How is it one group of people can perceive something one way, and others in a totally different way?

Look at it in context. He’s imitating the adults he looks up to. He doesn’t need a spanking. The adults need to think about their actions. He needs to have right and wrong explained to him. Your failure of parenting remark is dead on. Perception is based in part on your place you’re viewing things from. His parents are in the stands, laughing at cute little Johnny flipping of the ref or whoever. You’re looking at it as a responsible parent.
And yeah, I LMAO. But he can’t see that, so I’m okay with it.

Yes, he’s imitating the adults. In fact, someone must have taken the time to show him how to do it. What are people thinking?

Thinking? That never entered the equation.

Then take the kid’s photo to show him extra attention? Makes no sense.

@Dutchess_III: “I posted, “I’d turn that kid over my knee.””

^ This statement is quite upsetting to me. How is it one group of people can perceive something one way, and others in a totally different way?

How and why we perceive things differently results from many factors including familial influences, religious and political beliefs, education (or lack thereof), amount and distance of travel, even if our individual DNA. What a better world it would be if more people were better at appreciating other perspectives.

I would say that some people are trashy and often times the apple does not fall far from the tree.

It seems that this meme, as huge as it was, was missed by a few people. It’s a photo taken in 2002 at a Dutch soccer game. His name is Mikey Wilson and he was apparently 4 or 5 at the time.

Like @tom_g said, a lot of people would take issue with you stating you would strike a child, especially a 4-year-old for doing something he was taught to do by adults. There are plenty of folks that see the spanking you might consider normal to be child abuse. Others may shove copious amounts of research your way that shows spanking children may have negative effects on them in adulthood and that it’s no more effective than other discipline techniques that do not have negative effects. But you’d probably think they were going way overboard.

It’s simple: Opinions are like assholes – everyone has one.

You might see this as evidence of parental failure while some might see it as humorous and harmless. There’s no “reason” for it; it just is.

In an uneducated guess I would say upbringing and alot might view the tot flipping the bird as cute, alot will be offended, but that goes for politics, and religion as well,what some find as fine others will not.

I’m bad. I totally laughed. If that makes me horrible, then so be it.
I also think this is hilarious.

A sense of humor is a very strange, unknowable thing. So is our memory process.

My sister and I were brought up nearly identically, but her memories of our family life are very different from mine.

That’s the thing @Katniss… It IS funny at first blush. Just like the little kid telling her father off as she was trying to buckle herself into her car seat. We have to go deeper than the surface stuff though. It won’t be funny when he’s 6 and flipping off classmates and teachers. It won’t be funny when the little girl is 10 or 12 and lipping off to adults.

@Dutchess_III Good point. I’m with you there. I have seen kids behaving that way, it’s disgusting.

I’ve seen kids behaving that way and their parents just laugh at how cute they are.

I admit, I probably would have taken the photo. I wouldn’t put it on the internet, but I would have taken it. I probably also would have chuckled to myself if I saw my kid do that. That being said, he would not have seen or heard me chuckle and he would have been told in no uncertain terms that that behavior is not ok. He would be notified that if that was to happen again there would be consequences.

That being said, I agree 100% with @tom_g, it seems in this very thread we have a couple of different perceptions of corporal punishment. My perspective is that smacking the child would teach him one more thing that he will get in big trouble for which is probably not the desired result. From my perspective it is not ok to hit another human being – even if you are bigger than them.

We disagree on whether it is ok to hit a kid for the same reason you disagree with laughing at these bird flying shenanigans, our life experience has given us different perspectives.

Thing is, my kid wouldn’t have done it. Neither would yours. So how we would react really doesn’t apply, does it. I mean, not our kid! I just wish people would think.

My kid is 19 and he still wouldn’t do that. As a matter of fact, he’d yell at me for doing it.
“Mom! That’s embarrassing! Stop it!!”

Yes! My kids couldn’t even fathom it.

I couldn’t have said it better than @LilCosmo.

This question is like asking, “Why is it that one group of people can be Liberal, and others are conservative?”.

I don’t know the answer. Perhaps it is simply genetic based survival differences.

@gondwanalon I honestly think it’s pure learned behavior.

Personality.

Let say you have a comedian make a racist or sexist joke, why is that within the targeted race, or even outside the group, some find it extremely hilarious while others are insulted?Personality.

Why do some people laugh when someone gets hurt while others are sad, shocked, or in terror? Personality. The way the person fell or the way the accident happened made it humorous even though the person was hurt or killed.

There are different styles of of humor to accommodate different personalities.

I find this link hilarious. Others do not. The thumbs up or down can give you some indication

@eno I looked at your link. If you find humor in those crashes, which most certainly killed someone, maybe even a few children, then you’ve watched far too much fake TV and played far too many video games and don’t know the difference between fantasy and reality. I found it horrifying.

OK, the question for you then is what causes some people to have one kind of personality and another to have a different personality?

@Dutchess_III The environment, of course, and everything that goes along with it. Our families, friends, life experiences, innate temperament, etc.

I agree there’s nothing funny about that video.

I know…it’s mostly learned behavior with some native personality thrown in. I was actually asking @eno to go a little deeper than “personality.”

@Dutchess_III then you’ve watched far too much fake TV and played far too many video games and don’t know the difference between fantasy and reality.

So does your psychoanalysis of me also apply to the other 2,000 people who liked the video?

How about those who find the picture cute? Same psychoanalysis for those people too?

@Dutchess_III what causes some people to have one kind of personality and another to have a different personality?

This questions falls under the nature v.s nurture debate among scientists. The only agreed upon answer so far was that there wasn’t a single source. Meaning, that it was a mixture of nature and nurture.

So that psychoanalysis you provided is just foolish for its lack of empirical evidence and for its emphasis on a single cause source.

@eno I could click a thumbs up on the video. Doesn’t mean I found it funny. I’ve seen those before, strongly tempted to show it to the grandkids who are learning to drive.

I accept your explanation about personality. But as far as the toddle flipping the bird, which I find disturbing, would you consider that those who find it “cute” to be a product of of their upbringing or their nature?

if you find it horrifying, why are you thumbing it up?

As for those who find it cute, I’m with the empirical evidence here. It is an interaction of genes and environment.

Because it’s morbidly fascinating. It would be a valuable learning tool.

Yes. Everyone here accepts the “empirical evidence” of what creates a personality. I, however, think that anyone who views nasty behavior as “cute,” just because it’s done by a little kid, missed something in their up bringing.

Well there you go. I find the video funny. You find the video educational. We’re perceiving it in different ways because of our different genes and environments.

You’re just being biased towards nurture.

I’m being biased toward nurture? In this particular instance, regarding the kid, yes I am.

Regarding what I view as feeling an inappropriate emotion to such carnage as seen in your video, I have to ask if you’ve ever experienced a severe car wreck, or known someone who was killed in a wreck?

I have been personally in a car wreck, I witnessed a bunch of car wrecks, and I knew more than a few people who were killed by car wrecks.

@eno Then what exactly what is funny about the video?

The style in which these people drive and crash their cars.

physical comedy or slapstick humor

Physical comedy and slap stick humor is planned comedy. It’s meant to be a joke and no one gets hurt. I can imagine that there are times when someone IS hurt but that’s the chance they knowingly take.

Your video does not compare to slap stick. It isn’t a joke. Those are real accidents and real people, maybe real children, died. Yeah. The kid was only 7 years old and he got smashed through the windshield! His blood and guts were everywhere and he’s like, totally dead, dude! Isn’t that hilarious?

Who cares if something is planned or not if it produces the same affect?

E ffect, dude.

They are two completely different effects. One is planned and rehearsed strictly for comedy and no one gets hurt. It parodies an accident. It’s a pretend accident.

The other is a REAL accident and people die. You really don’t see the difference? That is disturbing.

You’re not explaining the effect. You’re explaining the procedure involved to produce an effect.

The effect is the same whether real or fake (people get hurt in a humorous way whether real or planned).

In planned slap stick no one gets hurt. It’s planned so it may look like they get hurt or have a close call, and that’s the effect they’re aiming for, but no one really does.

In a horrific car wreck the effect is that people actually get killed or paralyzed or blinded or gutted. And you think that’s just hilarious. There’s something wrong with you.

You’re talking about something else entirely. We’re talking about the effect it has on the audience or the viewers or witnesses of the fake or planned events, not those who are producing the effect. I agree that the difference between planned and live events is that one is fake harm and the other is real, but in terms of the effect in has on the viewers, the fake and real produce the same effect (laughter).

It was not drivers intention to produce laughter for me, but he did so anyway by hurting himself in a humourous way (physical or slapstick humor).

You need to take evaluate your emotional reactions @eno. You seem utterly devoid of empathy.

http://www.fluther.com/167730/do-you-find-this-video-to-be-hilarious/#quip2875365

No, I don’t. I’m fine with my emotional reactions. I don’t care if you think I’m devoid of empathy and I certainly don’t care that 10 people on fluther do not find this video hilarious.

Go ask the same question on 4chan boards, or darwin awards. Let me know what responses you get.

Here we go, a famous one.

Grape Lady falls

29,000 people find it hilarious, but you, plus another 1,000+ find it horrific.

Even the news anchor on the right was seldomly laughing towards the end

She broke 5 ribs and punctured a lung. Hilarious. The only way it could possibly be any funnier is if her thigh bone was broken a protruding through the skin! Oh what a crack up!

No, breaking 5 ribs and puncturing a lung is not hilarious at all. The hilarious part is how she fell and reacted to the fall.

@Dutchess_III Well, there are things that many people find funny after the fact that they hopefully wouldn’t laugh at right when it happened. I’ve done things that I definitely didn’t find funny when they happened, but I can crack up about them now – even if I got hurt. Plus, there’s a disconnect if you don’t know the person. That’s why shows like America’s Funniest Videos, World’s Dumbest, Tosh.0, Ridiculousness, etc. are so popular. Not to mention the large amount of “fail” videos that are viral online at any given time. The people that enjoy these videos are not psychopaths and they don’t necessarily lack empathy. People have been laughing at other people doing stupid things and potentially getting hurt for a really long time.

I still don’t see why car crashes are funny, though. To me, these aren’t the same thing at all. I don’t think I’ve ever witnessed someone laughing at a car accident, even after the fact.

The car crashes is under the same umbrella of fail compilations. If you took at the car link, it’s tagged on the screen “wtfyoufail”.

Another hilarious one at someone’s expense. dea agent shoots himself in foot

Plenty of buzz killington’s who won’t laugh at any of this stuff. They’re the ones who are never invited to any social events for this reason.

@eno No drunk people acting stupid? No idiots trying to skateboard down stair rails or jump off of buildings onto a trampoline? No cocky college guys making fools of themselves? Not the same thing. Metal crunching and cars exploding…not funny. Entertaining in a morbid kind of way? Sure, but not funny. And I still say it’s not the same. Two things can be “fails” without both being funny.

I thought the picture Rarebear posted of himself on fb, after he took a face plant in the mud when he fell off his bike, was pretty funny!

Exactly @livelaughlove21.
Some of the Funniest Home Videos are funny in an “Ouch, glad that wasn’t me!” kind of way, but some of them aren’t funny at all. Especially the tramp accidents. Also, the people in those videos have given them up for our entertainment. I somehow don’t think that a person who lost a loved one in an horrific accident would give up the video of the crash so everyone could laugh about it.

@Dutchess_III That too.

Damn, I missed the flame bait! I always miss the good stuff. Anyone catch it? Ahem, PM me, ahem.

@livelaughlove21

I don’t think it should be separated, but fair enough, to each their own.

I’ll rephrase my answer since the first was removed for flame-bait.

What did you of the palestinian ambassador who blew himself up? Horrific? Funny?

I broke into laughter the minute I imagined the event. I believe he is being reviewed for the darwin award.

@eno I’d love to know how your response was originally worded.

I’m not familiar with the case you mentioned, so I can’t say. I’d assume the funny part isn’t in your description, because I don’t find it funny or “horrific” (I definitely haven’t used that word in this thread) based on that alone.

I post on those forums sometimes, but for being a site with blogs written by psychologists I have to admit that I get upset with the material and responses on there. Those types of posters are the same types of idiots posting on other sites stating that it’s wrong to teach kids compassion and empathy. These are the same types of idoits who then turn around, and of course are the very first people who want to hang everybody when they commit crimes and disrespect others in the future.

OMG….....

I agree with child protective services there. Those parents are literally generating a future violent criminal. There are some things that are illegal which aren’t as bad as what the parents in that video are doing.