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Notes -
Exactly.
The expected value theory here is symmetric. If you're close to 50/50 odds then your vote has a relatively high chance of making a huge impact, and you should make absolutely sure to cast it. If you're at 90/10 or 10/90, then whatever; why bother making your margin of victory a tiny bit larger or your margin of defeat a tiny bit smaller?
The psychological theory here is what's asymmetric. Social Desirability Bias tells you that if you agree with the majority and high-status leaders of Our Tribe then you are in sync with the community and safe and loved, whereas if you agree with the outnumbered and low-status dissenters from Our Tribe then you are a traitor and a risk and what are you even still doing here anyways? Best to hop on the bandwagon.
It's weird to see people blowing money on prediction markets to that end, though. They used to be such a niche nerd idea, mostly talked about among small groups who saw expected utility maximization as a goal and biases as obstacles inherited from our less-evolved ancestors, but I guess they're now just as fertile a target for hoary advertising tricks as "people who didn't even get up to stretch during the commercial breaks" used to be.
As I understand it, social desirability bias as a theory is meant to suggest why people may respond to, say, questionnaires in ways that may make them seem in harmony with favored social norms, eg if you ask someone directly (even anonymously) how many units of alcohol do you drink per day they may round down by one or more, if they're a heavier drinker. To do otherwise would give a feeling of hedonistic depravity (disfavored) even if true. This creates considerable noise in self-reported data, and is why parallel forms (similar but not exact) questions are sometimes used within in one questionnaire (and why Cronbach's alpha is used in analysis). Surveys of this sort are very difficult to do even passably well if one wants any data close to reflective of reality.
In this case--voting--it may apply but I would argue only within one's own imagined society. In other words so-called red tribe types will vote red because their people vote red. It's arguably not about some larger percentage of the population, it's about whom you value socially. I suppose you could tell some "blue triber" that the vote is 99% Trump and argue that they will be swayed to vote Trump to stay in sync, but I'm not so sure that wouldn't be very inconsistent across a large population.
edit: of to if
Polarization these days is strong enough that I wouldn't expect that bias to make a huge difference, it's true, only a difference on the margins. But we're on the margins again with this election, aren't we? +3% Harris nationally, but Trump's leading in a couple swing states he lost last time, probably within one swing state's electoral votes of winning. I could easily imagine a decent number of undecided voters being swayed (or just persuaded not to stay home) by the belief that one candidate or the other is socially acceptable or at least not too socially unacceptable.
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