly accessible article is the article
No.
> it isn’t the reader’s fault that the publisher decided to only make a little bit of it accessible to us.
It is a commenter's fault if they comment on an article they did not read.
You can read the original forum discussion that inspired this article: https://ask.metafilter.com/55153/Whats-the-middle-ground-bet...
a link to the non-paywalled article is at the top of the hn post