A few years ago, I was in a health club getting dressed, and I pulled one of my socks on. I don't spend too much time worrying about my clothing. The sock had a hole in the heel. Another guy in the changing room burst out with an explosive laugh. I mean, it was loud. I'm talking about an adult man here, not a child. Then he stopped himself, when he realized he was laughing by himself, and he sort of looked away in embarrassment. Everyone else in the room pretended not to notice what he'd done. I didn't look at him or say anything, but I thought to myself, "How fucking immature do you need to be to do something like that?" According to Henri Bergson, laughter is a social corrective. We laugh at others to correct their errors in social behavior. By the mechanism of public ridicule individuals are kept in line, and prevented by their shame from diverging too far from the norm of the group. It's an automatic social mechanism, not something people usually think about consciously. At some point in this man's life, it had been impressed upon him that a person simply does not wear a sock with a hole. Probably by his mother.