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Comment by anigbrowl | Hacker News Reader

I don't care too much for correlates with self-report scales (a limitation noted in the study itself in the Further Work section).

Game theory offers an alternative approach of measuring a sample population's behavior in a suite of games with varying payoffs. The study below suggests most people's behavior patterns fall into just 4 major groups, with a 5th group (~20%) that seems to just make random choices. Even more surprisingly, these patterns seem to be established early in life and to be independent of socio economic factors. In that study, the largest cohort was found to be willing to experience a loss as long as the counterparty suffered a greater loss, and I suspect that would probably correlate well with the 'sadistic' cohort mentioned in OP's study.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.1600451

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I have a behavior pattern from my father: I'm initially 'happy' if someone is getting hurt (not Bad).

Like someone is dropping something or whatever.

I realized that's not the reaction I want to have and have a core memory of a woman asking a man who drove into the wall (with the back of a truck) if everything was okay with him before even checking the damage to the truck and her house wall.

I want my first reaction to be like that.

My older cousin told me on e that our grandpa was also like my father.

It's an unlogical trained behavior. Nothing more.

And unfortunately that also means there is no reason for people being like that than 'they learned it.

Germans have the word schadenfreude. Is it even a cultural pattern and my family just pushed the goal post further than others?

I don't know enough to say to what degree it's changeable; you can certainly train yourself in other directions, but reflexes learned in early life aren't easily overcome.

I don't think it's necessarily unlogical, eg it's adaptive if you are engaged in hunting or combat for survival. Perhaps you need to explore contexts in which the payoff for successful cooperation significantly exceeds that for defection.

I'm able to change it but it took first seeing another pattern.

Than it takes enough situations.

Have sympathy for your old folks. Of course you have more clear context on this than me so I could be out on thin ice, but hear me out. My inclination though is that it is actually something like fear based. We smile to each other to send the signal “hey, I’m nice, don’t hurt me”, monkeys do that too. And a laugh at those kind of situations you describe could just mean a shocking reflex “I don’t know how to handle this situation” which results in a laugh (and described as “happy”).

I could come up with a few hypothetical questions from this though: 1) do narcissists find “fail videos“ more amusing? 1.a) if yes, then it can be trained away by reminding them to reflect on the situations. This is normal training for narcissism, put them in other people’s shoes. 2) watching the same “fail videos” over and over again makes them boring? 2.a) it’s on the same line as previously, but instead the hope that it internalizes the seriousness of a situation.

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