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First and foremost, this seems absurdly difficult to measure rigorously. It is easy to determine whether someone professes a belief, you just ask them on a poll. It is highly nontrivial to determine whether someone "truly believes" something in the way you describe in any sort of objective sense. You can make a bunch of inferences that you think ought to logically follow from the true belief and also ask them about those on a poll, but that's incredibly subjective in what "counts", and someone with genuine true belief could disagree with some of your logical implications or disagree with those particular statements because they also have other beliefs you didn't expect them to have. And someone without genuine true belief could agree with those statements for other reasons.
Similar issues come up if you try to track real world behavior like "does this person buy a gas guzzling car?" Maybe they really believe in climate change but they're just selfish and care more about their own convenience. Maybe they have a consistent belief that only 1% of people with the most demand for hauling heavy things around should have large trucks and they genuinely believe they qualify as one of those people. Maybe that belief is in part selfishly motivated but in part genuine and it's not a binary thing. Similarly, lots of people who don't believe in climate change still have low carbon impact simply by coincidence. Any attempt to measure hypocrisy is going to be incredibly subjective and could turn out completely different answers based on the methodology.
Second, I think a lot of the perceived sparseness is availability bias. You are thinking of positive examples where people have hypocritical-seeming behavior, and controversial issues that people disagree on, but if you look at a broader and less interesting class of beliefs I expect you'd find 99%+ of beliefs are genuine. Everyone believes the sun will come up tomorrow, and acts accordingly. Everyone believes that wearing clothes in public is good behavior, and acts accordingly. Everyone believes that using doorknobs is the optimal way to open most doors, and acts accordingly. There are millions of minor facts that everyone genuinely believes in, acts as if they believe in, and take for granted, not even thinking about except when educating children. It's only concepts which are controversial, which some people do and some people do not believe in, where your attention is drawn when making these considerations. So if you're trying to make some sort of claim about rarity of genuine beliefs you need to be careful about what class of beliefs you are considering.
Additionally, controversial issues where there is mixed evidence are precisely issues where a good Bayesian ought to have a nontrivial probabilistic belief. Maybe someone thinks there's a 60% chance that antropogenic climate change is a big problem, and so they do some high efficiency efforts that they think have a high value per cost, but not others because the expected value is lower than someone with a 99% belief would perceive. Does this 60% belief count as "genuine?" And would your study be able to tell the difference between that and someone with a hypocritical professed 99% belief?
In theory something along the lines of your study, done extremely carefully, could be useful. In practice it is incredibly likely to be muddled with subjective biases to the point of unusability except as a cudgel by some people to bash their political opponents with and call them hypocrites with "scientific evidence", and nobody learns anything they didn't already know.
Counting issues above aside, I'm not sure. And it's a much more interesting question when approached practically - what do many peoples' held beliefs mean, and should they hold the supposedly-nongenuine ones, as opposed to a philosophical "how real are they" approach.
Are beliefs about, say, the attractiveness of clothing genuine? Not that it's entirely fake, but the history of fashion and said trends show it is, at best, highly contingent - does the simulacra, groundless nature of it mean anything? What about men or women who find women with heavy, garish makeup attractive? (one could respond "they're just making trivial claims about their experience", but ... say i'm enlightened, and can redirect the rivers of perception at will - I look at an apple, "perceive it" instead as a pear, and then honestly claim "I see that as a pear". Something's not quite right there! Wouldn't something like that apply to to socially-modified, rather than intentionally-modified, beliefs?)
If someone says (and does really believes, as opposed to it being a straight lie) "I think my wife is the most beautiful person in the world"?
Beliefs of the form "my race is superior", or "my country is superior to other ones"? Even if some races were superior, e.g. whites or jews being smarter, most folk beliefs posit supremacy in areas where it doesn't exist, whether that be historically "british good, german bad", "whites are much more honest and freedom-loving than blacks", or funny-to-us balkan or african rivalries. There are plenty of overtly nationalistic or racist people alive today.
"I want to lose weight, but just can't manage to, I try to eat less but I still don't lose any!" or "I want to lose weight but don't have the willpower to"?
"<my favorite player> is the BEST <sport> PLAYER!" What does that mean?
It's easy to put politics into the 'just one of many things' box, but looking at a broader scope of human activity, a lot of them don't seem to be "fully updating" or "broadly applied". IMO, that's borne of their meaninglessness, and said faux-beliefs should be abandoned by those who hold them.
You make a good point that there are a wide range of possible fake, or at least questionable beliefs in a broad range of areas. But I don't think that invalidates my point that there are an absurdly large number of genuine beliefs about banal things. Any number of anecdotes does little to provide statistical weight when for every suspicious "My wife is the most beautiful person in the world" you cherry pick out there are literally hundreds of trivial beliefs like "My wrinkly grandpa is not the most beautiful person in the world", "my neighbor's dog is not the most beautiful creature in the world", "My wife's red scarf is more beautiful than her brown purse", "My wife's red scarf is more beautiful than mud"... that never get questioned and are rarely even mentioned because they're just so obvious to the person holding them and relatively uninteresting.
I'm not arguing that nongenuine beliefs don't exist, or are super rare in some global sense. Just that they are vastly outnumbered mathematically if you consider the full set of ordinary beliefs that people have continuously throughout the day that let them function as human beings.
Agree with that, and made the same point lol. It gets worse - what about locally-correct beliefs that are held for the same reasons as pseudobeliefs? One might avoid poisonous plants because they're "cursed", and also burn incense to avoid curses. Say you, in the interest of 'health', or just because it's what everyone in your family does, brush your teeth each night, and also use antimicrobial mouthwash each night - believing both to be equally effective means of teeth cleaning - and yet you don't actively pursue 'cleaning stuff off of teeth' while brushing, just 'go through the motions' and don't clean effectively, and also eat lots of donuts.
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Lots of great points here; let me respond to a few.
Agreed, although this is a problem with most psychological and social states. There is a robust conceptual distinction between someone joking vs being sincere, but actually teasing that apart rigorously is going to be hard (and you certainly can't always rely on people's testimony). Instead, when it's really essential to make a call in these cases, we rely on a variety of heuristics. The point of my screed is not that I've found a great new psychometric technique, but rather an important conceptual distinction (that psychometric or legal heuristics could potentially be built around).
Right, although that would generate predictions of its own (e.g., changing their behaviour immediately when the convenience factors changes). Hard to measure for sure, but not impossible (I think we do this all the time for lots of similar states).
That's possibly true, but not hugely interesting except for framing purposes since "counting beliefs" is a messy endeavour in the first place. Perhaps my main thesis could be reframed as "a lot of things we are inclined to think of as being beliefs aren't actually best understood as beliefs but as a distinctive type of state." Moreover, any serious attempt to quantify the prevalence of S-dispositions vs beliefs is going to have to grapple with some messy distinctions between e.g. explicit beliefs that are immediately retrievable (my date of birth is XX/XX/XXXX) and implicit beliefs that are rapidly but non-immediately retrievable from other beliefs (Donald Trump is not a prime number).
Again, this is messy in practice, but as long as we stick to the conceptual level it's fairly clear-cut, insofar as we'd expect different behaviour from a rational sincere Bayesian 60% believer vs a hypocritical 99% believer (consider, e.g., betting behaviour).
To be clear, this is theoretical psychology/philosophy of mind rather than policy recommendations, and any actual implemented policies would be several research projects downstream.
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