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.
I suppose I also meant to ask after the proliferation of both types of abuse. Physical confrontations among men, from my schooling experience, were quite rare. I once witnessed an 'alpha' stare down someone challenging his status, while verbally asserting dominance and forcing the challenger to agree the alpha was superior, and the challenger was an idiot for thinking otherwise. From an anthropological perspective it was quite enthralling to watch.
I know that physical violence among male culture occurs more frequently in other regions, and that in Japan...
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?