Why Ask Why?: " we all are motivated for survival purposes to develop cognitive understandings of reality that enable effective prediction and control over our worlds. When we understand and know what to do to produce de-sired outcomes and to avoid undesired ones, our worries are relatively few. But when something happens to engender uncertainty about our constructions and comprehensions of reality, our worries may be many. "

a model of motivated social cognition that builds upon this fundamental need to know, this need to reduce uncertainty about the causes of social events. We argue that there exist chronic individual differences in causal uncertainty beliefs that are related to chronic motives to reduce uncertainty about the social environment. Such motives can be domain-specific