Say­ing No to seem­ingly unrea­son­able requests and unwanted invi­ta­tions is easy for some and a gru­elling men­tal chal­lenge for oth­ers. This dis­par­ity between responses can be explained by look­ing at the behav­ioural dif­fer­ences between Askers and Guessers:

In Ask cul­ture, peo­ple grow up believ­ing they can ask for anything–a favour, a pay rise–fully real­is­ing the answer may be no. In Guess cul­ture, by con­trast, you avoid “putting a request into words unless you’re pretty sure the answer will be yes… A key skill is putting out del­i­cate feel­ers. If you do this with enough sub­tlety, you won’t 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.”

Neither’s “wrong”, but when an Asker meets a Guesser, unpleas­ant­ness results. An Asker won’t think it’s rude to request two weeks in your spare room, but a Guess cul­ture per­son will hear it as pre­sump­tu­ous and resent the agony involved in say­ing no. Your boss, ask­ing for a project to be fin­ished early, may be an overde­mand­ing boor – or just an Asker, who’s assum­ing you might decline. If you’re a Guesser, you’ll hear it as an expec­ta­tion. This is a spec­trum, not a dichotomy, and it explains cross-cultural awk­ward­nesses, too. […]

Self-help seeks to make us all Askers, train­ing us to both ask and refuse with rel­ish; the medi­a­tion expert William Ury rec­om­mends mem­o­ris­ing “anchor phrases” such as “that doesn’t work for me”. But Guessers can take solace in logic: in many social sit­u­a­tions (though per­haps not at work) the very fact that you’re receiv­ing an anxiety-inducing request is proof the per­son ask­ing is an Asker. He or she is half-expecting you’ll say no, and has no inkling of the tor­ture you’re expe­ri­enc­ing. So say no, and see what hap­pens. Noth­ing will.

This the­ory orig­i­nates from Andrea Donderi’s fan­tas­tic response to a 2007 Ask MetaFil­ter query on deal­ing with unrea­son­able requests.

From this arti­cle, David brings the fol­low­ing to our atten­tion: Sayre’s Law and Parkinson’s Law of Triv­i­al­ity.