Confirmation bias? We do see a lot of it. My fav. example from personal experience was this girl, she picked up a leaf and said something like "oh look god made it with three parts, to represent the trinity".
You are right, I should study the psychology of false beliefs,, it does sound very interesting.
I sure have the time on my hands these days.
Id also be interested to read something about the psychology involved when a person is incapable of ever admitting they are wrong about anything. That seems to be a near to invariable aspect of creationism.
Any specific ideas on what would be a good read on that?
Off the top of my head? Sadly, no. I've picked up most of this stuff through texts on other things, like social psychology, developmental psychology, memory, and most especially advertising. The amount of things some advertisers know about you that you don't is scary.
Texts or papers on "belief formation" might get you where you want to go, but I'm not sure. If losing a belief is the opposite process of gaining one, then that would help. My first guess would be that the mechanisms are different.
Wikipedia suggests:
" Bell, V., Halligan, P.W. & Ellis, H.D. (2006) A Cognitive Neuroscience of Belief. In Peter W. Halligan & Mansel Aylward (eds.)
The Power of Belief: Psychological Influence on Illness, Disability, and Medicine. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-85010-2
and
Michael Argyle,
The Psychology of Religious Behaviour, Belief and Experience, Routledge, 1997,ISBN 978-0-415-12331-0
For bleeding edge knowledge, access to something like the APA database might yield a journal whose topic is belief. There's a bajillion psychological journals, just like there's gazillion scientific ones. Direct access to such places is usually expensive, but almost every university library and many public libraries will have subscribed.