Hypothesis: to enable malice in the quantities where it does "raise status or improve the odds of reproductive success", evolution made it a psychologically rewarding behavior (as well as plugging into socially rewarding circuits when it succeeds at raising status). And reward in the brain is implemented such that any rewarding behavior has a danger of self-reinforcing into an addiction.
Do we see more malice than this generic explanation can explain?
As for self-hatred, I don't get the sense that it's the same experience or drive as malice. Of course they could still reinforce one another due to overlapping brain signalling, etc. How do you see them relating to one another?
At least in my case, I found that I was repeating the spontaneous self-hating thoughts back to myself and making them louder. Once I realized that a piece of the process was under my control, I was able pretty much stop doing that part of it, and it's helped with making the spontaneous self-hating thoughts less frequent and intense.
However, why was I amplifying the self-hatred in the first place? I'm not sure. Some of it may be a hunt for intensity, but that doesn't seem like the whole answer.
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?