Comment by keiferski

I feel like this should be directly correlated with how much "tradition" plays a role in local culture. The more tradition, the more you're expected to "just get it" and guess the other person's thoughts via cultural context. The less tradition, the less rules there are to follow, and therefore the less connection you have to the other person.

An extreme example being: the interactions between two foreign cultures are (or at least ought to be) almost entirely ask-based, as they have no prior understanding of how the reciprocal cultures work.