Why is malice addictive?
I'm talking about malice which goes way beyond anything which could be expected to raise status or improve the odds of reproductive success.
There's probably a whole syndrome of things that contribute to this, including but not limited to:
"Improving the odds of reproductive success" is for the long term and for the ancestral environment. Online trolling and abusing one's kids in the privacy of one's home are products of an environment radically different from our evolutionary one. There's simply no good and noble reason for them, just the same old cognitive reflexes playing themselves out in unnatural surroundings.
Humans have the tendency to blame the victim. You treat someone like trash long enough and you'll start to buy into the idea that they deserve it and it's for the best. "I'm not unreasonable or cruel - if only he weren't such a lazy, thick-headed idiot..." Rinse and repeat long enough until all feelings of guilt go away, and possibly until all feelings of any kind go away and the abuse continues simply out of habit.
Trolling and lashing out at people online (and off-line) is a way to assert oneself. For people with low enough social skills and off-line status, it may be the only way of doing so. The harsher one acts, the more likely it is to produce an effect, which leads to vicious trolling being viciously enjoyable.
Malice isn't the only thing that's addictive - power in general is addictive, and that also goes for ways of exerting it. And, of course, since the other person is still an idiot who has it coming for being so thin-skinned, why not have a bit of fun?
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?