> The model of high-context and low-context cultures offers a popular framework in intercultural communication studies but has been criticized as lacking empirical validation.

Damnit, that seemed interesting! Thanks for sharing though, I'll still read about this.

> Just knowing that there is such different ways of thinking is useful

We agree. People have different ways of thinking and interacting. Maybe that asker-vs-guesser thing made you / others realize that (and that's good! Possibly it made me realize that too, although having a flatmate years before had already done the trick tbh), but we didn't need it to know this.

> there clearly is a stark divide in behavior

How are you sure it's not confirmation bias [1]? When you have a hammer, everything looks like nails. When you have an asker-guesser theory, everybody look like askers and guessers, including yourself.

Odds are it is most likely, in fact, confirmation bias, since that theory was found to be unsubstantiated and underdeveloped, and since this is a sexy topic, it's hard to believe nobody tried to validate it rigorously (and the way scientific publishing is currently organized sadly doesn't encourage publishing negative results).

> Why not?

Because apparently, from what we actually know (robust, established knowledge), there's no good reason to think the following is actually true, even if it strongly feels like it for a host of reasons, which is my whole concern:

> this framework is good to understand how people think socially and have a better understanding towards one another

It's too easy to pick two half convincing categories that feel somewhat opposite and have the feeling that these two categories provide insight on how people work. Such theories are sugar for the brain.

I'd be most happy to be proven wrong in the future though! In the meantime, I'll pick cautiousness.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias

I was going to make the same comment.

The correct term is high context vs low context culture, not "askers" and "guessers"

Thought not well grounded in objective evidence has a place, both on matters that are not subject to empirical inquiry and in preliminary speculation about matters that are.

But it also runs the risk of building palaces of elaborate BS with no relation to reality and pure garbage filler content, like article presenting three different non-evidence-based ideas of how a dichotomy itself not grounded in evidence supposedly plays out in reality, with no effort to do look at any evidence or do any analysis as to whether any of them or the underlying dichotomy is connected to reality.

Humanity / humanism and science aren't opposed.

Wrong social models can have bad human implications. It seems to me that being careful with these models and requiring rigor is the humanist thing to do.

Go ahead and present hypotheses, that can be very interesting, just don't present them as facts.

(Now maybe this asker-guesser thing is indeed studied, I don't know)

> ("we" as in ostensibly thoughtful people - the average person definitely needs to lean a little bit more toward studies/statistics).

I'm not sure what you're getting at here by suggesting an elite class of people above the "average person" who do not require objective evidence. That's not really aligned with the core tenets of humanism.