A review by zhelana
Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time by Michael Shermer

challenging informative medium-paced

3.0

This book covers several weird things that people believe and debunks them. And it is pretty interesting to read these different sections. But it doesn't really answer the question "Why [do] people believe weird things?" I mean in the final chapter it suggests that people believe weird things because they want to, but I think that isn't true. Most people don't want to believe weird things, they want to believe true things. It's just that somehow their brains fall into the patterns seen earlier in the book and they wind up believing weird things as true. But I've found that the people who believe the weirdest things are the most firm in their beliefs that everything they believe is absolutely true. So anyway, I was disappointed by the lack of an answer to the question posed in the title, but the book itself was interesting enough to keep me reading.