The guys seems to have segued from behavior with evolutionary origins to consciously justified behavior.

On the likely evolutionary origins and advantage of believing the other guy, or going along with the tribe, I agree. My own theory is that there are different motivations for the acceptance of a belief, many of which have nothing to do with it's predictive value, and many people really just aren't that motivated by predictive value. When I say "not motivated" I don't mean they have a conscious list in their head that they evaluate by. No, they have different pattern matching algorithms in their heads, one of which is "belief predicts well", and other are "the bossman says so", "my tribe says so", "mommy says so", "this is easy to understand", "this feels good to believe", etc. Different people have different weights associated with the different pattern matching algorithms, giving them different valuations of the beliefs.