there's nothing "relatively less cruel" about being beat up or shoved around than with being given the silent treatment.
My best friend was once given the silent treatment in a context and manner so stressful that she could not eat solid food for several days and I had to make her smoothies. A physical beating with the same effect would have had to be really seriously injurious.
It also depends on the context where the physical beating happens, not just the intensity.
For example imagine being beaten in front of your best friends, who are too afraid to intervene (maybe they realistically didn't have a chance, but you feel that they should have done something) -- that would hurt beyond the pain of beating itself. For a guy, being beaten in front of the girl he has crush on, probably means losing status and reproductive chances. Also the context determines the probability that the same thing will happen again: being beaten in the school where you must go every day, is worse than being beaten in a dark street you can avoid next time.
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?