It's fun to boo. Expressing public displeasure with someone in a totally safe and one-sided fashion Is something people love to do: See forums.
Doing the same thing as the crowd around you is very thrilling. If some people start booing other people are likely to join in.
People actually DO get angry at performers. People tend to have strong senses of entitlement in these kind of situations and if they're disappointed they will be upset. Not everyone is crass enough to boo but surely you've felt ripped off in the past by a performance that was worse than what you expected?
Thanks for the reply, and upvoted. Now there are three things I don't understand ;-). It rings true in the sense that people can be reliably expected to behave that way. But I still cannot empathize, and if I have the same mental machinery as the booers, then I ought to be able to.
Fun to boo. This one feels right and yet so foreign. Shouldn't sympathy for the target of criticism kill the fun? Like you imagine doing something hurtful, then you picture the other person, hurt. Then you imagine what it would be like to be that person, and, jeez, I wouldn't w
The other day, someone did something I didn't expect. It was something many people have done before; something that I thought of as very normal, but that I in no way understood and had not predicted.
As I said, this had happened many time before, so I wrote it off as "me not understanding people" or "people are weird" for a second, like I usually do, before realizing that "bad at" really means "lacking basic knowledge", which I had never realized before.
And then I thought "I should ask someone who is different from me why people do that, and eventually someone will have an answer."
But many people will have many more questions like this. So, what have you observed people doing time and time again, but never understood? Or something that you only understood after a long time or asking someone about it?
And can Less Wrong tell us, not necessarily why (I for one can make up evolutionary psychology fairy tales all day if I want) but what conscious thought process occurs behind these events?