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: