political beliefs are actions in the social space, not estimates of reality
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Humans are often drastically overconfident in their convictions relative to their factual knowledge, sometimes ridiculously so. Why is that?
The authors say that beliefs about political questions are fundamentally different to beliefs about practical matters. They offer 3 views of political beliefs:
* We believe things about politics mostly to get the approval or admiration of others.
* People express what seem like political opinions as a way of expressing support for a party, not because they think what they say is necessarily true. "not to express their 'belief', in its conventional meaning, but rather to throw verbal stones" (Gary Langer).
* political beliefs are often not so much opinions about reality as much as they are accepted positions of one's chosen political coalition.
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