'Askers' vs. 'Guessers' (2010)

Summary

This article is from the archive of our partner .Let's say your husband or wife has a friend who will be coming to your city for two weeks on business. This friend writes to you and your spouse, asking if you can put him up while he's in town. Has this person committed a gross violation of etiquette? Whether you answer yes or no may speak to whether you're an Asker or a Guesser--the two personality types described in a three-year-old Web comment that has lately taken on a second life as a full-on blog meme.On January 16, 2007, Andrea Donderi responded to an Ask MetaFilter post that dealt with a houseguest-related situation like the one described above. Donderi's take on the situation is as elegant as it is provocative. Basically, she says, there are two types of people in the world:This is a classic case of Ask Culture meets 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. 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.Over the weekend, Oliver Burkeman wrote a column for The Guardian taking up Donderi's dichotomy and asking, "Are you an Asker or a Guesser?" A number of bloggers took the bait, expanding into broader thoughts about the niceties of social etiquette. Here's what they had to say:Contributes to Personal, Professional, International Tensions In his column for The Guardian, Burkeman notes that neither type's approach is wrong per se, "but when an Asker meets a Guesser, unpleasantness results. An Asker won't think it's rude to request tw...