How to quickly tell if someone is an asker or guesser?

Question

I realised that most of my interpersonal conflicts arise when I (an asker) ask a guesser questions that they find uncomfortable answering. To overcome this, I am thinking that when I meet a new person, I should quickly find out if s/he is an asker or guesser. If s/he is an asker, then I will be my normal self. But if s/he is a guesser, then I will avoid asking any question unless the question is general.

I'm looking for a way to figure out if someone is an 'asker' or 'guesser'

A little context on 'ask' and 'guess' culture: when you ask guesser a question, s/he will feel compelled to answer the question even if s/he does not want to, resulting in resentment towards the person who asks the question. However, if you ask an asker a question and s/he does not feel comfortable in answering it, s/he will simply say no.

More context on 'ask' and 'guess' culture: for the question asker, if s/he is a guesser, s/he will avoid asking questions or make a request unless when s/he is in dire need of help. Hence, if a guesser ask a question or make a request and get 'no' as a reply, s/he will be resentful. However, for an asker, s/he understands that it is normal to ask a question and get 'no' as a reply. So s/he will not be resentful in getting 'no' as a reply.

For more information on 'ask' vs 'guess' culture, see https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2010/05/askers-vs-guessers/340891/

guessing implies a lack of knowledge... Does this imply that those who know the answer to said questions are automatically askers? — , Jun 15 '21 at 23:16
Further, is this on a per-subject basis? I imagine that the interrogative behavior of any individual depends highly on the subject at-hand. — , Jun 15 '21 at 23:22
@tuskiomi Thank you for your replies. I realised that I am not making myself clear in my question. Hence, I added a link to a website which further explains 'ask' and 'guess' culture. — Jean Diharo, Jun 16 '21 at 02:50
In brief, here is an explaination of ask vs guess culture. 'In some families, you grow up with the expectation that it's OK to ask for anything at all, but you gotta realize you might get no for an answer. This is Ask Culture.' — Jean Diharo, Jun 16 '21 at 02:51
'In Guess Culture, you avoid putting a request into words unless you're pretty sure the answer will be yes. Guess Culture depends on a tight net of shared expectations. A key skill is putting out delicate feelers. If you do this with enough subtlety, you won't even have to make the request directly; you'll get an offer. Even then, the offer may be genuine or pro forma; it takes yet more skill and delicacy to discern whether you should accept.' — Jean Diharo, Jun 16 '21 at 02:51
I'm still not sure of the answers to my questions. The context is good, but doesn't answer them.. that said, I'll re-iterate: Are those who know the answer to a given question automatically 'askers'? Is the property of 'guessing' and 'asking' on a per-subject basis? — , Jun 16 '21 at 22:37
This is not really an answer as much as a suggestion that may alleviate some of your problems. Try assuring the person you're asking that no is indeed an option. Example: "Can you pick me up from work tomorrow? If you can't that's ok, I'll find another way around". — Touniouk, Jun 17 '21 at 09:06
@tuskiomi I don't think you understand what's being asked. The sort of questions being talked about here aren't ones you know or don't know an answer to, it's more asking a favor. An asker will simply ask for the favor and be fine with a refusal, a guesser will only ask if they are confident the answer will be yes. On the flip side, if they are asked a favor, they will assume the person asking expects agreement or they would not have asked, so the guesser will feel obligated to agree. — Kat, Jun 20 '21 at 08:44
@kat so.... they're asking how to gage the confidence of someone using unconventional / esoteric language? — , Jun 21 '21 at 05:11
@JeanDiharo Reading your later comments, I think that your question is not (sic!) about asking questions, but about making requests. E.g. in "asker culture" it's ok to ask "can you do this for me?" but in "guesser culture" you _never_ make a direct request. If I guessed right, can you edit the question to refer to requests as well as questions? Btw, a very interesting issue! I have not seen these culture named before, but I was aware of them, as I was born an 'asker' in a 'guesser' culture. — yo9cyb, Jul 07 '21 at 01:50
@yo9cyb I feel you! I am born as an asker in a predominant guesser culture too. My question is about both asking question and making request. There was once I met a new friend during a dinner, and I ask her 'what is your job title?'. Immediately she appeared offended, and did not answer my question. And for the rest of the dinner, she avoided talking to me. Thinking back, I realised that I should not have asked her such a personal question as we have just met (although I do not consider it too personal). Moving forward, I would like to stop offending guessers, hence my post. — Jean Diharo, Jul 07 '21 at 05:58
@JeanDiharo thanks for the reply! I have just posted an answer to your other question, about surviving in a 'guess' culture. The truth is that I have many of the same problems as you, even though I can describe the rules (e.g. not asking personal questions like 'what's your name? what's your job?') because my 'ask' personality has little patience with these games. Interestingly enough, in France for example it's rude to ask 'what do you do' but it's Ok to ask 'do you like classical music?' — yo9cyb, Jul 07 '21 at 07:22
@JeanDiharoI hope I do not come off as condescending and arrogant with my suggestions. You have openend my mind by naming these two polarly different ways of interacting and I am grateful for this! — yo9cyb, Jul 07 '21 at 07:22

Nelson · Answer 1 · 2021-06-17T02:45:40.653

Observe whether they say "No"

An asker is very direct, and sometimes to the point of being too blunt, and has no problems with people telling them "No", but guessers are a lot more subtle, and have serious problems both receiving and giving "No"s.

That is the fundamental difference between an asker and a guesser. A guesser translates saying "no" into some type of personal failure/mistake.

You can tell someone is a guesser when they complain about having to say no, or they effectively never say no, despite severe consequences. Observing someone asking something very simple like "Do you want me to get you coffee?" If they never say "No, thank you." in a natural, non-defensive way, then it is likely they are a guesser. Guessers will do weird things to avoid saying No.

I'm naturally a guesser, and my wife isn't. She directly confronts me with a lot of the weird things I do. One is not wanting to use my day offs (fearing a No), to just basically doing things at a severe consequence to myself for no good reason (giving people rides home after a party, when it takes an extra 2 hours, while I have a university final exam next day at 8 am).

A guesser can overlap with a people-pleaser and, in more extreme situations, co-dependency. These two topics have a lot more formal research so you can look those up to understand them better.

You can also flip it around. If every question they ask is an obvious "Yes", sometimes to absurd and ridiculous things ("Can I go to the bathroom?" "Yes, uh, why do you need to ask me that?") then they also lean towards the guesser spectrum.

Thanks for this answer! Yes, "can I get X for you?" is a simple test that can tell a lot with minimal risk of awkwardness. I'll try to remember to apply it/pay attention to it when it occurs by chance. — yo9cyb, Jul 07 '21 at 02:29

score 6 · Answer 2 · answered Jun 18 '21 at 11:29

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How about not labeling people to begin with?

You're trying to pre-empt how to treat a person based on an arbitrary label.

Firstly, those labels are not absolutes. There is no reason to expect that a person is one and only one of those labels. Secondly, pre-emptive judgment of such a label is nothing short of stereotyping a person based on some approximated marker.

Rather than try to pre-empt your interaction with this person, simply interact with them and be aware of their responses. If they're uncomfortable, you can observe this and steer away from similarly intrusive (to this person's view) questions.
If you ask something and they hesitate, address that they are free to accept/reject your request as they see fit, and make it clear that this was not a "politely phrased command" (e.g. "can you do X?" meaning "Please do X for me") as opposed to an actually open question.

Your question works on the presumption that the people you deal with are incapable of understanding that when meeting a person, you spend the initial stages trying to feel each other out, and that this might mean that there is a character mismatch between them and the other person. Or that encountering such a mismatch immediately and irreversibly offends them to a point where you can no longer interact with them.

People are not fragile little eggshells. And even if some of them are, it should be abundantly clear from the initial interaction with them. The only kind of people you'd need to pre-empt this behavior for are precisely the kind of people who would very clearly indicate discomfort or shyness from the start when they meet someone new.

It's better to learn about people during your interaction with them and learn to steer your behavior based on earlier interactions, than to unfairly label someone based on some pre-conceived stereotypical markers and not allowing for people to be different from how you think people work.

answered Jun 18 '21 at 11:29

Flater

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A wonderful post describing reactions to an ideal person. If only people actually were like that. – DJClayworth Jun 18 '21 at 15:15
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@DJClayworth: By a wide margin, pre-emptively judging people has caused more social friction (to say the least) than simply getting to know a person while interacting with them has. – Flater Jun 18 '21 at 15:49
Thanks for this answer! I upvoted this too since there is value in here as well for some people. For me though, like DJClayworth mentioned, I had lots of trouble interacting with people when not knowing their type (since I can't understand why they do that, so I keep forgetting and falling back to my natural assumption). Understanding why they do that (which the labeling does good enough) is the first step for me to make their behavior (with different type) resonates with me, so I can respond more naturally but still catering their style. The next step, of course, is like your answer. – justhalf Jun 19 '21 at 05:56
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Not so sure this is about pre-emptively stereotyping but rather what the quickest way is to determine a good likelihood that asking questions is welcome or not. The labels might be misleading, but the intent to find out whether it's likely a person can say no to questions that are too intimate doesn't need to be based on stereotypes. OP is not asking for visible cues to make that decision. I.e. OP asks *how* to figure out whether intimate questions are welcome enough - potentially in the first steps of an interaction. So as an improvement suggestion: you might explain how that works. – Frank Hopkins Jun 24 '21 at 03:13
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ie. >And even if some of them are, it should be abundantly clear from the initial interaction with them< to OP this doesn't seem clear. (Even if OP is caught in this guesser/asker mindset, which indeed seems weird to me too, then helping them by redirecting with practical advice might be more convincing than simply stating it should be obvious to them ;)). – Frank Hopkins Jun 24 '21 at 03:14
@FrankHopkins: If you silently judge people by if they adhere to arbitrary markers that you've assumed must apply equally to people at large, then you're by definition judging people by a stereotype. Using stereotyping to change your behavior towards the person, _before_ they've even had the chance to disprove your notions, is not a great interpersonal approach. **I'm not saying OP is being malevolent**. Not every stereotype finds its roots in ill intent, but that doesn't justify the process either. – Flater Jun 24 '21 at 07:57
@Flater Finding out if an individual tends to be able to reject requests or feel uncomfortable rejecting personal questions is not applying a stereotype. You try to gauge that person's individual character trait in that regard. If you try to gauge whether they do so by their hair colour or the like, because the few people you've seen so far that have shown a certain trait had a certain hair colour, yes then you're stereotyping. And sure, assuming there is a binary split where you are either totally uncomfortable or not is a black/white view, but it's not clear OP sees it that strictly. – Frank Hopkins Jun 24 '21 at 18:11
@Flater All I'm saying is you might interpret OP's request one way (as coming from a stereotyping mindset) when that is not necessarily the case. In Language we indeed often simplify our thoughts, and the result can be interpreted as stereotyping, racist etc without that having been the intention. Feel free to stick with it, I just tried to indicate that this is imho not a given and that along your lines of thoughts a *how* to identify whether to ask intimate questions might be helpful for OP (unless you think it's not possible to do so without asking intimate questions^^). – Frank Hopkins Jun 24 '21 at 18:17
@Flater Perhaps your answer is simply: You cannot gauge without conversation and conversation includes potentially intimate questions or requests that the other party might in principle feel offended by, your only way is to deal properly with such cases when they occur and stop a line of inquiry if you notice you overstepped? If so, maybe that can be made clearer aside from the labelling criticism. – Frank Hopkins Jun 24 '21 at 18:20
@Flater It's important to know how the other person understands what you are saying. Some people take what is said almost literally, but others see layers of meaning. For example: I visit a friend's house and find her dressed very lightly. I exclaim: "Wow, aren't you cold?" She may answer "No, I'm fine" if she is a standard 'asker'. But she may think I'm complimenting her for being so tough. Or she may think I'm criticizing her for, 'showing too much skin'. Or, and this actually happpened, she understood that her house is too cold for me, and immediately turned up the heat. – yo9cyb Jul 07 '21 at 02:15
@yo9cyb: I agree. But the variety of options (like you listed) makes it impossible (or at least very prone to error) to have a pre-emptive flowchart on how someone will or won't understand your statement based on some arbitrary markers that _precede_ conversation with the person (so is reduced to visual or contextual inferences). I'm not saying visual or contextual inferences don't help, but they aren't a full picture in and of themselves, and making judgments about people without a full picture is just not advisable, hence why I'm advising against it. – Flater Jul 07 '21 at 08:00
@justhalf: _"I had lots of trouble interacting with people when not knowing their type"_ Far be it from me to tell someone how they should or shouldn't think, but I would offer the consideration that the presumption that people should be handled by some arbitrary type is flawed to begin with, as opposed to figuring out which specific type they are. And that flaw, as I see it, precludes further discussion in diving someone's type. – Flater Aug 09 '21 at 14:30
@justhalf: As a more extreme example for the sake of clarity, if I were to ask how to figure out an online user's religious beliefs and gender before wanting to communicate with them, the notion that this is essential to human interaction is flawed, and there's no point in further discussing _how_ to find these things out, as opposed to simply conveying that gender/religion should not be used for pre-emptive judgment and instead to treat all people the same by default. This asker/guesser type is the same kind of label that should not be used as a means of prejudice, well intentioned or not. – Flater Aug 09 '21 at 14:32
@FrankHopkins: While it is not the main intention, the question is effectively asking how to get to know a person without giving them a say in the matter (precisely because of pre-empting the first conversation with them). No judgment system, no matter how well-intentioned or not, is going to be able to accurately label every person in every situation the right way, nor would any human be perfect in every assessment of every person. The safest bet here is to step away from such approximated stereotypes and simply get to know people while interacting with them as opposed to pre-emptive judging. – Flater Aug 09 '21 at 14:38
@FrankHopkins: Maybe better phrased: I'm unsure if your (second) comment is built on the notion that by "stereotyping" I mean a negatively intentioned behavior. I don't intend it that way. OP is engaging in textbook stereotyping (especially given the binary nature of their type assignment, hence "stereo"), but I do agree that it is not coming from a place of ill-intentioned prejudice (which is how "stereotyping" is commonly interpreted nowadays, in my experience). But just because something is not ill-intentioned doesn't therefore make it a good approach or idea. – Flater Aug 09 '21 at 14:41
@Flater, thanks for starting this discussion. Regarding "the presumption that people should be handled by some arbitrary type is flawed to begin with, as opposed to figuring out which specific type they are", I don't quite understand this. Can you clarify? What I said before seems to be more aligned to "figuring out which specific type they are", and I also don't see how this leads to "precludes further discussion in diving someone's type". When I mention about using type to interact, of course I don't solely use that, but to know them as a unique person as well. (1/2) – justhalf Aug 09 '21 at 14:47
The type is used as the big picture template, so that I can focus on the specifics of each person. Without the big picture template, I feel overwhelmed with the wondrous complexity of people that it hampers my effort to interact in a way that is best for that specific person. It's like when carving a wood into a statue, we don't start with a knife that deals with the fine details, but we start with axe to make the overall shape correct, and only then we use knife to carve the fine details. (2/2) – justhalf Aug 09 '21 at 14:48
@justhalf The point I was trying to make is that any discussion on how to assign the correct label is irrelevant when considering the concept of labeling incorrect to begin with (hence the "precludes ..." quote). I'm very intentionally sidestepping ways to refine the labeling process because no matter how much you refine it, it's always going to be an approximation that is liable to mislabel some subset of people, hence why I think it is a bad idea. – Flater Aug 09 '21 at 15:02
@justhalf "I feel overwhelmed with the wondrous complexity of people that it hampers my effort to interact in a way that is best for that specific person" I _genuinely_ understand that feeling. I really do. But if people are wondrously complex, would you then not agree that any simple typing is not going to account for all of the wondrous complexity? Would a mislabeling then not lead to you treating someone wrongly? And would treating them wrongly not be worse then if you just got to know the person and treated them based on how they behave when interacting with you? – Flater Aug 09 '21 at 15:04
@justhalf: To put it differently, I'd rather my doctor remains unsure of my diagnosis and investigates futher, even at the cost of more scans which I have to partake in, than I would want my doctor to take a guess at a diagnosis and just accept that he'd be wrong once in a while. The same opinion applies to how I'd feel about you labeling me. I'd prefer you get to know me and treat me based on that, instead of quietly pre-emptively judging me and then forcing me into some preset stereotype - it wholly excludes me being a different person (to you) than you've met before. – Flater Aug 09 '21 at 15:07
Thanks for empathizing! I specifically say the sentence you quoted to convey that any simple typing (or any typing at all) won't do. And I completely agree with your doctor analogy. And that's what I'm doing too! I can be unsure of someone's type, and while that's still the case, I will still ask questions to decide the diagnosis. – justhalf Aug 09 '21 at 15:11
@justhalf: As much as I understand that your idea is well-intentioned, the concept of already deciding how to interact with someone before even talking to them inherently means that you exclude the person themselves from that decision logic, and consider your opinion of who this person _might_ be (no matter how incomplete your understanding of people may be) as more important than who the person actually is. And that is, in my opinion, going against the very core of interpersonal interaction, as it requires interaction more so than silent judgment. – Flater Aug 09 '21 at 15:11
@justhalf: To round this off, I think this pursuit of labeling accuracy is somewhat of a wild goose chase, and it might be a more fruitful avenue to change your phrasing to avoid conflicts, rather than trying to get the jump on pegging someone as a specific type. Learning some type-agnostic interactions with people would similarly solve the issue _without_ the odds of mislabeling someone. For example, "Feel free to say no, but ..." would help in allaying any fear someone might have about having to say no. You can doubly stress that point if you feel the situation warrants it. – Flater Aug 09 '21 at 15:16
I understand your position, and rest assured I am not what you imagine. =) – justhalf Aug 09 '21 at 18:05

How to quickly tell if someone is an asker or guesser?

2 Answers2

Observe whether they say "No"

How about not labeling people to begin with?