On Second Thought

Outsmarting your mind's hard-wired habits.

by Wray Herbert

How The Mind Construes/The Post-Election Blues

Here's a way to keep perspective amid post-election craziness. Read More

The scarcity heuristic, half a mile down

Brushes with death change how we think about living Read More

The Hidden Costs of a High-Calorie Recession

The heuristic mind entwines cash and hunger, with bad results Read More

Jelly Beans, Stick Figures, and AIDS in Africa

Heuristic thinking can be fatal in rural Ghana. Read More

A Unifying Theory of Psychological Momentum

It was a big emotional win. Does that mean momentum? Read More

The Whodunit Heuristic: Why 9/11 was Immoral

The heuristic mind has an automatic and rigid sense of right and wrong. Read More

Life is not a family football pool

The familiarity heuristic says pick the Redskins Read More

The "Piece of Cake Heuristic"

Is the "piece of cake heuristic" a variety of the fluency heuristic? Read More

Spinning class, the scarcity heuristic, and me

This is actually a short piece I wrote a while back for my trainer at the gym. I was trying to explain what my book is about, and specifically how it's related to exercise, fitness and health choices. She ended up sending this to corporate headquarters, and it was eventually distributed to trainers at all the health clubs, where it's used to help motivate struggling gym-goers: Read More

A Cognitive Avalanche

"On February 12, 1995, a party of three seasoned backcountry skiers set out for a day on the pristine slopes of Utah's Wasatch Mountain Range. Steve Carruthers, 37 years old, was the most experienced of the group, though they were all skilled skiers and mountaineers. Carruthers had skied these hills many times, and was intimately familiar with the terrain. Read More

Into the Heuristic Mind

Welcome to my new blog, called On Second Thought. I have borrowed both the name and the concept for this blog from my new book, the full title of which is On Second Thought: Outsmarting Your Mind's Hard-Wired Habits. Read More

Wray Herbert is a science writer and author of On Second Thought: Outsmarting Your Mind's Hard-Wired Habits.

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About On Second Thought

My On Second Thought blog is an extension of my book, On Second Thought: Outsmarting Your Mind's Hard-Wired Habits--but much more. It's an introduction to the field of cognitive psychology known as heuristics and biases, and also a forum for discussing continuing advances in the field. Each of the 20 chapters in my book introduces and discusses one kind of heuristic thinking, but there are hundreds of these subtle habits of mind at work. Here is the place to expand on the essays in the book and to introduce and discuss related ideas.