We’re wired to ask why — here’s what we’re really searching for

With frustration and fascination, I’ve come to begrudgingly accept that the questions I’m most interested in surface when I’m least equipped to answer them. Lights off, eyes closed, the pull of sleep growing stronger — a memory flashes across my mind. As I sink into it, the images turn into questions: Did I mess that up at work? What did they mean by that? Did I make the right decision?

During my most recent late-night ruminations, I turned over the confusing behavior of someone I just met. We hit it off at first, and I was excited about the prospect of a new friend. Then, out of nowhere, they pulled away and stopped answering texts or reaching out to make plans — the all-too-familiar phenomenon of “ghosting.” I couldn’t help but wonder what happened, and I don’t mean that as a figure of speech. I literally could not help but wonder, my brain looping through the same events over and over again, more intent on solving this mystery than getting a good night’s sleep.

Why did they pull away? What did I do wrong? And, of course: Why am I thinking about this at midnight?

This strong impulse to make sense of things can be useful, but it can also be incredibly annoying, perplexing, even counterproductive. But according to cognitive scientist Tania Lombrozo, it’s just as human.

“Of course, we might one day discover that chimpanzees seek explanations, or that African grey parrots wonder ‘why,'” she writes in the introduction to her new book Why We Ask Why. “Such discoveries would challenge the idea that explaining is unique to humans. But they wouldn’t challenge the significance of explanation for our species. It has its own warp and weft in the tapestry of what it means to be us.”

A career built on curiosity

Lombrozo appeared on my screen with a warm, wide smile and dark, wide-rimmed glasses, seated in front of a tidy, and packed bookshelf — a fitting backdrop for someone who has spent a career studying curiosity, how we learn, and how we explain the world to ourselves and to others.

I couldn’t resist the obvious, slightly on-the-nose question: Why write this book? What do we need to know about our own curiosity that we don’t already know intuitively?

“We all have this psychological, everyday experience of seeking explanations,” she said. “Learning more about that process can help us cultivate the skill, appreciate it, do it better. That benefits us in obvious ways.”

Like learning how to stop ruminating in the middle of the night, I thought.

“But we also know it can lead us astray,” she continued, as if reading my mind. “We can be manipulated, misled. The world is complicated. We can even mislead ourselves. I wanted to give people the tools to know when to follow that impulse and when to redirect it.”

The question “why” may appear as an outward search to find something that exists outside of ourselves, an answer. But throughout the book, Lombrozo shows that the questions we ask, the curiosity that drives us, and the explanations we settle on can also offer a mirror inward into who we are — as a species wired to seek meaning; as communities that use explanations to set up and navigate social structures; and as individuals learning our own way of being in it.

What we want from why

Trying to explain an event or problem that resists a tidy answer takes real effort, yet we’re wired to resist opaque, incomplete explanations. An unsatisfying answer needles at you, like a pebble jostling around in your mind. It may even keep you up at night. Why do incomplete explanations bother us so much?

“Explaining allows us to create an understanding of how the world works,” Lombrozo told me. “That’s valuable because it gives us the flexibility to generalize to new cases.”

An explanation doesn’t just account for what happened; it lets us connect the known to the unknown, anticipate what comes next, and figure out what we can do differently. Given all the potential benefits, it’s not surprising that our inquisitive nature develops early.

In one study Lombrozo describes, five-year-olds and chimpanzees were both trained to balance L-shaped blocks for a reward. The researchers then secretly added weighted “trick” blocks to the mix, and the blocks started to topple over. The children stopped to investigate, asking why and inspecting the blocks for clues; the chimps just kept trying, without pausing to figure out what was going on.

In my case, turning over the details of a possibly soured friendship was my attempt to figure out whether I had done something wrong, whether I was misreading social cues, or whether there were details I just didn’t know yet. That information could help me avoid a similar situation in the future and start building something that I really wanted — a social network in a new place.

More immediately, it would tell me what to do next. Should I text them, or leave it alone? I wanted, needed, to recover some sense of what would come next.

What drives us to seek it

The act of explaining can seem cognitive, but it’s driven by emotion and a sense of curiosity.

Curiosity nags at us, turning an unanswered question into something we want to pursue. The potential reward of that pursuit is a satisfying “Aha!” when the separate pieces click together, and an explanation falls into place. These “eureka moments,” both small and big, are pleasing and reinforce the habit of staying curious. Lombrozo points to a bolder version of this idea from psychologist Alison Gopnik, who compared it to sex: Curiosity is the “Hm …” — the itch, the lust — and the “Aha!” is the orgasm. In both cases, learning and reproduction, the reward fuels our behavior.

In her research, Lombrozo found that one of the strongest predictors of curiosity is the expectation that what we’ll learn will be useful. I found that idea a little deflating, partly because it didn’t leave room for marvel or wonder and partly because it’s at odds with my own experience. I regularly want to know more about things that are completely useless to me, like the name of random plants. I also tend to ignore subjects I know are important, like economics or politics.

She nodded along as I explained, pointing out that being drawn to seemingly irrelevant fields may be our mind’s way of acknowledging and accommodating something we all know is true, but would rather not face: The future is very uncertain.

“We don’t know in advance what information will turn out to be useful, but we also know that we don’t know,” she told me. Curiosity, she suggests, is an investment in a future self we can’t yet picture, which is part of the reason she recommends following it into unfamiliar territory as often as you do to places that feel obviously practical.

Your version of the truth

Seeking explanations is only half of it. We also dole out our own explanations in different doses of depth and breadth. Lombrozo describes these as “reasons,” conventions,” or “stories,” each offering the person receiving them a different version of what happened. Choosing among them is a social strategy: We decide what to reveal, what to leave out, and what we want the other person to understand about us and the relationship.

“Explanations are how we negotiate our interpersonal relationships,” she answered. “There’s something very disrespectful about ghosting, or about giving a lackluster explanation — it’s communicating that they don’t feel they owe you the explanation.”

If, for example, someone ends a long-term relationship with a generic reason, like “I’m too busy with work,” the other person may feel stung not only by the breakup, but by the inadequacy of the explanation itself. They received a “convention” when they may want a “story,” a narrative understanding where the level of detail matches the significance of the relationship.

That’s part of why my would-be friend’s ghosting stung so badly. It wasn’t just that they disappeared; it was that, in doing so, they seemed to communicate that our brief friendship didn’t warrant even a quick text, and that I, evidently, cared more than they did.

Such truth-tailoring scales up beyond interpersonal relationships and onto most every level of society. “You can have two people agree on the facts but disagree on the explanation,” Lombrozo said. That gap can have significant consequences for the actions we choose to take collectively — especially when paired with our well-documented tendency to recognize other people’s biases, while failing to acknowledge our own.

Lombrozo points to climate change as a case in point. People largely agree the planet is warming, but not everyone accepts that human activity is the cause. A study across twenty-three European countries found that in each one, believing climate change was human-caused was linked to a stronger sense of personal responsibility to address it, which predicted support for climate policies. In this and other cases, it’s our explanation of events that decides what actions we take.

Understanding this tendency — and the strategic role explanations play in our lives — can help us hold our assumptions more loosely, take others’ perspectives more seriously, and, in the end, treat each other with a little more respect.

Why we need the struggle

Our search for answers, and the explanations we construct along the way, is rarely straightforward: We weigh possibilities, dismiss some, and decide which questions are worth asking and which explanations are worth accepting. Those choices can shape where our search takes us.

In general, we tend to favor simple explanations that require fewer separate events to be true. But Lombrozo cautions against taking the instinct too far, arguing that the assumption underpinning it — that the world itself is simple — is fundamentally flawed. “Why, after all, must the world be simple?” she writes.

Her advice isn’t to reject simple explanations but to hold them loosely and be aware that the seduction of an easy explanation might pull you away from considering alternatives.

“‘Seek simplicity, and distrust it,'” she advises, quoting the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, adding. “I think of both instincts as angels on my shoulder. One points to the simplest explanation; the other asks, ‘Can it really be that simple?’ We don’t know in advance which one we need, so don’t neglect either.”

That tension — between settling for an explanation and doing the harder work of questioning it — is also at the heart of learning. Working something out for ourselves can be frustrating and slow, but research consistently finds that self-explanation, where learners reason and generate explanations for themselves as they work through problems, produces deeper, more lasting learning. The struggle itself can bring about the “Aha!” moment, opening up questions we might never have thought to ask.

Celebrating that struggle and the deep learning it produces, Lombrozo stresses, is particularly important now, when a growing number of AI tools are happy to field our questions and generate an instant answer before we work through anything ourselves.

“AI won’t kill curiosity,” she told me. “We will always go down rabbit holes. But I am concerned about the fate of deep learning if we ask AI to come up with all the explanations for us. We have to ask what kinds of cognitive activities we enjoy, that we do or don’t want to outsource to something else.”

A perpetual state of wonder

All of this relentless questioning and answering won’t lead you to the summit of some mental mountain, self-actualized and full of deep understanding about yourself and the world. It just leads to more questioning.

“We never get direct access to the truth,” Lombrozo reminded me toward the end of our conversation. “Explanations are always an approximation.”

It’s a brutal reality to swallow. Confusion is painful because it signals uncertainty and, with it, a potential lack of agency. But some of the most positive emotions that are also deeply human (awe, wonder, marvel) depend on that same uncertainty. Some of our most fundamental questions — “what is the meaning of life,” among them — are powerful because they have no definitive, clear answer.

Perhaps asking why in the best way possible means respecting two human impulses at once: our capacity to surrender to, even revere, a mystery, and our drive to wrestle some semblance of predictability and meaning from a chaotic world.

After speaking with Lombrozo, I managed, at least temporarily, to extricate myself from the events I was analyzing — to examine the wondering itself, to peek at the scaffolding of my own internal reckoning and ask what I was really after. And, naturally, a question appeared: Is our hunt for an explanation just an effort to reach through that dark, velvety mystery of human experience, make a ripple, find someone on the other side, and ask one more question?

Do you see the world as I do?

This article is featured on Big Think.