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.
14
Embed
Cognitive-Affective Mapping in the Study of National Identity
This document is posted to help you gain knowledge. Please leave a comment to let me know what you think about it! Share it to your friends and learn new things together.
Transcript
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: