Again, no correction letter was ever published. This was not the first time General McCaffrey had mischaracterized Dutch policy. The erroneous figures were based on an apparent failure to realize that the Dutch statistics included unsuccessful homicide attempts. My essay on biased interpretation relied heavily on a key distinction in contemporary social and cognitive psychology hot vs. cold cognition. Cold cognition is abstract and dispassionate, but not necessarily rational it is nearly as vulnerable to distortion, but due to the quick and dirty mechanical shortcuts of mental processing.
Hot cognition is cognition infused with emotion and motivation.
For several months after these media incidents, my own interpretations were positively scalding. With the passage of time, I m now able to reflect on these events more coolly. War stories like mine are all too common in the public debate on American drug policy, as they are in many other areas of social policy. Interpreting Misinterpretations Arguably, there are at least two normatively justifiable mechanisms for biased interpretation of evidence. First, from the standpoint of the Bayesian induction framework, disagreements about the a posteriori probability of a hypothesis, conditioned on the available data, are justifiable when judges differ in their priors their subjective estimate of the a priori probability of the hypothesis.