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?
I guess this answer strongly depends on how exactly you define "abuse". My intuition is that generally the more intensive acts of abuse are less frequent, and the less intentive acts of abuse are more frequent; for example people more often scream at each other than hit each other. So where exactly you draw the line, the kind of abuse just above the line will probably be the most frequent. If we count only physical violence, in western culture (during peace) the most frequent would be men against women, or maybe parents against children. With psychological abuse, I am not sure.
A fair comparison would be a weighted sum: to multiply the frequency of abuse with severity of average consequences. But it is easier to evaluate physical damage from physical abuse (although this is also not simple: a small brain tissue damage from one incident may be undetected, but cumulative effects can be serious) than a damage from psychological abuse; the latter is almost impossible to evaluate.
(As a sidenote, focusing on statistics by sex is kind of privileging a hypothesis. We should start by looking at data, and draw the boundary accordingly. Sometimes the incidence will correlate with one sex very strongly: I guess criticizing not having a new dress for an event is a predominantly female behavior, just like e.g. bar fights are a predominantly male behavior. For other kinds of abuse, the incidence may be different.)
I think defining psychological abuse as that which is done passively (behind someone's back, through subtly in a conversation, etc.) and physical abuse as that which is done actively (aggressive contact, screaming, heated insults) would suffice.
I can see how asking, "... and by which sex?" can privilege the hypothesis that the most common type of abuse would be used by one sex more than the other. I think fixing it to saying, "... and by what sex?" solves it, though; what other answers could the data reflect besides male, female, DSD (intersex), or some combination of the three?