Behavioral research · Audience insight
What people want to know when something goes wrong
When users encounter a negative experience, what drives their need to understand “why,” and how does that differ across audiences?
Preference shown as Cohen's d. Data: Yonas & Heiphetz Solomon, Child Development (2024).
The challenge
Teams often assume curiosity and attention are uniform across users. I tested how people decide which events are worth understanding, positive ones versus things that go wrong, and how that tendency shifts from early childhood to adulthood.
My approach
Designed and ran three forced-choice behavioral experiments across preschoolers, school-age children, and adults. Isolated the underlying driver with a mediation analysis (5,000 bootstrap samples) to rule out competing explanations.
What the data showed
People disproportionately seek out the “why” behind negative events over positive ones, and that bias grows with age (effect sizes ~0.5 to 0.6 in older groups vs. 0.1 in the youngest). The driver was specifically how much weight someone places on intent, not how surprising the event was.
Why it matters for teams
A concrete model for segmenting how audiences process information: younger audiences attend broadly, while mature audiences zero in on what went wrong and why. Directly useful for content strategy, trust & safety messaging, and onboarding flows that need to surface intent when something breaks.