I suspect there's a lot of baseline variation there; for some people the sense of schadenfreude is very small and easily overwhelmed by empathy. Case in point: comedies that consist entirely of unsympathetic characters being jerks to each other (my go-to examples are Arrested Development and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia), which some people think are the most hilarious thing ever and some other people think are the most painful thing to watch ever.
I think mr bean is terrifying.
It's depressingly hard for humans to turn on sympathy over the internet and across tribal boundaries. All that has to happen for lulz to be the dominating drive is that sympathy doesn't get started (by conscious effort, scifi morality, good upbringing, some near-mode switch, whatever)
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?