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Social Animals
I was playing with an online random substitution generator thing and was about to post it to LJ because a couple of results made me giggle though the rest were stupid, then realized that behavior is much more interesting than the results.
Why is it that whenever humans encounter something funny, sad, annoying, that tastes bad or good, that we instantly want to share it with any other human around.
Taste and smell makes sense. Primitive monkey food-gathering stuff. Emotional stuff too, probably as social networking on a hind-brain level.
I find it interesting because it's a function as automatic as breathing and it really seems to be a built-in component to most people.
It also leaves me wondering... What sorts of things are we NOT automatically tempted to share. Not ones we've learned to be guarded about through abuse or training, but what things do we as a species, genuinely tend to not care about enough to share?
Why is it that whenever humans encounter something funny, sad, annoying, that tastes bad or good, that we instantly want to share it with any other human around.
Taste and smell makes sense. Primitive monkey food-gathering stuff. Emotional stuff too, probably as social networking on a hind-brain level.
I find it interesting because it's a function as automatic as breathing and it really seems to be a built-in component to most people.
It also leaves me wondering... What sorts of things are we NOT automatically tempted to share. Not ones we've learned to be guarded about through abuse or training, but what things do we as a species, genuinely tend to not care about enough to share?
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Or on a more cynical side, perhaps passing it on could be double-checking your own assesment of it? Was it really that funny? Is it actually a threat? Have you made the wrong call?
Either way, social. One way creating positive social links, the other checking you haven't stepped out of line.
It seems to me the list of what we don't share could be defined as "everything else". It's hard to pick a specific. I understand there's a book called "Human Universals" that looks at patterns and similaritys through human cultures worldwide. Looking for those things common to all humans.
IIRC, it's also a quite expensive book.
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I've also noticed, at least for myself, I'm less inclined to share things that would require a large amount of explanation, or which is very meandering, unless the emotional reaction was particularly strong. I sort of term this "abstract thinking" - when I'm creating interesting concepts, but would have trouble really capturing them in words, and they're very emotionally casual.
I can't think of any strong emotional feeling that I'm not inclined to share. Perhaps "spiteful" emotions like jealousy and envy? It's fairly normal in my culture to talk about jealousy in terms of anger and resentment ("John is stealing my girlfriend from me!") rather than actually mentioning the jealousy. Could be cultural, though.
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