Admittedly, I am hardly capable of cool neutrality in my assessment of these uses of my research. But to assert, as I do, that Recer and McCaffrey distorted the evidence is not to impute motives or assert that they acted fraudulently. Recer s error might be viewed as deceptive, but it might simply reflect confusion or carelessness. For General McCaffrey s essay, a plausible account might invoke an overworked staff, a recent public history of skepticism if not outright hostility toward the Dutch approach to drug problems, and an AP story that seemed to meet their rhetorical needs. After some decades debating hot vs. cold accounts of various judgmental biases, most psychologists have come to the conclusion that warm cognition is the norm.
Warm cognition is motivated it acts in the service of furthering one s desired ends.
But it acts the way lawyers are supposed to act when they are properly fulfilling their advocacy role. Social psychologists call this constrained directional bias we push our interpretation as far in the desired direction as the evidence will permit, but not further. For many if not most Americans, the use of into the use of intoxicating drugs, at least illegal ones, is a profoundly immoral act and must be judged and policed on moral terms. The American Jury, that jurors personal sentiments are most likely to emerge as a factor in deliberations when the evidence was equivocal or ambiguous. Similarly, physicist and science fiction author Gregory Benford has offered a Law of Controversy in which passion is inversely proportional to the amount of real information available.