This paper discusses particular traits of historical thinking, including the role of the historian’s mentality in the perception of history.

The paper depicts some negative consequences of the attempts of history comprehension. In the light of the settlements of the contemporary psychology such attempts lead to the biases in historical cognition results.

The paper depicts the relations between historian person and history cognition, especially the influence of his mind inclinations to cognitive biases on narrative.

The paper presents well-known destructive obedience research which has been used as an unsuc- cessful attempt to explain the reasons behind the Holocaust using social psychology. It also com- ments on a psychological theory which is more pertinent for elucidating this phenomenon

The paper presents the usefulness of the common sense psychology, as well as of the knowledge acquired in various traditions of academic psychology in historical interpretations.

Created in the distant past, attitudes and patterns of thinking have caused the mentality of contemporary Poles. The collective memory about the greatness delusions of old-time nobilities and the traumas suffered in the annexed territories today infl uence their thinking and behaviours as well national self-evaluation.

The paper On the Psychohistory as a Historiographical Paradigm reviews a book by Tomasz Pawelec: History and the Unconsciousness. Theoretical Premises and Research Practice of Psychohistory, Katowice 2004. The book includes both the reconstruction of the theoretical and methodological assumptions shared by psychohistorians based on the psychoanalysis or the neofreudian conceptions and the characteristics of their actual studies of the history. The psychohistory is presented by T. Pawelec as a vivid and constantly changing paradigm in historiography of 20th century. His book is recommended to psychologists interested in the psychoanalysis and, even more strongly, to historian.

The article presents some possibilities and limitations of the general psychological knowledge utilization in the causal explanation in history based on the probabilistic model.