The crawl can be explained without invoking pleasure at all. Once it gets started it is self perpetuating.
True, but "pleasure" doesn't necessarily explain why the lead car in the crawl slows down to look. Morbid curiosity or gawkination could explain the attraction.
As a matter of fact, cars slow down passing anything parked on the shoulder, even if there is no sign of an accident or injury.
You could make a better case for epicaricacy in the popularity of blood sports such as bear-baiting. But in that case it would not be epicaricacy, but epibearicacy.
Did the common man lose his taste for public hangings (a popular public spectacle before the turn of the last century) or did we outlaw such amusements because an increasingly educated population became embarrassed at the depravity of ordinary citizens?
We may have scotched the snake of epicaricacy, but we have not killed it. Does it still lurk in the fascination of professional boxing and extreme fighting, high-speed car racing with inevitable accidents and inevitable fatalities, predictable violence in sports like hockey?
Are we really less epicaricatic today than we were a hundred years ago when mom and dad took the family out to picnic at a public hanging? [A scary thought.]
