Why People Believe Weird Things: Science, Pseudoscience, and Critical Thinking

Abstract

Dr. Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic magazine and a monthly columnist for Scientific American, presents his most popular lecture on science, pseudoscience, and superstitions, explaining mysteries and exploring the psychology of why people believe them. In the process, Dr. Shermer will consider how science works by looking at how it does not work. Dr. Michael Shermer is the Founding Publisher of Skeptic magazine, he Director of the Skeptics Society, a monthly columnist for Scientific American, the host of the Skeptics Distinguished Science Lecture Series at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), and the co-host and producer of the 13-hour Fox Family television series, Exploring the Unknown. He is the author of The Science of Good and Evil: Why People Cheat, Gossip, Share Care, and Follow the Golden Rule on the evolutionary origins of morality and how to be good without God. He wrote a biography, In Darwins Shadow, about the life and science of the codiscoverer of natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace. He also wrote The Borderlands of Science, about the fuzzy land between science and pseudoscience, and Denying History, on Holocaust denial and other forms of pseudohistory. His book How We Believe: Science, Skepticism, and the Search for God, presents his theory on the origins of religion and why people believe in God. He is also the author of Why People Believe Weird Things on pseudoscience, superstitions, and other confusions of our time.