Reading Notes

Ask And Guess

  • Ask culture vs. guess culture:
    • Ask culture: socially acceptable to ask, equally acceptable to refuse
    • Guess culture: determine ahead of time if your request is appropriate
      • Rude to make requests that are excessive or inappropriate
      • Rude to refuse requests that are appropriate
    • People tend to be systematic askers or systematic guessers (possibly influenced by culture)
    • Ask vs. guess is also situational
      • Generally, the higher stakes the social situation, the more we lean towards guess culture
  • If you’re a guesser, when should you ask more?
    • Failure/rejection is so common that it’s not shameful
    • You’re asking someone whose job it is to handle requests
    • Granting/refusing a request is easy
  • Are there situations where we should err more towards guess culture?

Tell Culture

  • Tell the other person the state of your mind
  • Interpret responses as attempts to create common knowledge rather than requests or presumptions of compliance
  • The burden of honesty is even higher with Tell Culture than it is with Ask Culture
  • Requires near complete trust between people
  • How do you bootstrap this?

Reveal Culture

  • Why are Ask, Guess, Tell, etc called cultures, and not strategies
    • Shared assumptions - you can’t just declare Tell Culture and unload your internal state on the other person
    • Ask Culture - assumptions of trust:
      • I trust that you’ll ask me if you want something
      • You trust that I’ll be able to refuse if I’m not able or willing to give you what you want
    • Guess Culture - assumptions of trust:
      • I trust that you’ll be able to read my body language and respond appropriately
      • You trust that I’ll offer indirect cues before responding, so that you can calibrate your requests/responses accordingly
    • Reveal Culture:
      • When you share information with me, I trust that you’re doing so honestly and because you think that it will be helpful
      • When I share information with you, I’m trusting that you can process it, even if it’s difficult to hear
      • The second part is very important
  • So what about Tell Culture?
    • Tell Culture is a variant of Ask Culture
      • Ask culture + strength of preference in request
  • What experiences are people having with Tell Culture
    • People are having Tell Culture thrust upon them rather than being in a situation where there’s mutual agreement
    • Like “having Crocker’s rules thrust upon you”
    • Seems like this is especially traumatic for people coming from Guess Culture
  • Reveal Culture, has as a prerequisite, positively correlated models of interpersonal engagement
    • Does not work if engagement is a zero sum game
    • No sociopaths
    • No narcissists
  • Why Reveal Culture
    • Speaks to vulnerability of everyone involved
    • Less imperative than Tell Culture (you can tell someone to do something, but you can’t reveal someone to do something)
    • Evokes image of careful sharing

Against Tell Culture

  • The difference between Tell, Ask and Guess is how much subtext is involved
  • Tell Culture tries to remove subtext from communication entirely
    • Not possible
    • Not even desirable
  • Lots of human interaction is more about subtext than it is about the object level interaction
    • Flirting, for example
  • It’s impossible to disentangle value judgements from certain facts
    • If you tell someone that you don’t trust them, it will always carry a subtext of, “And you’re a bad person,” whether you want it to or not
  • Tell Culture is the death of plausible deniability
    • You can’t tell someone you want to do something, you also have to tell them why you want to do it

Against Being For or Against Tell Culture

  • Ask, Guess and Tell cultures are all very broad categories, meant as a first approximation for a variety of communication styles
  • You should learn how to communicate effectively no matter which culture you’re coming from
  • Identify what you what to do with your communication and tailor it to your audience’s expectations

Why You Should Maybe Keep Your Crush a Secret

  • Telling someone that you’re romantically interested in them puts an obligation on them
  • They don’t have a good mental model of you
  • They don’t know how you’re going to react to being rejected
  • Especially problematic for women
  • Not every attraction needs to be followed up on
  • Look for signals that they might be interested in you before you confess your crush to them