I spent most of my life absolutely not understanding why a person would ask questions out loud in a classroom setting, with extra lack-of-understanding for people who disrupt classes with objections to the teacher's content or style.
Eventually I was able to understand, through a lengthy conversation with different individuals having different points of view on the topic, that I have an unusually sensitive fear of public punishment and aversion to authority, probably ingrained in me by some specific classroom events of my childhood.
I'm a high school student. I ask a lot of questions in classes, especially math and discussion-based classes like "Science and Religion". In math, this is an unwillingness to miss something and to back to it later--if I fail to understand one part of a lesson, it makes understanding the other parts hard. In "science and religion", I ask loaded questions that disrupt the class by turning it into a complicated debate between me and the teacher. This is because I have little respect for the (boring) subject matter, believe I'm smarter than...
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?