I have heard that some females play relatively cruel psychological games with each other when compared to male culture. Is this true?
I would say no. I'm with Konkvistador; the male and female games simply take on different forms. Still, on the psychological-physical axis of abuse, women tend toward the psychological more than men, so I'd expect them to be commensurately more adept at purely psychological abuse.
However, regarding the big picture, there's nothing "relatively less cruel" about being beat up or shoved around than with being given the silent treatment. I've wondered more than a few times at how often the psychological effects of physical interactions tend to be overlooked. Even aside from, say, the actual physical pain of losing a fight, there's still all the other stuff. It's not like the memory of a fight lost in front of everybody suddenly vanishes or is instantly overcome. Physical pains intentionally inflicted on you by others always come with corresponding mental counterparts, while the reverse is not true.
However, regarding the big picture, there's nothing "relatively less cruel" about being beat up or shoved around than with being given the silent treatment.
Outside of fairly toxic environments, my experience is that social conflicts among men rarely devolve to violence past high school age. How far does this sort of judgmental behavior among women persist? It's something I'm aware of in abstract but I've never really observed it firsthand.
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?