'Askers' vs. 'Guessers' (2010)

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.

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.

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'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.

It's been quite illuminating for people in multicultural teams...

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)

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.

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.

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.

For 'guesser protocol', the initiatior guess whether the ask is appropriate (say initiator_known _benefit > responder_guessed_cost), while in 'asker protocol', the task of guessing is shifted to responder, as the responder has to guess whether the reject is appropriate (say responder_known_cost > initiator_guessed_benefit).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbGw-fnlf1Q

https://geerthofstede.com/culture-geert-hofstede-gert-jan-ho...

it's not completely black-and-white, and it similarly depends on group-level - whole-country vs region vs suburb vs family, and even domain-in-question..

Original comment below for posterity and because there are answers.

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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.

You probably know the rest

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.

I don't pay for the Atlantic and thus am limited by paywall, but this ignores power dynamics.