Milton Lodge and Charles Taber have been pioneers in developing a slightly different approach to understanding how emotion affects politics. 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.
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.