I suppose adults (around 20 years and onward) are the most productively discussable age group, as by then the mind has completed most of its development.
I can only think sadism the reason for why one would pretend to be someone's friend, unless affirming the "absurdity" of the concept itself reinforces a status divide.
The pin incident points to in-groups using exclusionary measures to define themselves from everyone out-group.
Just conceived theory:
In school settings, groups of girls that signal unavailability and attract the majority of their class's opposite sex maintain these two measures of status through exclusively signalling themselves as what 'high-status' means. These signals often express themselves as psychological games.
The theory would extrapolate to post-school settings by essentially repeating the process; have others signal one as high-status by treating one as such, then represent oneself as the epitome of high-status by using similar games to signal others as lower status.
The theory operates on the premise that the games are all about status, which I think would be sad if true. So specious.
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?