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.

Umeshism: "If nobody ever says no to you, you're not asking for enough."

Reminds me of The Screwtape Letters, which seems to come down hard on guess culture (not so much rejecting it as not considering it in those terms to begin with, which seems to be common on both sides):

Later on you can venture on what may be called the Generous Conflict Illusion. This game is best played with more than two players, in a family with grown-up children for example. Something quite trivial, like having tea in the garden, is proposed. One member takes care to make it quite clear (though not in so many words) that he would rather not but is, of course, prepared to do so out of "Unselfishness". The others instantly withdraw their proposal, ostensibly through their "Unselfishness", but really because they don't want to be used as a sort of lay figure on which the first speaker practices petty altruisms. But he is not going to be done out of his debauch of Unselfishness either. He insists on doing "what the others want". They insist on doing what he wants. Passions are roused. Soon someone is saying "Very well then, I won't have any tea at all!", and a real quarrel ensues with bitter resentment on both sides. You see how it is done? If each side had been frankly contending for its own real wish, they would all have kept within the bounds of reason and courtesy; but just because the contention is reversed and each side is fighting the other side's battle, all the bitterness which really flows from thwarted self-righteousness and obstinacy and the accumulated grudges of the last ten years is concealed from them by the nominal or official "Unselfishness" of what they are doing or, at least, held to be excused by it.

I've tried to keep that generally in mind as a reason to be as direct as possible; it's only recently that I've been aware enough of the dichotomy in popular advice to start collecting quotes about it.

Also possibly related:

If you have two choices, choose the harder. If you're trying to decide whether to go out running or sit home and watch TV, go running. Probably the reason this trick works so well is that when you have two choices and one is harder, the only reason you're even considering the other is laziness.

...from Paul Graham via EY. I usually think of asking for something as being harder than trying to find it myself or doing without; for one thing, it's an action now versus a possible action later.

I have a bias in that I really, really don't understand the "guess" mentality. Or rather, I see how it could develop but I don't understand how people once they are aware of the breakdown don't immediately say "hey! Ask is more efficient and less likely to lead to misunderstandings." While a culture that is a mix of Askers and Guessers will have a lot of misunderstandings (and likely more than a pure Ask or pure Guess culture), it seems that Guessers frequently have more serious misunderstandings due to poor guessing even when interacting with other Guessers. In contrast, Askers rarely have a problem interacting with other Askers in the same way. So it seems that utility is maximized with Askers. There's likely some biases coming into play in constructing this argument in that I'm heavily an Asker, and I've tried in areas I was more of a Guesser to move towards being more of an Asker because it just seems to work better. I'd be enlightened if someone could point out where my logic about ideal cultures breaks down.

In Guess cultures, how much estimation of other people's desires goes on, and how much is following rules about how desires can be expressed? This may vary from one culture to another, and it may be very hard to get an answer to the question.

Do Guess cultures tend to have etiquette creep, where, if going through a ritual is equivalent to making a request (demand), then the ritual must be made more ambiguous?

I've trained myself to be an Asker - I consider it one of life's cheat codes. It does lead to friction with my wife who's more into Guessing.

See also Rejection Therapy.

I think "ask culture vs. guess culture" would be a better title.

I'm definitely an asker, and this - as I see now in retrospect thanks to this post - caused me a lot of grief with a friend with whom I was otherwise closely mentally aligned. She insisted on "reading" people and playing "guess my intent", often accusing me of things that I never even thought of, and complaining that I was difficult to read. When I asked her why she couldn't just ask me about my thoughts instead of trying to infer them, she said it was not culturally common in her country (Holland). I have no way of verifying that last assertion, though.

I remember reading tangerine's* ask_metafilter answer when it was posted and got hundreds of upvotes (favorites in their jargon) and I thought it was a brilliant few paragraphs.

A couple years later it got some publicity in The Guardian and there was a complete thread on the single topic of the ask versus guess thing.

I am interested but I am not at all convinced. Anthropologists have been writing about gifts and exchange and reciprocity since as long as anthropology has existed. It is very complex. After family and clan relations, it is perhaps the second most studied topic in the field. I suppose the most likely explanation is the ask versus guess thing (tangerine later updated it by describing it more accurately as ask versus hint) is that we have a false dichotomy of folk psychology here, which may be useful in spots but needs to be taken with a grain of salt. There are a number of professional anthropologists and sociologists who regularly post there on any number of topics, and if they commented on this one, I missed it. I looked closely for exactly such a comment when the original threads were active.

*tangerine is the author's metafilter user I D.

Guessy: Etiquette. Fashion. Religion. Favor trading & extent of trust. Social status. The attitudes, abilities and intentions of others. Taboos.

Asky: Monetary economic transactions. Contracts. Science. Engineering. Medicine. War. Philosophy class.

Guessy suggests small groups and the exclusion mechanisms to maintain them in a populous world. Asky just looks modern.

Things women and men tend to do in unmixed groups, respectively.

Other ideas?

Thinking about this game-theoretically: Let's say you get awarded points for getting what you want (+10), subtracted points when a Guesser refuses your request and is miffed that you even asked (-10) and you get no points (+0) if you don't ask, or if you get a friendly refusal from an Asker.

Askers always ask; guessers decide, on a case-by-case basis, whether or not to ask. In principle, this means guessing ought to dominate as a strategy.

On the other hand, in real life, Askers probably are less upset than Guessers by rejection in general. Even when an Asker asks a Guesser and gets an angry refusal, he's probably less bothered by it than he would be if he were a Guesser. So it's probably in your best interest to cultivate the flexibility of a Guesser but the unflappability of an Asker.

Also, obviously, a world full of Guessers is riskier than a world full of Askers -- every time you ask a favor, you risk that (-10) disaster. So, in a world full of guessers, if they're risk-averse, nobody ever asks for anything. The expected value for everyone is zero. In a world full of askers, the expected value is positive. I'd rather live there!

The ideal world is where everyone is an asker; however, in a world with some guessers, it may be optimal to be a guesser.

I've always preferred an ask culture for its efficiency. However, as Yavin pointed out, someone in a position of authority or influence can't expect to ask with no consequence because people aren't free to refuse. I'd expect a boss to understand that, but if you're a guest of someone from a hospitality culture, you might have trouble because the rules of hospitality mean that if you give the slightest indication of a desire or preference, they're obligated to fulfill it. Unfortunately, this means that the more "hospitable" someone is, the less comfortable I am as their guest because I have to make sure I don't accidentally demand things I don't especially care about or even don't want.

Does anyone know how to safely express desires or preferences, especially when they are implicit in a question, in a guess culture?

So, I'm an ask person. Oftentimes, I don't even sing "Happy Birthday" to people unless I know they appreciate it, because my experience is people seem to find the burst of concentrated attention more offputting than they enjoy the well-wishing, and thus I have little desire to take part.

One consequence is that I generally don't give people gifts on occasions. That doesn't mean I don't give gifts- just that I don't give something to someone unless they have a readily identifiable need that I can fill. And so my parents, who have gotten me something without fail every Christmas and birthday, have only received one return gift, which they immensely enjoyed.*

But, for various reasons I'm trying to become better at traditional social things, and so last night while thinking about this and my impending vacation home, I thought "I ought to get my parents gifts." Of course, there's nothing they need at the moment- their planning has beat out their bad luck so far, leading to them being rather well off, and their wants are moderate enough to be satisfied- but when I rephrased the question from "what can I buy to genuinely improve my parent's lives" to "what can I buy to signal I know their tastes" I immediately came up with answers for both of them. It was sort of shocking how quick it was. Finding suitable instances of those imaginary gifts may not happen soon enough to act on those thoughts, but beyond that I'm not sure I want to change my dynamic; we're practical enough to be holding our Thanksgiving celebration a week late to beat the traffic, do we really need to signal our affection expensively? But it's worth trying at least once.

*After the switch to digital TV, they were no longer able to watch Scrubs reruns, a cherished nightly ritual, and so I bought them the season DVDs. The opportunity presented itself only because I knew they wouldn't be willing to buy it for themselves.