I was recently introduced to a great, 30 minute podcast that discusses utilizing known psychological habits of humans to tell better stories.
In the NPR podcast: Spoiler Alert! The Psychology of Surprise Endings Shankar Vedantam discusses with Vera Tobin the many elements of psychology that are used in excellent storytelling including such classically twisty movies as The Sixth Sense and Usual Suspects.
You can listen to the podcast here:
And read the brief article that accompanies it here: Spoiler Alert! The Psychology Of Surprise Endings