Milton Lodge and Charles Taber have been pioneers in developing a slightly
different approach to understanding how emotion affects politics. 20 Although
they agree with Marcus and his colleagues that affect should be regarded as
prior to cold cognition, they approach the topic a little differently. They
assume three things: (1) all political stimuli are affectively charged (the "hot
cognition" hypothesis); (2) people keep in their heads an online, constantly
updated "running tally" which includes their feelings about these stimuli; and
(3) how a person "feels" generally affects the reception of stimuli as well. "The
clear expectation is that most, if not all, citizens will be biased reasoners, finding
it nearly impossible to evaluate any new information in an evenhanded way,"
Lodge and Taber say. 21
These two perspectives may not be entirely complementary, as Redlawsk
has suggested. In particular, they implicitly disagree about whether encountering
a novel or unexpected situation is likely to lead to "better" decision-making.
Under the Marcus model, evolutionary mechanisms have led to an ability to act
instantaneously, before cold cognitive processes set in. This is expected to
improve, not detract from, decision-making. In Lodge and Taber's approach,
on the other hand, affect biases the interpretation of new information. As
Redlawsk notes, Lodge and his colleagues "find people are more likely to stick
to their guns, to support their prior beliefs, and thus allow affect to interfere
with updating [of newly encountered information]."22 Thus the first approach
emphasizes the way that emotions help us learn, while the second stresses the
ways in which emotions bias and distort that process.