Well over half a century ago, Jean Piaget noted that cognition and affect are two sides of the same coin. While researchers initially needed to isolate one from the other for purposes of analysis, ultimately the goal of psychology was to understand how the two systems function in tandem, along with memory and perception. As specialization within psychology increased, we deepened our understanding of affect, cognition, memory, and perception, but lost sight almost entirely of how these systems interact as a whole. Indeed, some psychologists even argue that cognition and affect are unrelated systems. Needless to say, in political science and economics, a focus on cold cognition became almost an obsession obscuring any considerations other than rational calculation. Over the past decade or so, in an attempt to account for puzzles in political behavior, political psychologists have begun work that has brought the ultimate goal Piaget set for psychology into sight once more. The chapters on affect and cognition in Citizens and Politics are major advances toward a more holistic account of public opinion formation and functioning.

David O. Sears's summary of “The Role of Affect in Symbolic Politics” is a primer on one of the most important challenges to the rational actor model over the past two decades, and is written lucidly enough to be accessible simultaneously to undergraduates, laypersons, and professional analysts of public opinion. George E. Marcus and Michael B. MacKuen present an equally robust and readable account of Jeffery Gray's theory of emotionality and personality, demonstrating the theory's usefulness for understanding when voters are likely to rely on learned habits and when they are more likely to break their reliance on habituated partisanship and shift attention to new information, possibly leading to different electoral choices. In the section's third article, Roger D. Masters presents a model of emotional and cognitive responses to leaders based on recent advances in neuroscience, they have revealed a modular structure to the mind in which specific functional processes operate much like a distributed computing system, with the emotional centers of the brain (the amygdala and hippocampus) acting to integrate the various processes. Masters's approach presents affect and cognition as tightly linked and interdependent systems and is thus a major step toward a holistic understanding of attitude formation. Although his chapter is a bit less accessible than the previous two chapters and accepts as settled what is anything but settled—that is, hard-wired gender differences in cognitive and emotional functioning (e.g., Carol Gilligan is cited, but her assertion that men and women have different moral orientations has been resoundingly disproven)— Masters provides a far more sophisticated understanding of viewers’ responses to national political leaders than we have had to date.

The articles in the cognition section depart from traditional survey methods by adopting more experimental twists. One chapter focuses on voters’ responses to leaders’ explanations of their behavior, and two focus on the way in which memory influences cognitive processes. Richard R. Lau and David P. Redlawsk employ an award-winning simulation method (Lau received the International Society of Political Psychology Friedman Award for the best paper at the 1998 annual meeting) to assess how voters choose preferred candidates. Adding memory to their voter decision-making model, they find that during multicandidate primary election simulations, subjects employ different evaluation strategies than in two-candidate general election simulations. Kathleen M. McGraw's contribution to the volume analyzes leaders’ attempts to persuade and explain behavior by means of a multistage persuasion model demonstrating that accounts have a systematic influence on attributions of responsibility and character. Charles S. Taber, Milton Lodge, and Jill Glathar assess the role of memory-based and “on-line” evaluations of candidates and produce a model of motivated political judgment that goes a long way toward understanding how citizens pass judgment on their leaders. Together these three chapters provide a much deeper understanding of candidate evaluation than does previous research.

The third section on attitudes and perception continues the debate over the nature of beliefs in mass publics, but also adds an important new emphasis, voters’ perceptions of fact. Jennifer L. Hochschild is concerned not so much with what people know as with what people “know” that just is not so. She shows that misperceptions of social facts, such as the relative size of our ethnic and racial groupings, can have profound consequences for how citizens evaluate public policies. Paul Sniderman, Philip E. Tetlock, and Laurel Elms provide a devastating critique of John Zaller's research reported in an earlier volume in the Cambridge series, The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion. These authors find that contrary to Zaller's ambivalence thesis, attitudes are robust when situational and predispositional factors are taken into account. In perhaps the most innovative chapter in the book, Gregory Andrade Diamond develops a “Latitude-Theory Model of Citizen Attitudes,” based on much earlier work by Muzafer Sherif and Carl Hovland. Rather than an attitude's being conceptualized as a specific point along an agree–disagree continuum, Diamond suggests that attitudes are actually composed of three different “latitudes”: the latitude of acceptance, the latitude of noncommitment, and the latitude of rejection. Election swings can be accounted for by expanding or contracting latitudes of noncommitment or rejection, not by the conversion of believers into nonbelievers or vice versa. Citizens thus have a negative effect on elites by rejecting or constraining available policy options.

The final section on political values contains two chapters with very important new discoveries, but the third chapter and the commentaries only detract from this otherwise significant contribution to political psychology. Stanley Feldman and Marco Steenbergen ask: “If Americans are so suspicious of the welfare state and its philosophical underpinnings, why do so many champion its policies?” (p. 367). Their answer is that in addition to egalitarianism, economic individualism, and limited government, a strong humanitarian sentiment forms the core of the American political and social creed. While Feldman and Steenbergen add a dimension to our understanding of belief systems, Gregory B. Markus performs a bit of division. Using a forced-choice survey method, Markus identifies three distinct aspects of individualism and concludes that there are far fewer rugged individualists than heretofore believed, but that there is a strong desire for autonomy that supports government interventions, which enhance personal control.

Laura Stoker's contribution is an illconceived study of value “judgments” in which judgment is mysteriously missing from the analysis. She assumes that justifications of values can be inferred by the content of values. Her focus is on what people believe, rather than on why they believe it, or more specifically, she assumes that if people believe x it must be justified by y. The folly of such an approach can easily be seen if we compare the responses of an Eskimo and Arab man to a guest sleeping with their wife. While opposite values will be expressed, the underlying principle may well be the same, that is, the wife is viewed as a possession to be shared or hoarded as the owner sees fit. In contrast, two Communists might share the same values, but one might adhere to the labor theory of value based upon an analysis of surplus value, while the other subscribes to the theory because his father taught him to respect Marx. In sum, without asking subjects to actually justify their values, we have no way of knowing what that justification may be.