When people ask "why" questions, and the heuristics of attributional search.

TLDR

Heuristics guide causal search, and the self‑probe method offers advantages for studying this process. Participants spontaneously search for causes, especially after negative unexpected outcomes, biasing toward internal causes after failure and external causes after success—a pattern that reverses the typical hedonic bias and suggests an adaptive function; the most common heuristic focuses on locus and control.

Abstract

Five experiments making use of a self-probe methodology in both simulated and real conditions demonstrated that individuals do engage in spontaneous attributional search. This search is most likely when the outcome of an event is negative and unexpected. Content analysis of attributional questions also suggested that causal search is biased toward internality after failure but toward externality following success. This reverse of the oft-reported hedonic bias implicates the adaptive function of causal search. The data also revealed that the most commonly used heuristic in attributional search is to center on the locus and control dimensions of causality. The importance of heuristics in causal search and the advantages of the self-probe methodology employed in these investigations are discussed.