Rather, the theory is that when the costs of having erroneous beliefs are low, people relax their intellectual standards and allow themselves to be more easily influenced by fallacious reasoning, cognitive biases, and emotional appeals.
In other words, people do not deliberately seek to believe false things but stop putting in the intellectual effort to be open to evidence that may contradict their beliefs.
In an essay on irrationality in politics Michael Huemer[3] identifies some possible sources of preferences over beliefs: Many of the claims of religions are not easily verifiable in the day-to-day world.
There are many competing religious theories about the origins of life, reincarnation, and paradise, but mistaken beliefs about these rarely impose real world costs upon the believers themselves.
In typical large democracies, each individual voter has a very low probability of influencing the outcome of an election or determining whether a particular policy will be implemented.
The psychological benefits of supporting policies that feel good but are in fact harmful may be greater than these small expected costs.
Caplan attempts to demonstrate empirically the existence of systemic biases in beliefs about economics in his book The Myth of the Rational Voter.
Caplan believes that the rational irrationality of voters is one of the reasons why democracies choose suboptimal economic policies, particularly in the area of free trade versus protectionism.
A key idea of public choice theory is that many harmful policies have concentrated benefits (experienced by special interests) and diffuse costs.
The key difference between expressive voting and rational irrationality is that the former does not require people to actually hold systematically biased beliefs, while the latter does.
Loren Lomasky, one of the proponents of expressive voting, explained some of the key differences between the theories in a critical review of Caplan's book.