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Notes -
Certainly people's behaviour is complicated by a host of competing beliefs, goals, and interests, and people are very good at rationalising away conflicts. However, the specific class of pseudo-beliefs I had in mind are those that people don't feel particularly obliged to reconcile with their actual beliefs or translate into behaviour. Sure, you have the person who genuinely believes that climate change is a real threat, and would love to be vegetarian but feels unable to do so for health reasons. But you also have people who seemingly sincerely assent to statements like "climate change is a real threat" but don't feel any real normative pressures to make that fit in with their other beliefs or translate it into behaviour. I think a lot of our social and political utterances are like this. They're not lies, and we take ourselves to genuinely believe them, but they constitutively function in a manner quite different from canonical beliefs.
I am not sure how you can determine what pct of their behavior is a function of not feeling normative pressure, versus feeling that pressure but having it overridden by other factors.
And, when you say, "they constitutively function in a manner quite different from canonical beliefs," how are you defining "canonical beliefs," and how are you measuring them? There is a danger of circularity, if they are, eg, beliefs so strong that they override others.
PS: Maybe look at work re value rationality (see eg here
[noting that "Some spheres or goals of life are considered so valuable that they would not normally be up for sale or compromise, however costly the pursuit of their realization might be" -- you would think, given some people's rhetoric, that fighting climate change might be one of them, but as you note, it often isn't] ).
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