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In what sense do you mean that they "believe in" evo psych, such that "believe in" and "practice" are different? If you mean "believe in evo psych" in the "beliefs should pay rent in anticipated experiences" sense, I think you're just factually wrong. I suspect most people couldn't even elaborate what claims evolutionary psychology makes in enough detail for it to inform their expected everyday experiences. And even if they could, my experience is that the majority of average people don't actually predict what things they will experience in the future on the basis of extrapolation from scientific theories, but instead base their expectations on some combination of extrapolating their past experiences and extrapolating the stories they know about people "like them".
Which I suspect you realize, but I am not sure what it would even mean to "believe in" a certain scientific hypothesis "without consciously realizing it". Maybe you mean "the behavior of a huge majority of average people is driven by instincts and patterns of thought burned into them by evolution", but that pattern-matches better to "evo psych can predict the behavior of those people" than to "those people believe in evo psych".
They believe in it in the sense that they hold it to be true i.e. they consider it a social reality that inexorably asserts itself. It's just like the fact that women are capable of lying about rape and domestic violence. 98 out of 100 people actually believe that, but 78 out of those 98 would never admit that even to themselves.
So if I'm understanding correctly, your claim is that, for most things that evolutionarily psychology predicts, most people would make the same predictions?
If so, I think I buy that for a lot of things (e.g. "people intuitively value their immediate family more than their distant family, and people who look like them more than people who don't) though definitely not all of them (e.g. I expect evolutionary psychologists to have very different views on infanticide than the general population).
I imagine there's probably one particular claim that evo psych makes that you're thinking of here, but I'm actually not sure which one. Evo psych makes kind of a lot of claims and many of them are outside the Overton window.
Because "women are capable of lying about rape and domestic violence" is not actually a claim evo psych makes (except in the very general sense of "strategies that involve deception are adaptive sometimes"). Most people won't agree to that in an internet argument because they expect that "are capable of" will be treated as "mostly do" or some other similar "gotcha". But that's not a matter of not admitting it to themselves, it's a matter of not admitting it to a hostile internet rando.
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