Claire Dix

Everything was fine and the case studies gave me a lot to ponder until I reached chapter nine. At that point, everything that the authors encouraged the reader to think about regarding cognitive dissonance, and how to recognize it and to deal with it, was obliterated as they themselves became extremely political. Their argument fell apart. Everything that they told us in a cautionary way before chapter nine, was disregarded and became uncontrollable for them. As a matter of fact, I found myself laughing since, in the recent news (May 2024) Hilary Clinton is returning to the political scene and still “talking* about why she lost the election. This time she says that it is because she lost “women” who expect political women to be perfect, and therefore they abandoned her. I laughed when I reached chapter 9 when the authors even spoke about friends cautioning them that if they were to bring in politics everything could change within a year. Up to this point in the book , I had been thinking that the case of Hilary would be another perfect case study for the book to include of someone who suffers from cognitive dissonance. However, she was not mentioned up to this point. Here, in chapter nine, the authors present their “horror” of Trump. This “sheer horror” even deserves a change in font in the text. The jolt in direction was enormous . In my view, the authors have completely contradicted and disbanded their goals of studying cognitive dissonance in an impartial way. As a matter of fact, they just proved themselves incapable of following their own advice. Chapter nine is a complete reversal of the the cautions of cognitive dissonance which they had presented in the first eight chapters. They fell into their own trap. Interesting!!