Much of the work in human cognitive psychology over the past quarter century has focused on issues of rationality and bias. The general conclusion is that the same processes that help us create order in our thoughts can (and often do) give rise to errors which we fail to recognize. There is a large literature on this topic, but several books below provide a digestible introduction.
Baker, Robert. Hidden Memories.
Prometheus Books, 1992. An informal treatment of various memory and other cognitive errors
that underlie some anomalous beliefs.
Coltheart, Max & Davies, Martin. Pathologies
of Belief (*), Blackwell, 2000. Case studies of delusional thinking with
an emphasis on what this reveals about normal thinking. Some emphasis on the
underlying cognitive neuroscience.
Evans, Jonathan. Bias in Human Reasoning. (*) Erlbaum, 1989. Focuses on the unreliability of human reasoning. This is a short, but good treatment.
Festinger, Leon. Cognitive Dissonance Theory. Stanford University Press, 1956. The classic treatment of how people deal with inconsistencies in their beliefs.
Gilovich, Thomas. How We Know
What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Reason in Everyday Life. (*) NY: Free Press,
1991. This is a lucid, quite readable discussion of how the biases embedded in our
cognitive systems lead to characteristic errors in reasoning. He has brief chapters on
health fads and ESP.
Hoggart, Simon & Hutchinson, Mike. Bizarre
Beliefs (*) Richard Cohen Books,1995. Highly readable general
introduction. A good place to begin.
Piattelli-Palmarini, Massimo. Inevitable Illusions: How Mistakes of Reason Rule Our Minds. Wiley, 1994. An informal and readable catalogue of cognitive illusions.
Plous, Scott. The Psychology of Judgment and Decision Making. (*) McGraw-Hill, 1993. More technical than the Gilovich, it is also a better treatment of the psychology of rationality.
Shermer, Michael. Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time. (*) Freeman, 1997. Long on description of various fringe beliefs and relatively short on attempts at explanation. Especially good on Holocaust deniers, Creationism, and alien abductions.
Wegner, Daniel M. White Bears and Other Unwanted Thoughts. (*) Guilford, 1989. A well-written and accessible book on how we control our thought processes, especially on how we suppress unwanted thoughts. Less readable, more technical, but also more up to date is Wegner, Daniel M. & Pennebaker, James W. (Eds.), Handbook of Mental Control. Prentice Hall, 1993. Daniel Gilbert's "The assent of man: Mental representation and the control of belief" in the latter volume deals directly with beliefs, and other chapters deal with regulation of memory, emotion, and action.
Wegner, Daniel The Illusion of Conscious Will. MIT Press, 2002. An extraordinarily well written tour de force on the whole issue of free will and why we believe we possess it. In the process Wegner deals with issues such as facilitated communication, hyponosis, and Ouija boards. Not light reading, but highly recommended.Zusne, Leonard & Jones, Warren Anomalistic Psychology: A Study of Magical Thinking (2nd edition). Erlbaum, 1989. Intended primarily as a text, this is perhaps the most complete review of the various cognitive factors.