Michael Vassar once mentioned the example of some tribe of people who believed in faeries, because some of them could see hints of them from the corner of their eyes. Turns out that they had some sort of a degenerative eye disease that caused them to see things.
IIRC, he commented that while the tribe's theory about faeries was wrong, they were still onto something. They didn't just imagine that they were seeing things. They were seeing things, and constructed the best explanation they could given the information available to them. Even such a blatantly incorrect explanation was still correlated with the truth on some level.
All models are false, but some are useful. (Even if the faerie explanation probably wasn't very useful.)
Here's an interesting but very old paper - two theories of Heat Control.
It discusses mental models of home heating systems (thermostats) non-experts use.
These models tend to be extremely wrong from theoretical perspective, but surprisingly useful in practice.
The findings are applicable to a much wider range of subjects than just thermostats, and have certain epistemological significance, especially with regard to compartmentalization.