I spend my days at work working with people using a cognitive behavioural theraputic method to help patients who suffer from cognitive distortions. These can be best thought of as 'warpy thoughts' or 'magical thinking'.
People spend their lives sifting through their sensory input recieved from the outside world. We use our brain to generate rules or heuristics of reality.
From these rules we can make predictions about the world. We can imagine things as the could be in the future.
For the most part we are reasonably accurate enough that we can plan our day, work etc. We have to do this: otherwise we have to assess every situation in real time (be conscious of it).
Doing that requires data from the out side world. If the data is faulty e.g. we are told the wrong thing, or the perceptual system is in error e.g. our brains malfunction, we can come up with rules that are wrong.
These rules (right or wrong) become our beliefs. By definition we believe our beliefs. When we are angry, really really angry we feel justified to act in an angry way. This is just another belief.
What we learn dicates what we believe. We can and will believe anything (beleive me, some cases which I have work on you would not believe).
My whole job is spent helping patients challenge thir beliefs; not handwaving them away, but trying to falsify them. An example of this is when a depressed individual displays the neagative recall bias (in memory); he or she only remebers the bad things. The belief then follows that only bad things happen. This belief is then subjected to attempts at falsification.
This method can help individuals assess his/her attitudes and beliefs and find evidence for their beliefs to create an accurate (not always correct) reflection of their world.
However, when a patient cannot attempt (not succeed, only attempt) to question the beliefs held about the world I refer them to more specialist treatment.
I hope this goes some way to addressing the OP.
Note this is very much like the scientific method.
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