Comment by harpiaharpyja
2 years ago
I personally don't understand guess culture. It seems really broken.
It seems like it should be a communication nightmare. Humans are already predisposed to confuse reality with their own stories about reality, we shouldn't encourage doing that with other people and their thoughts. It's not real. The only way to know is to ask.
And when you get to the very bottom of it, withholding communication from someone because of how you think they might react is just a way of controlling them and their experience of life in a small way.
What is being called "guess" culture here is I think very helpful when assessing people's social awareness and emotional intelligence. Of course, it doesn't work very well in heterogeneous groups of people, but it definitely does very well when people share a culture and have been brought up with common values.