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.
It's a matter of different protocols, not exclusivity. An asker going into a guesser culture is like a client that doesn't respect congestion backoff; the guesser protocol is meant to ensure fairness for clients.
The way to deal with it is having some kind of handshake that indicates what protocol is being used.
> An asker going into a guesser culture is like a client that doesn't respect congestion backoff; the guesser protocol is meant to ensure fairness for clients.
The metaphor might be a bit strained, because a congestion protocol is fundamentally determining the system state by testing it with an optimistic request for what the client wants then responding based on the server answer or lack thereof. Which is to say, the typical asker strategy.
Having a protocol at all might be more of a guesser thing though - good luck getting to index.html by sending "Hey my server friend can I have a copy of index.html pls?" to port 80 in with netcat. Very clear request, unlikely to get much consideration by nginx even if it is willing to hand over the page.
And, importantly, there isn't one single "guess culture"; there are a myriad of different micro-cultures with their own local signals and codes for subtly communicating the information that isn't spelled out in speech.
So even if you are a consummate Guesser, and have been one all your life, if you move across the country (or even just across town!) and find yourself in a group with a different set of Guessers, you may be nearly as badly off as if you were an Asker in that subculture.
As usual, if both sides exist, it's because they both provide benefits. The guessers' benefits are just not obvious at first glance.
Taleb has a nice bit on that, explaining that if something exists for long, it must have enduring beneficial properties, and if you think it's stupid, you are the one having a blind spot.
Dawkins led to the same conclusion: stuff that works stays and multiplies. You may not like it, but nature doesn't care what you think.
It's true for entities, systems, traits, concepts...
Everyone mocks Karens, until your flight is delayed and that insufferable lady tires up the staff so much that everyone gets compensation.
I dislike lying but it works, and our entire society is based on it (but we call it advertising).
Don't like mysandry? Don't understand why nature didn't select out ugly people? Think circumcision is dumb?
All those things give some advantages in some context, to such an extend it still prospers today.
In fact, several things can be true. Something can be alienating, and yet give enough benefits that it stays around.
A huge number of things are immoral, create suffering, confusion, destruction, even to the practitioner themselves, and yet are still here because they bring something to the table that is just sufficient to justify their existence.
See your friend making yet again a terrible love choice, getting pregnant, and stuck with a baby and no father? From a natural selection standpoint, it could very well be a super successful strategy for both parties. The universe doesn't optimize for our happiness or morality.
Enduring survival properties aren't the same as enduring beneficial properties. Feudalism and slavery stuck around for quite a long time and were mostly forced out against their will.
I've done a lifetime of code review over the last decade. Let me tell you, the number times I have asked what I assumed were simple yes/no questions like "Would it make sense to do X?" or even "Why did we do it this way?" in cases where I'm looking for a discussion and it's been taken as a call to action is just wild.
They're competent developers, I just want to understand the code and the context behind it. I want to understand what their thoughts were while building it. Yet so many times a simple question like "Why X and not Y?" results in the person whose code I am reviewing going ahead and refactoring the entire PR without return comment, or in rare cases getting angry with the question. We actually had a DBA with a history of flying off the handle over simple questions but from what I've heard this is common among DBAs? He eventually got let go over it.
If I wanted you to change it, I would have said so. My question is not wrapped up in insinuation or hidden intent. It's a question I want the answer to. There are no layers to the meaning. I basically never mean anything I do not explicitly say.
I have gotten so frustrated with this that I have started specifying "You can say no", "I'm just trying to understand the thought process", or "I'm just curious, no need to change it". Things I still feel like I shouldn't have to tell another person with an engineering mindset, especially someone with many years of experience.
The “why did we do X and not Y?” style of question is a commonly used passive aggressive crutch to tell someone to do Y instead, while attempting to not look mean/harsh. Its the same reason people use “we” in the first place.
You may not be using it this way but because many others are that’s how it’ll typically be interpreted
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
Thank you for reposting this, OP. I have been (w)racking my brain trying to find this article and used HN search dozens of times. I couldn't remember what the title was, or the specific terms "ask" and "guess", so it was impossible to find.
This is one of the chief cultural differences between Southern and Northern culture.
Southerners (not transplants) will "ask" without imposition: they "ask" when giving, and "guess" when receiving.
Any inversion of these norms is an affront to "Southern hospitality" and will be met with the equivalent "Bless Your Heart".
Ask what you can do for someone, never what you can have. Assume someone will do right by you (you should never have to ask), and if they don't - people say not so nice things about those folks.
I need to articulate this better when it's not 4 AM, but it's an almost perfect descriptor of the cultural differences.
I'm pretty sure Japanese are guessers (would love to hear counter examples)
To them, the etiquette is that if you ask you've put the other person in a bind. Even if they want to say no, they feel pressure to say yes. You putting then in that situation is considered bad. So, don't ask, at least not directly. You can say "Guess what, I'll be in town next week!" and see if out of the blue they offer a place to stay. But even then there is subtly of reading between the lines, of do they actually want you to stay or are they just being polite but hope you'll read between the lines and not take them up on the offer. Generally you're supposed to refuse "Naw, I couldn't possibly stay and get in your way" and then they can come back and say "No really, it'd be great" if they really want you to stay and you might have to do this dance once or twice more to really verify it's ok.
The usual dichotomy / terminology for this stuff as it relates to painting national and business cultures with broad brushes is "high context" versus "low context". In a high context culture like Japan people would be expected to code switch between Asking and Guessing behaviors depending on their audience, relative status, social rapport, etc.
I think in Japan the culture is almost 100% Guessing.
I read this anecdote online about a US business dealing with Japanese partners (clients?). There's an item they'd like to discuss, in their regular meeting they bring it up, and the Japanese said "Hmm, this is possible. Let's discuss it next meeting.". Next meeting, they ask again, and the reply was the same. It took them a few rounds to realize that the actual (never uttered) answer is "No, this isn't possible."...
I think there is a couple of interesting things. First, it's still somewhat orthogonal to the High context versus Low context cultures (see the Culture Map), as in you can have people with more ask versus guess culture in either communication contexts from my observations (at least among some low to mid context cultures, I don't have a lot of experience with very high context cultures).
Another way to think about it is that it's a lot more local than the broader culture of a country, down to the family level, and you can see this in the US as many commenters have reported where they grew up in various different places in the ask vs guess spectrum.
Finally, the US work environment is generally very "Ask"-leaning, in particular in Silicon Valley and it can take a significant amount of time to recognize where you have been raised on this spectrum versus what is required of you to be effective at work.
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 don't think that's the case; I have a son who has been a "Guesser" from a fairly young age, despite our family encouraging people to be "Askers" all of his siblings are "Askers" and can't understand why he won't ask for things that he wants.
For completeness sake, I should point out that most of our kids (including this one) are adopted so it's not impossible that there could be a genetic predisposition to being an asker or guesser.
I think this is the correct dichotomy for the difference in cultures and better explains the Guesser vs Asker thing. High context cultures (Asia, South America, Mediterranean) tend to be Guessers because they already have the context and that context is the more important part of their communication. In low context cultures (Northern European, Russia, US) communication is more direct and words are more important than non-verbal cues.
I'm not that autistic but I simply can't deal with Guessers. The idea that I have to play some kind of 4D chess game to figure out what I am and am not allowed to ask or do makes me extremely stressed out. How am I supposed to map out the wishes and expectations and goals of everybody involved? Isn't that, in fact, borderline rude? What if I guess wrong? Everybody loses when that happens and it happens all the time.
Growing up in the east of the Netherlands made this worse; the Dutch are widely known as rude and direct (ie Askers), but in the rural east this is very much not the case. Everything there runs on a mixture of "what will the neighbours think" and "what will people expect me to do?" and it's just maddening. Fortunately I was sufficiently tone deaf as a youth to not notice when I was getting it wrong, and when I grew old enough to figure that out I moved to places where you can just ask stuff. It's nuts that such a small country can have such a widely varying cultural differences but it's very real.
I live in the south now and here I can ask everybody everything and people won't feel bad for saying no. It's lovely.
I also figured out that my mom (a total Guesser like everybody in my family) loves me even if I get this wrong! So I just began to treat her like an Asker and verrry explicitly spell out that it's totally fine to say no, no really it is, I'm not asking for a favour, I just want to know what you want, really mom it's true. It stresses her out! The idea of being asked point blank for her personal, disregard-other-people preference is just entirely outside her normal way of thinking. She has to do hard effort to disregard other people's wishes, it's just all totally mixed together in her brain. I know it's not nice of me, but the alternative is that we (my wife and I) keep getting it wrong and accidentally visit too often or too little or invite them to parties they don't want to go to and so on.
So yeah, protip for askers, treat guessers who love you as askers. They'll forgive you for it and everything else becomes easier.
That makes sense if it's in moderation. An overzealous asker can disproportionately eat up people's time. Context as to why you're asking helps set priorities.
Yeah ofc. I mean as someone who grew up in Guesser Land and got taught that it’s important to be able to read people’s minds, discovering that I can just, you know, ask, felt like a superpower. I don’t think I’m overdoing it.
I'm born Guesser but evolved into an Asker. However, it depended on whether I was the requester or not; if I wanted to invite someone, I would try to avoid putting them in a position where they had to say "no". However, I didn't mind saying "no" myself.
I would argue with other people that it's impolite to put them in such a position as they may not like to decline.
After discussing it openly with friends and family, I realized that it was okay to say no and people wouldn't mind. This changed me into an asker.
What's funny is that my parents were askers. I guess being introverted made me more of a guesser initially.
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.
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!
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.
I can think of birthdays when even the most diehard asker turns into a guesser - they would never go out of their way and ask to be coddled on their birthday but still don't mind bit of a fuss being made on their behalf.
... You haven't met Colombians. It could be just my extended family or it could be cultural; they love celebrating birthdays, including your birthday and theirs, and will actively and overtly tell you what they expect. In a strange way they're asking, it's a negotiation of wants and needs.
It could be just between family. I should ask my wife what's the go.
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.
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.
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.
> but basing your social interactions and how you see others and yourself on this stuff might not be the best thing to do!
Why not? Just knowing that there is such different ways of thinking is useful especially when interacting with people.
I was a guesser until maybe 2 of 3 years ago until I talked about it with friends and family and I learned just today that it was called "asker" and "guesser".
If you spend time with people from different cultures, there clearly is a stark divide in behavior. Even inside said culture there might be situations in which someone becomes an asker.
Therefore this framework is good to understand how people think socially and have a better understanding towards one another. Some people may think you are rude to ask–or an idiot not to–and you will probably lose relationships if you don't realize it.
> Just knowing that there is such different ways of thinking is useful
We agree. People have different ways of thinking and interacting. Maybe that asker-vs-guesser thing made you / others realize that (and that's good! Possibly it made me realize that too, although having a flatmate years before had already done the trick tbh), but we didn't need it to know this.
> there clearly is a stark divide in behavior
How are you sure it's not confirmation bias [1]? When you have a hammer, everything looks like nails. When you have an asker-guesser theory, everybody look like askers and guessers, including yourself.
Odds are it is most likely, in fact, confirmation bias, since that theory was found to be unsubstantiated and underdeveloped, and since this is a sexy topic, it's hard to believe nobody tried to validate it rigorously (and the way scientific publishing is currently organized sadly doesn't encourage publishing negative results).
> Why not?
Because apparently, from what we actually know (robust, established knowledge), there's no good reason to think the following is actually true, even if it strongly feels like it for a host of reasons, which is my whole concern:
> this framework is good to understand how people think socially and have a better understanding towards one another
It's too easy to pick two half convincing categories that feel somewhat opposite and have the feeling that these two categories provide insight on how people work. Such theories are sugar for the brain.
I'd be most happy to be proven wrong in the future though! In the meantime, I'll pick cautiousness.
> 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.
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
>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.
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)
> ("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.
I think this has a lot of truth to it, but I think it is ultimately an oversimplification or even a false dichotomy.
I was in a relationship that was constantly strained by something similar to this. My partner would never ask for help with anything and would just get frustrated when I didn't pick up on her struggling and jump in to help. Conversely, I only ask for help when I really need it but she would see me struggling and jump in, which would annoy me because I didn't ask for help.
But I'm not an asker in the sense of this article. I would never randomly ask someone to stay at someone's house, for example. This strikes me as like a child constantly testing their boundaries. I know where the boundaries are.
But, there is still some truth to it. I've often found that non-native speakers in my country tend to be askers. This can come across as quite shocking and lead one to believe, as I had, that this is actually part of their culture. But I have another theory: to be successful as a non-native you have to be an asker, because you will find it difficult or impossible to be a guesser. So it's a survivorship bias, essentially.
By the title I also thought this was going to be about another phenomenon: when given a task, some people will continue to ask for confirmation until they're confident they get it, while others will just "fill in the blanks" and deliver something, even if it's wrong. LLMs, of course, being the ultimate "guesser" in this sense.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Just ask, man!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbGw-fnlf1Q
It's a matter of different protocols, not exclusivity. An asker going into a guesser culture is like a client that doesn't respect congestion backoff; the guesser protocol is meant to ensure fairness for clients.
The way to deal with it is having some kind of handshake that indicates what protocol is being used.
Only on HN do we explain social interactions using network protocol analogies, and not the other way around!
> An asker going into a guesser culture is like a client that doesn't respect congestion backoff; the guesser protocol is meant to ensure fairness for clients.
The metaphor might be a bit strained, because a congestion protocol is fundamentally determining the system state by testing it with an optimistic request for what the client wants then responding based on the server answer or lack thereof. Which is to say, the typical asker strategy.
Having a protocol at all might be more of a guesser thing though - good luck getting to index.html by sending "Hey my server friend can I have a copy of index.html pls?" to port 80 in with netcat. Very clear request, unlikely to get much consideration by nginx even if it is willing to hand over the page.
Any type of culture is "fundamentally" exclusionary if you don't know how it works. Let me guess which culture you're from :)
And, importantly, there isn't one single "guess culture"; there are a myriad of different micro-cultures with their own local signals and codes for subtly communicating the information that isn't spelled out in speech.
So even if you are a consummate Guesser, and have been one all your life, if you move across the country (or even just across town!) and find yourself in a group with a different set of Guessers, you may be nearly as badly off as if you were an Asker in that subculture.
As usual, if both sides exist, it's because they both provide benefits. The guessers' benefits are just not obvious at first glance.
Taleb has a nice bit on that, explaining that if something exists for long, it must have enduring beneficial properties, and if you think it's stupid, you are the one having a blind spot.
Dawkins led to the same conclusion: stuff that works stays and multiplies. You may not like it, but nature doesn't care what you think.
It's true for entities, systems, traits, concepts...
Everyone mocks Karens, until your flight is delayed and that insufferable lady tires up the staff so much that everyone gets compensation.
I dislike lying but it works, and our entire society is based on it (but we call it advertising).
Don't like mysandry? Don't understand why nature didn't select out ugly people? Think circumcision is dumb?
All those things give some advantages in some context, to such an extend it still prospers today.
In fact, several things can be true. Something can be alienating, and yet give enough benefits that it stays around.
A huge number of things are immoral, create suffering, confusion, destruction, even to the practitioner themselves, and yet are still here because they bring something to the table that is just sufficient to justify their existence.
See your friend making yet again a terrible love choice, getting pregnant, and stuck with a baby and no father? From a natural selection standpoint, it could very well be a super successful strategy for both parties. The universe doesn't optimize for our happiness or morality.
Enduring survival properties aren't the same as enduring beneficial properties. Feudalism and slavery stuck around for quite a long time and were mostly forced out against their will.
Oh, hmm... I must be an asker.
I've done a lifetime of code review over the last decade. Let me tell you, the number times I have asked what I assumed were simple yes/no questions like "Would it make sense to do X?" or even "Why did we do it this way?" in cases where I'm looking for a discussion and it's been taken as a call to action is just wild.
They're competent developers, I just want to understand the code and the context behind it. I want to understand what their thoughts were while building it. Yet so many times a simple question like "Why X and not Y?" results in the person whose code I am reviewing going ahead and refactoring the entire PR without return comment, or in rare cases getting angry with the question. We actually had a DBA with a history of flying off the handle over simple questions but from what I've heard this is common among DBAs? He eventually got let go over it.
If I wanted you to change it, I would have said so. My question is not wrapped up in insinuation or hidden intent. It's a question I want the answer to. There are no layers to the meaning. I basically never mean anything I do not explicitly say.
I have gotten so frustrated with this that I have started specifying "You can say no", "I'm just trying to understand the thought process", or "I'm just curious, no need to change it". Things I still feel like I shouldn't have to tell another person with an engineering mindset, especially someone with many years of experience.
The “why did we do X and not Y?” style of question is a commonly used passive aggressive crutch to tell someone to do Y instead, while attempting to not look mean/harsh. Its the same reason people use “we” in the first place.
You may not be using it this way but because many others are that’s how it’ll typically be interpreted
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.
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A uni pal with the samey attitude had a wonderful motto - "better to look stupid than to be stupid".
Except a lot af askers will put you in an uncomfortable spot. No I don't want you and your family staying at my house while you are in town.
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I have been searching for this!
Thank you for reposting this, OP. I have been (w)racking my brain trying to find this article and used HN search dozens of times. I couldn't remember what the title was, or the specific terms "ask" and "guess", so it was impossible to find.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37182058
This is one of the chief cultural differences between Southern and Northern culture.
Southerners (not transplants) will "ask" without imposition: they "ask" when giving, and "guess" when receiving.
Any inversion of these norms is an affront to "Southern hospitality" and will be met with the equivalent "Bless Your Heart".
Ask what you can do for someone, never what you can have. Assume someone will do right by you (you should never have to ask), and if they don't - people say not so nice things about those folks.
I need to articulate this better when it's not 4 AM, but it's an almost perfect descriptor of the cultural differences.
I'm pretty sure Japanese are guessers (would love to hear counter examples)
To them, the etiquette is that if you ask you've put the other person in a bind. Even if they want to say no, they feel pressure to say yes. You putting then in that situation is considered bad. So, don't ask, at least not directly. You can say "Guess what, I'll be in town next week!" and see if out of the blue they offer a place to stay. But even then there is subtly of reading between the lines, of do they actually want you to stay or are they just being polite but hope you'll read between the lines and not take them up on the offer. Generally you're supposed to refuse "Naw, I couldn't possibly stay and get in your way" and then they can come back and say "No really, it'd be great" if they really want you to stay and you might have to do this dance once or twice more to really verify it's ok.
The usual dichotomy / terminology for this stuff as it relates to painting national and business cultures with broad brushes is "high context" versus "low context". In a high context culture like Japan people would be expected to code switch between Asking and Guessing behaviors depending on their audience, relative status, social rapport, etc.
I think in Japan the culture is almost 100% Guessing.
I read this anecdote online about a US business dealing with Japanese partners (clients?). There's an item they'd like to discuss, in their regular meeting they bring it up, and the Japanese said "Hmm, this is possible. Let's discuss it next meeting.". Next meeting, they ask again, and the reply was the same. It took them a few rounds to realize that the actual (never uttered) answer is "No, this isn't possible."...
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?
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37176703
Thanks for the pointer, I hadn't.
I think there is a couple of interesting things. First, it's still somewhat orthogonal to the High context versus Low context cultures (see the Culture Map), as in you can have people with more ask versus guess culture in either communication contexts from my observations (at least among some low to mid context cultures, I don't have a lot of experience with very high context cultures).
Another way to think about it is that it's a lot more local than the broader culture of a country, down to the family level, and you can see this in the US as many commenters have reported where they grew up in various different places in the ask vs guess spectrum.
Finally, the US work environment is generally very "Ask"-leaning, in particular in Silicon Valley and it can take a significant amount of time to recognize where you have been raised on this spectrum versus what is required of you to be effective at work.
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 don't think that's the case; I have a son who has been a "Guesser" from a fairly young age, despite our family encouraging people to be "Askers" all of his siblings are "Askers" and can't understand why he won't ask for things that he wants.
For completeness sake, I should point out that most of our kids (including this one) are adopted so it's not impossible that there could be a genetic predisposition to being an asker or guesser.
> Eastern countries/regions are generally “Guessers,” while Westerners are generally “Askers.”
See also the concept of high-context and low-context cultures.
I think this is the correct dichotomy for the difference in cultures and better explains the Guesser vs Asker thing. High context cultures (Asia, South America, Mediterranean) tend to be Guessers because they already have the context and that context is the more important part of their communication. In low context cultures (Northern European, Russia, US) communication is more direct and words are more important than non-verbal cues.
Gift link: https://www.theatlantic.com/national/2010/05/askers-vs-guess...
Discussed (in a singleton sort of way) at the time:
Askers vs. Guessers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37176703 - Aug 2023 (479 comments)
A 2023 submission of a similar article received 481 comments.[1]
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37176703
Good catch—added. Thanks!
I'm not that autistic but I simply can't deal with Guessers. The idea that I have to play some kind of 4D chess game to figure out what I am and am not allowed to ask or do makes me extremely stressed out. How am I supposed to map out the wishes and expectations and goals of everybody involved? Isn't that, in fact, borderline rude? What if I guess wrong? Everybody loses when that happens and it happens all the time.
Growing up in the east of the Netherlands made this worse; the Dutch are widely known as rude and direct (ie Askers), but in the rural east this is very much not the case. Everything there runs on a mixture of "what will the neighbours think" and "what will people expect me to do?" and it's just maddening. Fortunately I was sufficiently tone deaf as a youth to not notice when I was getting it wrong, and when I grew old enough to figure that out I moved to places where you can just ask stuff. It's nuts that such a small country can have such a widely varying cultural differences but it's very real.
I live in the south now and here I can ask everybody everything and people won't feel bad for saying no. It's lovely.
I also figured out that my mom (a total Guesser like everybody in my family) loves me even if I get this wrong! So I just began to treat her like an Asker and verrry explicitly spell out that it's totally fine to say no, no really it is, I'm not asking for a favour, I just want to know what you want, really mom it's true. It stresses her out! The idea of being asked point blank for her personal, disregard-other-people preference is just entirely outside her normal way of thinking. She has to do hard effort to disregard other people's wishes, it's just all totally mixed together in her brain. I know it's not nice of me, but the alternative is that we (my wife and I) keep getting it wrong and accidentally visit too often or too little or invite them to parties they don't want to go to and so on.
So yeah, protip for askers, treat guessers who love you as askers. They'll forgive you for it and everything else becomes easier.
That makes sense if it's in moderation. An overzealous asker can disproportionately eat up people's time. Context as to why you're asking helps set priorities.
Yeah ofc. I mean as someone who grew up in Guesser Land and got taught that it’s important to be able to read people’s minds, discovering that I can just, you know, ask, felt like a superpower. I don’t think I’m overdoing it.
I'm born Guesser but evolved into an Asker. However, it depended on whether I was the requester or not; if I wanted to invite someone, I would try to avoid putting them in a position where they had to say "no". However, I didn't mind saying "no" myself.
I would argue with other people that it's impolite to put them in such a position as they may not like to decline.
After discussing it openly with friends and family, I realized that it was okay to say no and people wouldn't mind. This changed me into an asker.
What's funny is that my parents were askers. I guess being introverted made me more of a guesser initially.
you may like this thought:
if you have a weak no, then it makes your yes weak.
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.
An asker who won't take no for an answer is just an asshole. As is a guesser who continuously hints when they want something and you don't offer.
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 am timid: I conduct myself like a Guesser, and treat others' requests as though they are Askers.
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.
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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.
I can think of birthdays when even the most diehard asker turns into a guesser - they would never go out of their way and ask to be coddled on their birthday but still don't mind bit of a fuss being made on their behalf.
... You haven't met Colombians. It could be just my extended family or it could be cultural; they love celebrating birthdays, including your birthday and theirs, and will actively and overtly tell you what they expect. In a strange way they're asking, it's a negotiation of wants and needs.
It could be just between family. I should ask my wife what's the go.
They sound like hobbits!
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.
I’m an asker, but I’m not going to waste my day asking everyone for $1,000 because I know it’s unlikely anyone will.
“Asking” is for things you don’t already know the answer to, and “no” or “I don’t know” are acceptable answers.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> but basing your social interactions and how you see others and yourself on this stuff might not be the best thing to do!
Why not? Just knowing that there is such different ways of thinking is useful especially when interacting with people.
I was a guesser until maybe 2 of 3 years ago until I talked about it with friends and family and I learned just today that it was called "asker" and "guesser".
If you spend time with people from different cultures, there clearly is a stark divide in behavior. Even inside said culture there might be situations in which someone becomes an asker.
Therefore this framework is good to understand how people think socially and have a better understanding towards one another. Some people may think you are rude to ask–or an idiot not to–and you will probably lose relationships if you don't realize it.
> Just knowing that there is such different ways of thinking is useful
We agree. People have different ways of thinking and interacting. Maybe that asker-vs-guesser thing made you / others realize that (and that's good! Possibly it made me realize that too, although having a flatmate years before had already done the trick tbh), but we didn't need it to know this.
> there clearly is a stark divide in behavior
How are you sure it's not confirmation bias [1]? When you have a hammer, everything looks like nails. When you have an asker-guesser theory, everybody look like askers and guessers, including yourself.
Odds are it is most likely, in fact, confirmation bias, since that theory was found to be unsubstantiated and underdeveloped, and since this is a sexy topic, it's hard to believe nobody tried to validate it rigorously (and the way scientific publishing is currently organized sadly doesn't encourage publishing negative results).
> Why not?
Because apparently, from what we actually know (robust, established knowledge), there's no good reason to think the following is actually true, even if it strongly feels like it for a host of reasons, which is my whole concern:
> this framework is good to understand how people think socially and have a better understanding towards one another
It's too easy to pick two half convincing categories that feel somewhat opposite and have the feeling that these two categories provide insight on how people work. Such theories are sugar for the brain.
I'd be most happy to be proven wrong in the future though! In the meantime, I'll pick cautiousness.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias
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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.
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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...
I was going to make the same comment.
The correct term is high context vs low context culture, not "askers" and "guessers"
>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.
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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)
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> ("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.
I think this has a lot of truth to it, but I think it is ultimately an oversimplification or even a false dichotomy.
I was in a relationship that was constantly strained by something similar to this. My partner would never ask for help with anything and would just get frustrated when I didn't pick up on her struggling and jump in to help. Conversely, I only ask for help when I really need it but she would see me struggling and jump in, which would annoy me because I didn't ask for help.
But I'm not an asker in the sense of this article. I would never randomly ask someone to stay at someone's house, for example. This strikes me as like a child constantly testing their boundaries. I know where the boundaries are.
But, there is still some truth to it. I've often found that non-native speakers in my country tend to be askers. This can come across as quite shocking and lead one to believe, as I had, that this is actually part of their culture. But I have another theory: to be successful as a non-native you have to be an asker, because you will find it difficult or impossible to be a guesser. So it's a survivorship bias, essentially.
By the title I also thought this was going to be about another phenomenon: when given a task, some people will continue to ask for confirmation until they're confident they get it, while others will just "fill in the blanks" and deliver something, even if it's wrong. LLMs, of course, being the ultimate "guesser" in this sense.
This has been posted like 20x: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=asker+guesser
What is the benefit, ultimately, of being a Guesser? How is it not better in every way for every one to choose to be an Asker?
... Explicit is better than implicit. Simple is better than complex ...
You probably know the rest
Human relationships are not computer code
Eliminating ambiguity from human relationships is neither possible not desirable
Not saying please or having to be polite is often simpler.
Knowing and using etiquette is often more effective.
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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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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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.
You can read the original forum discussion that inspired this article: https://ask.metafilter.com/55153/Whats-the-middle-ground-bet...
These both work for me (copied from the top):
https://web.archive.org/web/20250831074424/https://www.theat...
https://archive.ph/GBZBf
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.
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a link to the non-paywalled article is at the top of the hn post
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