Cognitive-Affective Mapping (CAM) in the Study of National Identity

Steven J. Mock, Balsillie School of International Affairs

(working paper)

Cognitive maps (also known as conceptual graphs, concept maps, and mind maps) have been

used for some time by researchers in psychology, computer science, and political science as a

method of depicting the conceptual structures that people use to represent important aspects of

the world (e.g. Axelrod 1976, Novak 1998, Sowa 1999). Representing beliefs as sets of

connected concepts allows one to recognize the relevance of distinct patterns of coherence in

decision making and other kinds of inference.

Cognitive-affective maps allow the researcher to incorporate emotion directly into the

representation of beliefs (Findlay and Thagard forthcoming; Thagard 2010, 2011, forthcoming-a,

forthcoming-b), in recognition of the increasingly acknowledged principle that the emotional

values attributed to concepts, far from being hindrances to rational decision making as often

assumed, are in fact crucial and indeed indispensible elements of human perception,

understanding, and decision making (e.g. Damasio 1994; Loewenstein et al. 2001; Thagard 2006;

Vohs, Baumeister, and Loewenstein 2007). The old and still widely used distinction between

“cold” and “hot” (rational and emotional) cognition is no longer serviceable. Especially in efforts

to explain and understand conflict, emotion must be given pride of place.1

Nation and Emotion

Emotion is rarely addressed directly in the study of ethnic and national identity. This is not

because its importance is in any way denied; it is widely accepted that a felt attachment to a given

identity and its symbols is a precondition for individuals to mobilize, sacrifice, and fight for the

group. People fight over stuff they feel strongly about – this notion is easy enough to understand

– and therefore emotion has to be aroused on some level in order for conflict to occur. However,

it is often assumed to be too complex, abstract or even mystical an aspect of the human condition

to be amenable to any form of operationalization. As a result, we tend to talk around it, or

presume it to be a byproduct of other forces and influences. Nonetheless, the role of emotion in

the processes by which humans represent their beliefs and world-view can be recognized as at

least an implicit theme in existing scholarly debates surrounding the origins and basis of ethnic

and national identities.

The tendency to mystify emotional attachments of individuals to their nations can be said to be

built into the primordialist assumptions common to national identities and ideologies themselves.

National membership is a felt reality, an intrinsic aspect of who you are. As Ernest Gellner

(1983) put it, it is considered akin in the modern world to having a nose and two ears; which is to

say, it is possible that one may be lacking any of these things, but unnatural, the consequence of

an extraordinary tragedy. The nation is, if not in the blood, then at least embedded in history,

1 see, for example, Alexieva 2008, 2009; Barry, Fulmer, and van Kleef 2004; Bazerman, et al. 2000; Bizman and

Hoffman 1993; Fisher and Shapiro 2006; Forgas 1998; Gordon and Arian 2001; Halperin 2008; Lindner 2009; Long

and Brecke 2003; Maiese 2007; Martinovski and Mao 2009; Mercer 2010, Obeidi, Hipel, and Kilgour 2005;

Retzinger and Scheff, 2009; Schreier 2002; Shapiro 2002; Stone, Patton, and Heen 2000; Thompson, Nadler, and

Kim 1999.

usually a long history throughout which the national group can be recognized as a continuous

protagonist. This often leads to the assumption that conflicts between groups that implicate

symbolic or territorial attachments are simply the consequence of “ancient hatreds”; that essential

characteristics of distinct groups place them in conflict, and that these antagonisms are, for

whatever reason, the very properties of an enduring group identity.

Modernist theorists challenge these assumptions, and particularly the way that they tend to the

reification of groups, along with their symbolic attachments, as unitary agents rather than

instrumental assemblages of otherwise diverse individuals or contingent products of variable

social forces. In fact, most national identities are of relatively recent origin, and can be shown to

have been shaped in large part by instrumental political interests.2 Indeed, it is not difficult to

find empirical support – throughout history, and in current situations of conflict – where national

symbols have been manipulated intentionally by elites seeking to mobilize populations further to

the standard imperatives of power politics. However, scholars supporting neo-primordialist3 or

“ethnosymbolist”4 perspectives counter that such approaches, taken in isolation, offer only a

shallow explanation for ethnic or national group mobilization and conflict. Though cases can

certainly be found of elites manipulating symbols to mobilize masses for material gain, and of

masses making choices regarding their identity or taking sides in a conflict for utilitarian ends,

such manipulations run up against inherent limits. There has to be a body of symbolic resources

within the existing cultural matrix for those elites to manipulate. As Anthony Smith (1998:130)

puts it, instrumentalist theory “places too much weight on artifice and assigns too large a role to

the fabricators. The passion that the nation could evoke, especially in time of danger, the

sacrifices it could command from the ‘poor and unlettered’ as well as the middle classes, cannot

be convincingly explained by the propaganda of politicians and intellectuals or the ritual and

pageantry of mass ceremonies – unless, that is, the public was already attuned to both propaganda

and ceremonial… The ‘inventions’ of modern nationalists must resonate with large numbers of

the designated ‘co-nationals’ otherwise the project will fail.” For every instance where elite

manipulation of national symbols has been successful in altering identities or mobilizing

animosities, there are many in which attempted manipulations fail to resonate. Elites are

constrained in which symbols will generate mass emotional response, and instrumentalism

doesn’t answer the question of why one symbol will resonate and another not.

A third category of theory, which we can broadly term “constructivist” frames the nation not as a

thing in nature, nor as an instrumental fabrication, but rather as an emergent social construct, the

product of a convergence of a distinctly modern set of norms and instrumentalities. While this

general principle is sensible, as well as explaining the emotional attachment of individuals to

2 A view most forcefully articulated by Paul Brass (1979:40-1, see also 1985 and 1996), but also evident in the works

of David Laitin (2007); as well as historians John Breuilly’s (1993:1) notion of nationalism as being ultimately a

form of politics geared toward control of the state and Eric Hobsbawm’s (1983, 1990) concept of nationalism as the

product of “invented traditions” engineered by elites to mobilize masses in the age of mass politics. 3 For example, sociobiologists such as Pierre van den Berghe (1978) who view nations as extended products of the

evolutionary mechanism of kin selection explained by, among others, Richard Dawkins (1989 [1976]); or culturalists

such as Stephen Grosby (2005a, 2005b), drawing primarily from the works of anthropologists like Clifford Geertz

(1993) who saw groups as forming around perceived a priori “givens” such as descent, language or religion. 4 A school of thought associated primarily with Anthony D. Smith (1986, 1991, 1999, 2009) that frames the nation as

a modern social construct nonetheless dependant on continuity with durable pre-modern ethnic communities;

associated as well with John Armstrong’s (1982) work which drew in turn on social anthropologist Fredrik Barth’s

(1969) focus on boundary mechanisms as the defining traits of groups.

ideational systems with existential significance to the continuity and stability of their social order,

specific models as to the historical causation both of particular nations and of “the nation” as a

global ideal-type have proven notoriously difficult to validate. Benedict Anderson (1991), for

example, saw the nation a consequence of the decline of traditional universal religious ideologies,

leading to the formation of territorial states based around the division of vernaculars formed from

the market demands of print capitalism. Gellner (1983) saw them more as the product of the

social changes necessary to the maintenance of a modern growth economy, accelerated by the

impacts of industrialisation on the relationship between imperial cores and their culturally distinct

peripheries. Inevitably, however, each of these models proves more applicable to some cases

than to others. Not all nations form around communities of language, nor out of the collapse of

empires in the face of industrialization. Clearly, then, different social processes have historically

led to more or less the same eventual result: the transition to a world of nations each of which,

though they might differ in the details, are remarkably similar to one another – and similarly

distinct from the diverse traditional social-ideational systems that preceded them - in terms of

their conformity to a common set of global norms and a shared ideal-type.

In summary, then, primordialist theories are best at taking emotional attachments to symbols

seriously as causal factors in identity construction and conflict, but in doing so tend to mystify

and essentialise them, falling into backward reasoning as to the origins and basis of these

attachments. Instrumentalist theories offer the greatest amount of empirical support, in terms of

number of cases where the manipulation of identity symbols by elites is evident in the service of

material interests, but it is implausible that this is the whole story. Constructivist theories start

from the most sensible premise – that identities are social constructs – but beyond this truism, are

notoriously difficult to verify or falsify when it comes to supporting general theories as to when

and how they are constructed.

Hence the need for a method that will enable us to better probe, reveal, and represent the deep

ideational content of social identity and conflict. What are the emotional attachments at the basis

of a given national identity; the network of myths, symbols, values and animosities that are

experienced as felt realities? How could the manipulation of elites, or other perturbations, be

expected to effect the system (or not)? And what are the essential elements of the emergent

social construct that becomes the nation, in order for it to function as a coherent system of norms

and shared mental representations?

The Method

What is called for is a method capable of representing social identity not simply as a collection of

myths, symbols and values but rather as an interconnected network of myths, symbols and values

in a given equilibrium state. In response to this need, we offer cognitive-affective mapping as a

new method of graphically diagramming points of view. The products of this method—cognitive-

affective maps, or CAMs for short—represent an individual’s concepts and beliefs about a

particular subject, such as another individual or group or an issue in dispute. Concepts and

beliefs, each with its own affective loading, are connected together into a network with links

representing either compatibility or incompatibility between them.

There are four steps to constructing a CAM:

• identify the main concepts, beliefs, goals, and emotions of the person being modeled;

• identify these elements as emotionally positive or negative and, accordingly, represent them

by ovals or hexagons;

• identify relations of compatibility (solid lines) or incompatibility (dashed lines) between

elements; and finally,

• show the resulting map to other people connected to the issue to see if it reflects their

understandings.

The CAM approach adopts the following conventions. Map elements are depicted by shapes:

• ovals represent emotionally positive (pleasurable) elements;

• hexagons represent emotionally negative (painful) elements;

• rectangles represent elements that are emotionally neutral

• a superimposed oval and hexagon indicates ambivalence; a single element that can generate

simultaneously positive and negative emotional associations (though this symbol should be

used sparingly, only where positive and negative aspects of the same element cannot be

disaggregated).

• the thickness of the lines in the shape represents the relative strength of the positive or

negative value associated with it.

Straight lines depict relations between elements:

• solid lines represent relations between elements that are compatible or mutually supportive;

• dashed lines represent relations between elements that are incompatible with each other

The result amounts to a network of interconnected concepts, as illustrated in Figure 1:

A computer tool that facilitates drawing cognitive-affective maps is available at

http://cogsci.uwaterloo.ca/empathica.html.

The world “element” here is employed as a place-holder for what in various disciplines might be

referred to as myths, beliefs, values, narratives, concepts, intersubjective constructs, symbolic

resources, and so forth. Drawing from cognitive science the term I would prefer is “mental

representation”, in part because it encompasses all of the above, but also because it helps to

demystify what these elements or objects are: processes that exist in the brain. It may be beyond

our (or at least my) ability at this moment to discern exactly what sets of neural impulses amount

to each of these elements, but that does not change the fact that, far from being mystical

properties, they are indeed objects in nature and should be treated as such.

Potential Uses

But in doing so, this methodology immediately leaves itself open to charges of reductionism.

Breaking down these mental representations to individual words or phrases has the potential to

vastly oversimplify their content, and attributing to them only positive, negative or neutral

valence similarly obscures the various nuances of emotion. This method cannot, without

accompanying narrative, draw out the vast and often significant differences between the positive

emotions of, say, happiness, pride, exuberance, contentment, arousal, etc.; or the negative

emotions of anger, hate, jealousy, disgust, frustration, and so on.

The answer to this objection, to begin with, is that any modelling language is by nature

reductionist, providing the tools to zero in on a limited set of factors to draw out a limited set of

connections in the interests of a limited argument. Any language is, by nature, as limiting as it is

expressive, and though the reduction of mental representations to single words or phrases has the

potential to oversimplify, it also provides a means by which the complexity of these concepts can

be depicted and unpacked. And at the cost of representing the nuances of emotion (which

narrative can always do better) what CAM can illustrate, better at times than these accompanying

narratives, are patterns of emotional coherence, and the importance of such coherence to the

functioning and stability of an identity construct. The emotions aroused by national symbols are

not just given irrational attachments. There is a logic to them, indeed an emotional logic that can

be discerned, mapped and predicted. Treating emotion as a product of the mind prevents us from

dismissing it as an irrational and therefore unfathomable factor in our calculations.

Understanding of emotion has the capacity to reveal connections between elements in one

ideational framework that may not be present in another. This methodology allows us to see not

only the emotion attributed to a given object, but how this leads to other valences being attributed

to other associated objects, enabling us to recognize patterns that might not otherwise be

apparent.

The simplicity of the language also allows for a multiplicity of uses. It can depict theories as to

the content of a world-view and differences between distinct world-views in such a way as to

take ideational constructs as causal factors accounting not just for emotion, but for cognitive and

emotional coherence. But it does so in a way that can incorporate a wide variety of empirical

sources, or a convergence of such sources. Maps could be drawn from analysis of texts, from

survey or interview data, even by subjects of study themselves, or through a combination of such

sources. The methodology is not tied to any prerequisite disciplinary jargon or theoretical

framework, and therefore can be taught to non-experts or experts from a variety of disciplines,

allowing for widespread collaboration.

It is even possible that it could ultimately be used as a method for quantifying emotional valence.

Though it is doubtful that the subjectivity of the researcher – who must choose the elements

considered relevant, and the mechanism by which data is to be coded – could ever be removed

from the equation entirely, given a controlled amount of textual, survey and/or interview data,

coded in a consistent and transparent manner, yielding certain measurable and replicable results,

the thickness of the boxes and lines in a CAM could be tied to the frequency and strength of

emotional relationships between certain mental representations indicated in the body of data.

Finally, this method has potential uses not just in scholarship but in the practice of diplomacy and

negotiation, to better understand the positions of parties in conflict and to further understanding

between them. Current scholarship in the practice of negotiation stresses the importance of

going beyond the conflicting positions of disputants to understand their underlying interests in

order to clarify the differences and possibly uncover unrecognized compatibilities with the

potential to reveal previously unseen alternatives that could at least partially satisfy both parties

(Raiffa 1982, Fisher and Ury 1983). But even this approach does not go far enough, as interests

are not always defined and measured according to the same sets of norms. One has to go further

to unpack the underlying beliefs and values according to which the framework of interest is

constructed, and whether these diverge between parties. Disputants themselves can be taught the

simple language of CAM and use it to improve understanding of their own perspectives or those

of other disputants. Or they can engage in a mediated process by which an outsider produces

CAMs of the various disputants’ perspectives that are then adjusted in dialogue with the

disputants themselves. Most importantly, CAMs can be used to identify key differences and

similarities in the disputants’ perspectives and thereby open up previously unconsidered

possibilities for compromise or reconciliation.

What Can We Map?

But this leads us to a potential second objection that one might raise any time a method devised

by psychologists or cognitive scientists toward understanding individual minds is reapplied at the

level of a collective construction such as the nation: are we, in using this approach, committing

the fallacy of reifying the nation as a unitary object with agency equivalent to that of an

individual? CAMs are maps of mental representations, and groups do not have minds, only the

minds of the individuals that compose them. The short and provisional answer to that objection

is that another potential use for CAM might well be as a means to devise and illustrate better

models as to the structure-agent relationship between the group as an emergent construct and its

component individuals. This is a distinct problem that will be addressed elsewhere in a later

paper. For now, our purpose is to demonstrate how this methodological language can prove

useful at various levels of analysis.

Individual Leaders

As a method devised for mapping individuals, the most obvious and straightforward use is to map

the mental representations of national leaders, particularly in situations of conflict and

negotiation. An example is provided by Scott Findlay and Paul Thagard (forthcoming) who

applied this method to Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat during the Camp David negotiations

between Israel and Egypt in 1978. Using first-hand accounts of the negotiations as their

empirical material, Thagard and Findlay show how significant events in the course of the

negotiation served to alter the leaders’ cognitive and emotional framework – that is, their

underlying interests and values - in such a way as to render their eventual positions more

compatible.

The positions of the two leaders at the start of negotiations were mapped by Thagard and Findlay

as follows:

These two maps offer a good introduction into how the methodology can serve to clarify

positions in situations of conflict and negotiation. Specifically, the key incompatibility in

positions is reflected in the different emotional valences attributed to either keeping or

dismantling Israeli settlements in Sinai. These two positions are logically incompatible: you

can’t have one without the other; you can’t want both one and the other. And between the two

leaders these interests at least appear as mirror images, and therefore intractable. But these

notions are connected in each map to very different networks of additional elements that are

logically and/or emotionally related in the distinct frameworks within which the two leaders were

operating.

As the argument progresses, new maps are drawn for each of the leaders demonstrating how key

events during the negotiation served to alter the emotional valence attributed to elements in the

CAM, and how each alteration had ripple effects on other elements in the coherent system that

led to an eventual convergence. In total, a succession of five maps is drawn for Begin and six for

Sadat. The first and last maps drawn for Begin can be compared as follows:

Among the changes that occurred between the beginning and end of negotiations, one can see a

markedly different relationship between democracy and the dismantling of settlements. This was

due, in part, to evidence brought to Begin’s attention that Israeli public opinion was not as

passionately opposed to compromise over dismantling the Sinai settlements as he had previously

assumed, altering the ramifications of concessions. Recognition of the emotional valuation of

democracy, and the implications of this valuation to how other elements in the system were

valued, was crucial toward understanding the impact that this new information could have on

negotiating positions. But there were also changes in the emotional framework that went beyond

the introduction of new information to alter rational calculations. At the bottom left of Begin 5,

we see the introduction of the element “grandchildren” with a strong positive valence,

strengthening, in turn, the positive valence attributed to the element “peace”. Several sources

noted that Carter often stressed the notion of future generations, sometimes obliquely through

casual discussions about his own grandchildren, and that this had significant emotional impact on

Begin, making the issue more personal, altering his emotional priorities.

According to Carter, Begin’s final emotional shift was brought about by a specific social interaction. With the

negotiations apparently coming to an unsuccessful end, Begin had asked Carter to autograph photographs of the

three leaders for his 25 grandchildren as a departing gift. On the advice of his secretary, Susan Clough, Carter

got the names of each of Begin’s grandchildren so that he could personalize the photographs. Carter thought

this had a profound affect on Begin. The Prime Minister and President Carter both began to cry while talking

about grandchildren and entered into a short but emotionally charged discussion concerning their

grandchildren’s future and war (Carter 1982:399). The conversation contributed to Begin’s emotional shift

away from the fear of embarrassment and uncertainty about dismantling the Sinai settlements and being flexible

in negotiations. He now focused more on ideals such as democracy, peace, and the future of Israel’s young

citizens as exemplified by his grandchildren. This final emotional shift salvaged the negotiations and was later

cited as a turning point by Carter (Carter and Richardson, 1998).(from Findlay and Thagard, forthcoming)

Of course, it was not the argument of this paper that the emotional changes brought about in these

individual leaders was the sole relevant factor enabling a breakthrough in negotiations. Other

systemic factors must be in place to enable convergence. But it does illustrate the utility of a

methodology capable of directly representing and accounting for emotional change as one such

factor.

Ideal-Typical Group Members

While the applicability of this method to mapping the emotions of individuals is evident, these

leaders did not reach these emotional starting-points in a vacuum. They are not simply

individuals with unique perspectives, but also members of groups, and the distinct networks of

mental representations that make up their cognitive-affective maps is inevitably formed in large

part by the identity groups to which they belong or into which they were socialized – state,

national, ethnic, religious, ideological, and so on – and by the nature of the institutional positions

of authority they hold within those groups. How do we account for the influence of these

factors? In short, how can we use a methodology designed to illuminate the cognitive and

emotional framework of the mind, to understand the influence of the group on that individual

mind; or, as is more often relevant, the aggregate effect on a collectivity of minds?

One possible way to do this without reifying the group is to map a hypothetical ideal-typical

group member, as a product of the averaging of aggregate data. The following CAMs were

drawn by Tobias Schröder, on the basis of research into attitudes in Germany toward sustainable

housing policy (Schröder et al., 2011). They are perhaps the first examples of CAMs for which

the empirical source material was survey data in which subjects were asked to self-report the

emotional valences attributed to certain objects.

These maps endeavour to provide insight into conflicts over housing policy in Germany,

specifically by contrasting the preferences of German experts and officials with those of average

members of the public over urban as opposed to suburban housing. These are not maps of any

one person, but obviously the argument here is not that every German official or every member

of the German public thinks in precisely this way as an individual. This is the aggregate product

of survey data, as interpreted by the researcher.

As an aside, what is interesting in these comparisons is some of the points of commonality, for

example common positive valence toward the concept of sustainability and concern over

environmental issues. This study served to highlight a widespread misperception that urban life

is less environmentally sustainable, demonstrating that the emotional response to experiencing

green space in the suburbs leads one to draw erroneous conclusions as to the relative

environmental load of suburban life. People make decisions on the basis of the green that they

see in front of them, rather than the green that is destroyed by suburban sprawl and the increased

need for transit. Awareness of this commonality will assist policy makers toward understanding

just what sort of information needs to be communicated to the public and how in order to further

appropriate policy goals.

Mapping the Nation

But mapping an ideal-typical member of the nation is, for some of our purposes, not sufficient.

The CAMs directly above may be the product of data collected in Germany, but it does not tell us

anything about “Germans” as such, as the individuals surveyed, and the hypothetical individuals

mapped through the aggregation of those surveys, are influenced by many other roles and

identities aside from the national. These results also reflect their perspectives as consumers,

workers, officials, family members, etc. Is it possible to use CAM to draw out the influences on

the individual of a particular group identity? In other words, can we use this method to, in effect,

draw a picture of the nation itself, as a system of shared myths, symbols and values with distinct

and shared patterns of emotional valence?

Here is where we get into the most methodologically sticky area. Nations do not have minds

with which to think and feel; how then can we draw a cognitive-affective map of an entity that

possesses neither cognition nor emotion? The short answer is that if we agree that the nation is

an emergent construct – more than the sum of its individual members – and that emotion is a

significant causal factor in the capacity of this construct to mobilize its members, then even if the

nation does not itself think or feel, the construct must nonetheless must have the capacity to

communicate distinct patterns of thought and emotion to its constituent members. The ability to

represent and operationalize those patterns can greatly facilitate our ability to understand and

predict the influences that particular national identities will have on masses of individuals, and to

track changes to national identities over time and in response to specific events.

The following is a CAM that I drew depicting how the Battle of Kosovo is interpreted in Serbian

national mythology, drawn from my research on this case in my broader study of symbols of

defeat in the construction of national identity (Mock 2012):

Assuming that this map is indeed an accurate depiction of the Kosovo myth, one must still ask

exactly where such a system of mental representations resides. It is not my intention to suggest

that any particular Serb, or even the ideal-typical member of any sub-group of Serbs, walks

around thinking and feeling these things all of the time. The sources for this map were textual

analyses of the most popular epics and recent political discourse, but while this map might be

said to represent a shared understanding of the myth and its component elements, the emotional

force of this myth and its influence on the wider construction of identity will vary widely

between different individuals, belonging to different sub-groups at different times. What I was

attempting to map, in drawing out the mythology of the Battle of Kosovo through this

methodology, were the mental representations and emotional valences that the group

communicated to its member individuals through this mythology. How it did so on an individual

level, and how successful it was, would be determined by numerous other extraneous social,

cognitive and emotional factors.

Does this serve to reify the group? A myth does not, by itself, have agency to communicate

anything. It is, at the most basic level, a set of mental representations residing in a mind. The

solution to this problem requires more involved exploration than we have space for in this paper.

But a short, preliminary answer is that approaching the problem using CAM methodology as a

tool gives us the means to understand reification as not just a fallacy with the potential to infect

scholarship, but rather as itself a cognitive-affective mechanism that contributes to group

formation and stability. Even if the nation is not a unitary entity with its own agency, the fact

that it is widely perceived and experienced as such is itself a factor that must be examined and

unpacked as a crucial element in the functionality of this distinct form of cognitive-affective

system. While the primordialist assumption of nationalism – that your nation is simply an

integral part of what you are, a historical if not biological given - is one we must still approach

critically, the hegemonic nature of this assumption is also something we must endeavour to

understand. CAM methodology can shed light on how a group forms as an emergent construct

without abandoning methodological individualism, by treating reification not just as a fallacy that

is the product of shoddy thinking, but as itself a cognitive mechanism that is a crucial trigger to

effective group formation.

This is an issue that calls for considerably deeper exploration. For now, my purpose is simply to

introduce the methodology of CAM, suggest some of its uses, and, finally, encourage scholars

engaged in the study of national identity to experiment with and further develop this method as a

means for providing quick and simple depictions as to what is most important to a given identity

construct. Certain issues relating to the nature of empirical source material and the uniform

coding of said material will have to be addressed over time through the experiences gleaned from

further use of the methodology before it will be truly effective as a means to measure and

operationalize emotion as a factor in identity. But the immediate use of this methodology

nonetheless has the potential to enhance research and understanding in at least two ways: First,

reconceptualising an identity less as a heterogeneous collection of myths, symbols and values

assembled through a given historical process of causation, and more as an interactive network of

myths, symbols and values in a particular equilibrium state offers the potential for richer and

more robust models for understanding the origins of those identity constructs and predicting what

sorts of changes or perturbations might or might not significantly effect that equilibrium, thereby

yielding more effective policy suggestions. Second, an approach capable of directly

incorporating emotion as a causal factor in the construction and coherence of identity systems,

even if only on a rudimentary level, will generate superior understandings to one that neglects or

mystifies this crucial aspect of cognition and decision making. This paper has demonstrated the

applicability of CAM to a wide range of identities at various levels of analysis, providing

analytical support for the claim that emotion is a crucial element in the cohesion of identity

constructs that must therefore be directly addressed in order for our understanding of these

constructs and their effects on behaviour and decision-making to have sufficient depth.

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