title: Dolphin

text: There is debate over the welfare of cetaceans in captivity, and often welfare can vary greatly dependent on the levels of care being provided at a particular facility. In the United States, facilities are regularly inspected by federal agencies to ensure that a high standard of welfare is maintained. Additionally, facilities can apply to become accredited by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA), which (for accreditation) requires "the highest standards of animal care and welfare in the world" to be achieved. Facilities such as SeaWorld and the Georgia Aquarium are accredited by the AZA. Organizations such as World Animal Protection and the Whale and Dolphin Conservation campaign against the practice of keeping them in captivity. In captivity, they often develop pathologies, such as the dorsal fin collapse seen in 60–90% of male orca. Captives have vastly reduced life expectancies, on average only living into their 20s, although there are examples of orcas living longer, including several over 30 years old, and two captive orcas, Corky II and Lolita, are in their mid-40s. In the wild, females who survive infancy live 46 years on average, and up to 70–80 years in rare cases. Wild males who survive infancy live 31 years on average, and up to 50–60 years. Captivity usually bears little resemblance to wild habitat, and captive whales' social groups are foreign to those found in the wild. Critics claim captive life is stressful due to these factors and the requirement to perform circus tricks that are not part of wild orca behavior. Wild orcas may travel up to in a day, and critics say the animals are too big and intelligent to be suitable for captivity. Captives occasionally act aggressively towards themselves, their tankmates, or humans, which critics say is a result of stress.


title: Dolphin

text: Although dolphins generally interact well with humans, some attacks have occurred, most of them resulting in small injuries. Orcas, the largest species of dolphin, have been involved in fatal attacks on humans in captivity. The record-holder of documented orca fatal attacks is a male named Tilikum, who lived at SeaWorld from 1992 until his death in 2017. Tilikum has played a role in the death of three people in three different incidents (1991, 1999 and 2010). Tilikum's behaviour sparked the production of the documentary "Blackfish", which focuses on the consequences of keeping orcas in captivity. There are documented incidents in the wild, too, but none of them fatal.


title: Dolphin

text: Fatal attacks from other species are less common, but there is a registered occurrence off the coast of Brazil in 1994, when a man died after being attacked by a bottlenose dolphin named Tião. Tião had suffered harassment by human visitors, including attempts to stick ice cream sticks down her blowhole. Non-fatal incidents occur more frequently, both in the wild and in captivity.


title: Dolphin

text: While dolphin attacks occur far less frequently than attacks by other sea animals, such as sharks, some scientists are worried about the careless programs of human-dolphin interaction. Dr. Andrew J. Read, a biologist at the Duke University Marine Laboratory who studies dolphin attacks, points out that dolphins are large and wild predators, so people should be more careful when they interact with them.


title: Dolphin

text: Several scientists who have researched dolphin behaviour have proposed that dolphins' unusually high intelligence in comparison to other animals means that dolphins should be seen as non-human persons who should have their own specific rights and that it is morally unacceptable to keep them captive for entertainment purposes or to kill them either intentionally for consumption or unintentionally as by-catch. Four countries – Chile, Costa Rica, Hungary, and India – have declared dolphins to be "non-human persons" and have banned the capture and import of live dolphins for entertainment.


title: Dolphin

text: A number of militaries have employed dolphins for various purposes from finding mines to rescuing lost or trapped humans. The military use of dolphins drew scrutiny during the Vietnam War, when rumors circulated that the United States Navy was training dolphins to kill Vietnamese divers. The United States Navy denies that at any point dolphins were trained for combat. Dolphins are still being trained by the United States Navy for other tasks as part of the U.S. Navy Marine Mammal Program. The Russian military is believed to have closed its marine mammal program in the early 1990s. In 2000 the press reported that dolphins trained to kill by the Soviet Navy had been sold to Iran.


title: Dolphin

text: The military is also interested in disguising underwater communications as artificial dolphin clicks.


title: Dolphin

text: Dolphins are an increasingly popular choice of animal-assisted therapy for psychological problems and developmental disabilities. For example, a 2005 study found dolphins an effective treatment for mild to moderate depression. This study was criticized on several grounds, including a lack of knowledge on whether dolphins are more effective than common pets. Reviews of this and other published dolphin-assisted therapy (DAT) studies have found important methodological flaws and have concluded that there is no compelling scientific evidence that DAT is a legitimate therapy or that it affords more than fleeting mood improvement.


title: Dolphin

text: In some parts of the world, such as Taiji, Japan and the Faroe Islands, dolphins are traditionally considered as food, and are killed in harpoon or drive hunts.


title: Dolphin

text: Dolphin meat is consumed in a small number of countries worldwide, which include Japan and Peru (where it is referred to as "chancho marino", or "sea pork"). While Japan may be the best-known and most controversial example, only a very small minority of the population has ever sampled it.


title: Dolphin

text: Dolphin meat is dense and such a dark shade of red as to appear black. Fat is located in a layer of blubber between the meat and the skin. When dolphin meat is eaten in Japan, it is often cut into thin strips and eaten raw as "sashimi", garnished with onion and either horseradish or grated garlic, much as with "sashimi" of whale or horse meat ("basashi"). When cooked, dolphin meat is cut into bite-size cubes and then batter-fried or simmered in a "miso" sauce with vegetables. Cooked dolphin meat has a flavor very similar to beef liver.


title: Dolphin

text: There have been human health concerns associated with the consumption of dolphin meat in Japan after tests showed that dolphin meat contained high levels of mercury. There are no known cases of mercury poisoning as a result of consuming dolphin meat, though the government continues to monitor people in areas where dolphin meat consumption is high. The Japanese government recommends that children and pregnant women avoid eating dolphin meat on a regular basis.


title: Dolphin

text: Similar concerns exist with the consumption of dolphin meat in the Faroe Islands, where prenatal exposure to methylmercury and PCBs primarily from the consumption of pilot whale meat has resulted in neuropsychological deficits amongst children.


title: Life imprisonment

text: Life imprisonment is any sentence of imprisonment for a crime under which convicted people are to remain in prison for the rest of their natural lives or indefinitely until pardoned, paroled, or otherwise commuted to a fixed term. Crimes for which, in some countries, a person could receive this sentence include murder, torture, terrorism, child abuse resulting in death, rape, espionage, treason, drug trafficking, drug possession, human trafficking, severe fraud and financial crimes, aggravated criminal damage, arson, kidnapping, burglary, and robbery, piracy, aircraft hijacking, and genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes or any three felonies in case of three-strikes law. Life imprisonment (as a maximum term) can also be imposed, in certain countries, for traffic offences causing death. Life imprisonment is not used in all countries; Portugal was the first country to abolish life imprisonment, in 1884.


title: Life imprisonment

text: Where life imprisonment is a possible sentence, there may also exist formal mechanisms for requesting parole after a certain period of prison time. This means that a convict could be entitled to spend the rest of the sentence (until that individual dies) outside prison. Early release is usually conditional on past and future conduct, possibly with certain restrictions or obligations. In contrast, when a fixed term of imprisonment has ended, the convict is free. The length of time served and the conditions surrounding parole vary. Being eligible for parole does not necessarily ensure that parole will be granted. In some countries, including Sweden, parole does not exist but a life sentence may – after a successful application – be commuted to a fixed-term sentence, after which the offender is released as if the sentence served was that originally imposed.


title: Life imprisonment

text: In many countries around the world, particularly in the Commonwealth, courts have the authority to pass prison terms that may amount to "de facto" life imprisonment. For example, courts in South Africa have handed out at least two sentences that have exceeded a century, while in Tasmania, Australia, Martin Bryant, the perpetrator of the Port Arthur massacre in 1996, received 35 life sentences plus 1,035 years without parole. In the United States, James Holmes, perpetrator of the 2012 Aurora, Colorado shooting, received 12 consecutive life sentences plus 3,318 years without the possibility of parole. In the case of mass murder at the US, Parkland mass murderer Nikolas Cruz was sentenced to 34 consecutive terms of life imprisonment (without parole) for murdering 17 people and injuring another 17 at a school. Any sentence without parole effectively means a sentence cannot be suspended; the prisoner may, however, effectively be released following a pardon, either on appeal, retrial or humanitarian grounds, such as imminent death. In several countries where ""de facto"" life terms are used, this is commonplace, such as in the case of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi.


title: Life imprisonment

text: A few countries allow for a minor to be given a lifetime sentence with no provision for eventual release; these include but are not limited to: Antigua and Barbuda, Argentina (only over the age of 16), Australia, Belize, Brunei, Cuba, Dominica, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, the Solomon Islands, Sri Lanka, and the United States. According to a University of San Francisco School of Law study, only the U.S. had minors serving such sentences in 2008. In 2009, Human Rights Watch estimated that there were 2,589 youth offenders serving life sentences without the possibility for parole in the U.S. Since the start of 2020, that number has fallen to 1,465. The United States leads in life sentences (both adults and minors), at a rate of 50 people per 100,000 (1 out of 2,000) residents imprisoned for life.


title: Life imprisonment

text: In a number of countries, life imprisonment has been effectively abolished. Many of the countries whose governments have abolished both life imprisonment and indefinite imprisonment have been culturally influenced or colonized by Spain or Portugal and have written such prohibitions into their current constitutional laws (including Portugal itself but not Spain).


title: Life imprisonment

text: A number of European countries have abolished all forms of indefinite imprisonment, including Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, which sets the maximum sentence at 45 years, and Portugal, which abolished all forms of life imprisonment with the prison reforms of Sampaio e Melo in 1884 and sets the maximum sentence at 25 years.


title: Life imprisonment

text: Life imprisonment in Spain was abolished in 1928, but reinstated in 2015 and upheld by the Constitutional Court in 2021.


title: Life imprisonment

text: In Europe, there are many jurisdictions where the law expressly provides for life sentences without the possibility of parole. These are England and Wales (within the United Kingdom; see Life imprisonment in England and Wales), the Netherlands, Moldova, Bulgaria, Italy, Hungary, Malta, Cyprus, Albania, Ukraine, Serbia and the Republic of Ireland.


title: Life imprisonment

text: In Sweden, although the law does not expressly provide for life without the possibility of release, some convicted persons may never be released, on the grounds that they are too dangerous. In Italy, persons that refuse to cooperate with authorities and are sentenced for mafia activities or terrorism are ineligible for parole and thus will spend the rest of their lives in prison. In Austria, life imprisonment will mean imprisonment for the remainder of the offender's life unless clemency is granted by the President of Austria or it can be assumed that the convicted person will not commit any further crimes; the probationary period is ten years. In Malta, there is never any possibility of parole for any person sentenced to life imprisonment, and any form of release from a life sentence is only possible by clemency granted by the President of Malta. In France, while the law does not expressly provide for life imprisonment without any possibility of parole, a court can rule in exceptionally serious circumstances that convicts are ineligible for parole if convicted of child murder involving rape or torture, premeditated murder of a state official or terrorism resulting in death. In Moldova, there is never a possibility of parole for anyone sentenced to life imprisonment, as life imprisonment is defined as "deprivation of liberty of the convict for the entire rest of his/her life". Where mercy is granted in relation to a person serving life imprisonment, imprisonment thereof must not be less than 30 years. In Ukraine, life imprisonment means for the rest of one's life with the only possibilities for release being a terminal illness or a Presidential pardon. In Albania, no person sentenced to life imprisonment is eligible for parole; this effectively means imprisonment for the natural life of the convicted person, unless the prisoner is found not likely to re-offend and has displayed good behavior, and the convicted person has served at least 25 years.


title: Life imprisonment

text: Before 2016 in the Netherlands, there is never a possibility of parole for any person sentenced to life imprisonment, and any form of release for life convicted in the country was only possible when granted royal decree by the King of the Netherlands, with the last granting of a pardon taking place in 1986 when a terminally ill convict was released. As of 1970, the Dutch monarch has pardoned a total of three convicts. Although there is no possibility of parole eligibility, since 2016 prisoners sentenced to life imprisonment in the Netherlands are eligible to have their cases reviewed after serving at least 25 years. This change in law was because the European Court of Human Rights stated in 2013 that a life long imprisonment without the chance of being released is inhuman, three years after that the Netherlands changed their laws on life imprisonment.


title: Life imprisonment

text: Even in other European countries that do provide for life without parole, courts continue to retain judicial discretion to decide whether a sentence of life should include parole or not. In Albania, the decision of whether or not a life convicted person is eligible for parole is up to the prison complex after 25 years has been served, and release eligibility depends on the prospect of rehabilitation and how likely he or she is to re-offend. In Europe, only the Netherlands, Ukraine, Moldova and Malta explicitly preclude parole or any form of release for life sentences in all cases.


title: Life imprisonment

text: In South and Central America, Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Venezuela, Colombia, Uruguay, Bolivia, Ecuador, and the Dominican Republic have all abolished life imprisonment. The maximum sentence is 75 years in El Salvador, 60 years in Colombia, 50 years in Costa Rica and Panama, 40 years in Honduras, 30 years in Nicaragua, Bolivia, Uruguay, and Venezuela, and 25 years in Paraguay and Ecuador. Brazil has a maximum sentence of 40 years under the Penal Code, but life imprisonment and capital punishment are provided by law for military crimes committed during wartime (such as treason, desertion, and mutiny) in the Constitution.


title: Life imprisonment

text: In 2011, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that sentencing minors to life without parole, automatically (as the result of a statute) or as the result of a judicial decision, for crimes other than intentional homicide, violated the Eighth Amendment's ban on "cruel and unusual punishments", in the case of "Graham v. Florida".


title: Life imprisonment

text: "Graham v. Florida" was a significant case in juvenile justice. In Jacksonville, Florida, Terrence J. Graham tried to rob a restaurant along with three adolescent accomplices. During the robbery, one of Graham's accomplices had a metal bar that he used to hit the restaurant manager twice in the head. Once arrested, Graham was charged with attempted armed robbery and armed burglary with assault/battery. The maximum sentence he faced from these charges was life without the possibility of parole, and the prosecutor wanted to charge him as an adult. During the trial, Graham pleaded guilty to the charges, resulting in three years of probation, one year of which had to be served in jail. Since he had been awaiting trial in jail, he already served six months and therefore was released after six additional months.


title: Life imprisonment

text: Within six months of his release, Graham was involved in another robbery. Since he violated the conditions of his probation, his probation officer reported to the trial court about his probation violations a few weeks before Graham turned 18 years old. It was a different judge presiding over his trial for the probation violations a year later. While Graham denied any involvement of the robbery, he did admit to fleeing from the police. The trial court found that Graham violated his probation by "committing a home invasion robbery, possessing a firearm, and associating with persons engaged in criminal activity", and sentenced him to 15 years for the attempted armed robbery plus life imprisonment for the armed burglary. The life sentence Graham received meant he had a life sentence without the possibility of parole, "because Florida abolished their parole system in 2003".


title: Life imprisonment

text: Graham's case was presented to the United States Supreme Court, with the question of whether juveniles should receive life without the possibility of parole in non-homicide cases. The Justices eventually ruled that such a sentence violated the juvenile's 8th Amendment rights, protecting them from punishments that are disproportionate to the crime committed, resulting in the abolition of life sentences without the possibility of parole in non-homicide cases for juveniles.


title: Life imprisonment

text: In 2012 the Supreme Court ruled in the case of "Miller v. Alabama" in a 5–4 decision and with the majority opinion written by Associate Justice Elena Kagan that mandatory sentences of life in prison without parole for juvenile offenders are unconstitutional. The majority opinion stated that barring a judge from considering mitigating factors and other information, such as age, maturity, and family and home environment violated the Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment. Sentences of life in prison without parole can still be given to juveniles for aggravated first-degree murder, as long as the judge considers the circumstances of the case.


title: Life imprisonment

text: In 2016 the Supreme Court ruled in the case of "Montgomery v. Louisiana" that the rulings imposed by "Miller v. Alabama" were to apply retroactively.


title: Life imprisonment

text: Pope Francis called for the abolition of both capital punishment and life imprisonment in a meeting with representatives of the International Association of Penal Law. He also stated that life imprisonment, removed from the Vatican City penal code in 2013, is just a variation of the death penalty.


title: Life imprisonment

text: In Singapore, before 20 August 1997, the law decreed that life imprisonment is a fixed sentence of 20 years with the possibility of one-third reduction of the sentence (13 years and 4 months) for good behaviour. It was an appeal by Abdul Nasir bin Amer Hamsah on 20 August 1997 that led to the law in Singapore to change the definition of life imprisonment into a sentence that lasts the remainder of the prisoner's natural life, with the possibility of parole after at least 20 years. Abdul Nasir was a convicted robber and kidnapper who was, in two separate High Court trials, sentenced to 18 years' imprisonment and 18 strokes of the cane for robbery with hurt resulting in a female Japanese tourist's death at Oriental Hotel in 1994 and a consecutive sentence of life imprisonment with 12 strokes of the cane for kidnapping two police officers for ransom in 1996, which totalled up to 38 years' imprisonment and 30 strokes of the cane. His appeal for the two sentences to run concurrently led to the Court of Appeal of Singapore, which dismissed Abdul Nasir's appeal, to decide that it would be wrong to consider life imprisonment as a fixed jail term of 20 years and thus changed it to a jail term to be served for the rest of the prisoner's remaining lifespan. The amended definition is applied to future crimes committed after 20 August 1997. Since Abdul Nasir committed the crime of kidnapping and was sentenced before 20 August 1997, his life sentence remained as a prison term of 20 years and thus he still had to serve 38 years behind bars. The appeal of Abdul Nasir, titled ""Abdul Nasir bin Amer Hamsah v Public Prosecutor [1997] SGCA 38"", was since regarded as a landmark in Singapore's legal history as it changed the definition of life imprisonment from "life" to "natural life" under the law.


title: Cognitive dissonance

text: In the field of psychology, cognitive dissonance is the perception of contradictory information, and the mental toll of it. Relevant items of information include a person's actions, feelings, ideas, beliefs, values, and things in the environment. Cognitive dissonance is typically experienced as psychological stress when persons participate in an action that goes against one or more of those things. According to this theory, when two actions or ideas are not psychologically consistent with each other, people do all in their power to change them until they become consistent. The discomfort is triggered by the person's belief clashing with new information perceived, wherein the individual tries to find a way to resolve the contradiction to reduce their discomfort.


title: Cognitive dissonance

text: In "When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group That Predicted the Destruction of the World" (1956) and "A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance" (1957), Leon Festinger proposed that human beings strive for internal psychological consistency to function mentally in the real world. A person who experiences internal inconsistency tends to become psychologically uncomfortable and is motivated to reduce the cognitive dissonance. They tend to make changes to justify the stressful behavior, either by adding new parts to the cognition causing the psychological dissonance (rationalization) or by avoiding circumstances and contradictory information likely to increase the magnitude of the cognitive dissonance (confirmation bias).


title: Cognitive dissonance

text: Coping with the nuances of contradictory ideas or experiences is mentally stressful. It requires energy and effort to sit with those seemingly opposite things that all seem true. Festinger argued that some people would inevitably resolve the dissonance by blindly believing whatever they wanted to believe.


title: Cognitive dissonance

text: To function in the reality of society, human beings continually adjust the correspondence of their mental attitudes and personal actions; such continual adjustments, between cognition and action, result in one of three relationships with reality:


title: Cognitive dissonance

text: The term "magnitude of dissonance" refers to the level of discomfort caused to the person. This can be caused by the relationship between two different internal beliefs, or an action that is incompatible with the beliefs of the person. Two factors determine the degree of psychological dissonance caused by two conflicting cognitions or by two conflicting actions:


title: Cognitive dissonance

text: There is always some degree of dissonance within a person as they go about making decisions, due to the changing quantity and quality of knowledge and wisdom that they gain. The magnitude itself is a subjective measurement since the reports are self relayed, and there is no objective way as yet to get a clear measurement of the level of discomfort.


title: Cognitive dissonance

text: Cognitive dissonance theory proposes that people seek psychological consistency between their expectations of life and the existential reality of the world. To function by that expectation of existential consistency, people continually reduce their cognitive dissonance in order to align their cognitions (perceptions of the world) with their actions.


title: Cognitive dissonance

text: The creation and establishment of psychological consistency allows the person affected with cognitive dissonance to lessen mental stress by actions that reduce the magnitude of the dissonance, realized either by changing with or by justifying against or by being indifferent to the existential contradiction that is inducing the mental stress. In practice, people reduce the magnitude of their cognitive dissonance in four ways:


title: Cognitive dissonance

text: Three cognitive biases are components of dissonance theory. There is a bias where one feels they do not have any biases. The bias where one is "better, kinder, smarter, more moral and nicer than average" is confirmation bias.


title: Cognitive dissonance

text: That consistent psychology is required for functioning in the real world also was indicated in the results of "The Psychology of Prejudice" (2006), wherein people facilitate their functioning in the real world by employing human categories (i.e. sex and gender, age and race, etc.) with which they manage their social interactions with other people.


title: Cognitive dissonance

text: Based on a brief overview of models and theories related to cognitive consistency from many different scientific fields, such as social psychology, perception, neurocognition, learning, motor control, system control, ethology, and stress, it has even been proposed that "all behaviour involving cognitive processing is caused by the activation of inconsistent cognitions and functions to increase perceived consistency"; that is, all behaviour functions to reduce cognitive inconsistency at some level of information processing. Indeed, the involvement of cognitive inconsistency has long been suggested for behaviors related to for instance curiosity, and aggression and fear, while it has also been suggested that the inability to satisfactorily reduce cognitive inconsistency may - dependent on the type and size of the inconsistency - result in stress.


title: Cognitive dissonance

text: Another method to reduce cognitive dissonance is through selective exposure theory. This theory has been discussed since the early days of Festinger's discovery of cognitive dissonance. He noticed that people would selectively expose themselves to some media over others; specifically, they would avoid dissonant messages and prefer consonant messages. Through selective exposure, people actively (and selectively) choose what to watch, view, or read that fit to their current state of mind, mood or beliefs. In other words, consumers select attitude-consistent information and avoid attitude-challenging information. This can be applied to media, news, music, and any other messaging channel. The idea is, choosing something that is in opposition to how you feel or believe in will increase cognitive dissonance.


title: Cognitive dissonance

text: For example, a study was done in an elderly home in 1992 on the loneliest residents—those that did not have family or frequent visitors. The residents were shown a series of documentaries: three that featured a "very happy, successful elderly person", and three that featured an "unhappy, lonely elderly person." After watching the documentaries, the residents indicated they preferred the media featuring the unhappy, lonely person over the happy person. This can be attested to them feeling lonely, and experiencing cognitive dissonance watching somebody their age feeling happy and being successful. This study explains how people select media that aligns with their mood, as in selectively exposing themselves to people and experiences they are already experiencing. It is more comfortable to see a movie about a character that is similar to you than to watch one about someone who is your age who is more successful than you.


title: Cognitive dissonance

text: Another example to note is how people mostly consume media that aligns with their political views. In a study done in 2015, participants were shown "attitudinally consistent, challenging, or politically balanced online news." Results showed that the participants trusted attitude-consistent news the most out of all the others, regardless of the source. It is evident that the participants actively selected media that aligns with their beliefs rather than opposing media.


title: Cognitive dissonance

text: In fact, recent research has suggested that while a discrepancy between cognitions drives individuals to crave for attitude-consistent information, the experience of negative emotions drives individuals to avoid counterattitudinal information. In other words, it is the psychological discomfort which activates selective exposure as a dissonance-reduction strategy.


title: Cognitive dissonance

text: There are four theoretic paradigms of cognitive dissonance, the mental stress people experienced when exposed to information that is inconsistent with their beliefs, ideals or values: Belief Disconfirmation, Induced Compliance, Free Choice, and Effort Justification, which respectively explain what happens after a person acts inconsistently, relative to their intellectual perspectives; what happens after a person makes decisions and what are the effects upon a person who has expended much effort to achieve a goal. Common to each paradigm of cognitive-dissonance theory is the tenet: People invested in a given perspective shall—when confronted with contrary evidence—expend great effort to justify retaining the challenged perspective.


title: Cognitive dissonance

text: The contradiction of a belief, ideal, or system of values causes cognitive dissonance that can be resolved by changing the challenged belief, yet, instead of effecting change, the resultant mental stress restores psychological consonance to the person by misperception, rejection, or refutation of the contradiction, seeking moral support from people who share the contradicted beliefs or acting to persuade other people that the contradiction is unreal.


title: Cognitive dissonance

text: The early hypothesis of belief contradiction presented in "When Prophecy Fails" (1956) reported that faith deepened among the members of an apocalyptic religious cult, despite the failed prophecy of an alien spacecraft soon to land on Earth to rescue them from earthly corruption. At the determined place and time, the cult assembled; they believed that only they would survive planetary destruction; yet the spaceship did not arrive to Earth. The confounded prophecy caused them acute cognitive-dissonance: Had they been victims of a hoax? Had they vainly donated away their material possessions? To resolve the dissonance between apocalyptic, end-of-the-world religious beliefs and earthly, material reality, most of the cult restored their psychological consonance by choosing to believe a less mentally-stressful idea to explain the missed landing: that the aliens had given planet Earth a second chance at existence, which, in turn, empowered them to re-direct their religious cult to environmentalism and social advocacy to end human damage to planet Earth. On overcoming the confounded belief by changing to global environmentalism, the cult increased in numbers by proselytism.


title: Cognitive dissonance

text: The study of "The Rebbe, the Messiah, and the Scandal of Orthodox Indifference" (2008) reported the belief contradiction that occurred in the "Chabad" Orthodox Jewish congregation, who believed that their Rebbe (Menachem Mendel Schneerson) was the Messiah. When he died of a stroke in 1994, instead of accepting that their Rebbe was not the Messiah, some of the congregation proved indifferent to that contradictory fact and continued claiming that Schneerson was the Messiah and that he would soon return from the dead.


title: Cognitive dissonance

text: In the "Cognitive Consequences of Forced Compliance" (1959), the investigators Leon Festinger and Merrill Carlsmith asked students to spend an hour doing tedious tasks; e.g. turning pegs a quarter-turn, at fixed intervals. The tasks were designed to induce a strong, negative, mental attitude in the subjects. Once the subjects had done the tasks, the experimenters asked one group of subjects to speak with another subject (an actor) and persuade that impostor-subject that the tedious tasks were interesting and engaging. Subjects of one group were paid twenty dollars ($20); those in a second group were paid one dollar ($1) and those in the control group were not asked to speak with the imposter-subject.


title: Cognitive dissonance

text: At the conclusion of the study, when asked to rate the tedious tasks, the subjects of the second group (paid $1) rated the tasks more positively than did the subjects in the first group (paid $20), and the first group (paid $20) rated the tasks just slightly more positively than did the subjects of the control group; the responses of the paid subjects were evidence of cognitive dissonance. The researchers, Festinger and Carlsmith, proposed that the subjects experienced dissonance between the conflicting cognitions. "I told someone that the task was interesting" and "I actually found it boring." The subjects paid one dollar were induced to comply, compelled to internalize the "interesting task" mental attitude because they had no other justification. The subjects paid twenty dollars were induced to comply by way of an obvious, external justification for internalizing the "interesting task" mental attitude and experienced a lower degree of cognitive dissonance than did those only paid one dollar.


title: Cognitive dissonance

text: In the "Effect of the Severity of Threat on the Devaluation of Forbidden Behavior" (1963), a variant of the induced-compliance paradigm, by Elliot Aronson and Carlsmith, examined self-justification in children. Children were left in a room with toys, including a greatly desirable steam shovel, the forbidden toy. Upon leaving the room, the experimenter told one-half of the group of children that there would be severe punishment if they played with the steam-shovel toy and told the second half of the group that there would be a mild punishment for playing with the forbidden toy. All of the children refrained from playing with the forbidden toy (the steam shovel).


title: Cognitive dissonance

text: Later, when the children were told that they could freely play with any toy they wanted, the children in the mild-punishment group were less likely to play with the steam shovel (the forbidden toy), despite the removal of the threat of mild punishment. The children threatened with mild punishment had to justify, to themselves, why they did not play with the forbidden toy. The degree of punishment was insufficiently strong to resolve their cognitive dissonance; the children had to convince themselves that playing with the forbidden toy was not worth the effort.


title: Cognitive dissonance

text: In "The Efficacy of Musical Emotions Provoked by Mozart's Music for the Reconciliation of Cognitive Dissonance" (2012), a variant of the forbidden-toy paradigm, indicated that listening to music reduces the development of cognitive dissonance. Without music in the background, the control group of four-year-old children were told to avoid playing with a forbidden toy. After playing alone, the control-group children later devalued the importance of the forbidden toy. In the variable group, classical music played in the background while the children played alone. In the second group, the children did not later devalue the forbidden toy. The researchers, Nobuo Masataka and Leonid Perlovsky, concluded that music might inhibit cognitions that induce cognitive dissonance.


title: Cognitive dissonance

text: Music is a stimulus that can diminish post-decisional dissonance; in an earlier experiment, "Washing Away Postdecisional Dissonance" (2010), the researchers indicated that the actions of hand-washing might inhibit the cognitions that induce cognitive dissonance. That study later failed to replicate.


title: Cognitive dissonance

text: In the study "Post-decision Changes in Desirability of Alternatives" (1956) 225 female students rated domestic appliances and then were asked to choose one of two appliances as a gift. The results of the second round of ratings indicated that the women students increased their ratings of the domestic appliance they had selected as a gift and decreased their ratings of the appliances they rejected.


title: Cognitive dissonance

text: This type of cognitive dissonance occurs in a person who is faced with a difficult decision and when the rejected choice may still have desirable characteristics to the chooser. The action of deciding provokes the psychological dissonance consequent to choosing X instead of Y, despite little difference between X and Y; the decision "I chose X" is dissonant with the cognition that "There are some aspects of Y that I like". The study "Choice-induced Preferences in the Absence of Choice: Evidence from a Blind Two-choice Paradigm with Young Children and Capuchin Monkeys" (2010) reports similar results in the occurrence of cognitive dissonance in human beings and in animals.


title: Cognitive dissonance

text: "Peer Effects in Pro-Social Behavior: Social Norms or Social Preferences?" (2013) indicated that with internal deliberation, the structuring of decisions among people can influence how a person acts. The study suggested that social preferences and social norms can explain peer effects in decision making. The study observed that choices made by the second participant would influence the first participant's effort to make choices and that inequity aversion, the preference for fairness, is the paramount concern of the participants.


title: Cognitive dissonance

text: Cognitive dissonance occurs to a person who voluntarily engages in (physically or ethically) unpleasant activities to achieve a goal. The mental stress caused by the dissonance can be reduced by the person exaggerating the desirability of the goal. In "The Effect of Severity of Initiation on Liking for a Group" (1956), to qualify for admission to a discussion group, two groups of people underwent an embarrassing initiation of varied psychological severity. The first group of subjects were to read aloud twelve sexual words considered obscene; the second group of subjects were to read aloud twelve sexual words not considered obscene.


title: Cognitive dissonance

text: Both groups were given headphones to unknowingly listen to a recorded discussion about animal sexual behaviour, which the researchers designed to be dull and banal. As the subjects of the experiment, the groups of people were told that the animal-sexuality discussion actually was occurring in the next room. The subjects whose strong initiation required reading aloud obscene words evaluated the people of their group as more-interesting persons than the people of the group who underwent the mild initiation to the discussion group.


title: Cognitive dissonance

text: In "Washing Away Your Sins: Threatened Morality and Physical Cleansing" (2006), the results indicated that a person washing their hands is an action that helps resolve post-decisional cognitive dissonance because the mental stress usually was caused by the person's ethical–moral self-disgust, which is an emotion related to the physical disgust caused by a dirty environment.


title: Cognitive dissonance

text: The study "The Neural Basis of Rationalization: Cognitive Dissonance Reduction During Decision-making" (2011) indicated that participants rated 80 names and 80 paintings based on how much they liked the names and paintings. To give meaning to the decisions, the participants were asked to select names that they might give to their children. For rating the paintings, the participants were asked to base their ratings on whether or not they would display such art at home.


title: Cognitive dissonance

text: The results indicated that when the decision is meaningful to the person deciding value, the likely rating is based on their attitudes (positive, neutral or negative) towards the name and towards the painting in question. The participants also were asked to rate some of the objects twice and believed that, at session's end, they would receive two of the paintings they had positively rated. The results indicated a great increase in the positive attitude of the participant towards the liked pair of things, whilst also increasing the negative attitude towards the disliked pair of things. The double-ratings of pairs of things, towards which the rating participant had a neutral attitude, showed no changes during the rating period. The existing attitudes of the participant were reinforced during the rating period and the participants experienced cognitive dissonance when confronted by a liked-name paired with a disliked-painting.


title: Cognitive dissonance

text: Meat-eating can involve discrepancies between the behavior of eating meat and various ideals that the person holds. Some researchers call this form of moral conflict the "meat paradox". Hank Rothgerber posited that meat eaters may encounter a conflict between their eating behavior and their affections toward animals. This occurs when the dissonant state involves recognition of one's behavior as a meat eater and a belief, attitude, or value that this behavior contradicts. The person with this state may attempt to employ various methods, including avoidance, willful ignorance, dissociation, perceived behavioral change, and do-gooder derogation to prevent this form of dissonance from occurring. Once occurred, they may reduce it in the form of motivated cognitions, such as denigrating animals, offering pro-meat justifications, or denying responsibility for eating meat.


title: Cognitive dissonance

text: The extent of cognitive dissonance with regards to meat eating can vary depending on the attitudes and values of the individual involved because these can affect whether or not they see any moral conflict with their values and what they eat. For example, individuals who are more dominance minded and who value having a masculine identity are less likely to experience cognitive dissonance because they are less likely to believe eating meat is morally wrong.


title: Cognitive dissonance

text: The study "Patterns of Cognitive Dissonance-reducing Beliefs Among Smokers: A Longitudinal Analysis from the International Tobacco Control (ITC) Four Country Survey" (2012) indicated that smokers use justification beliefs to reduce their cognitive dissonance about smoking tobacco and the negative consequences of smoking it.


title: Cognitive dissonance

text: To reduce cognitive dissonance, the participant smokers adjusted their beliefs to correspond with their actions:


title: Cognitive dissonance

text: In a study titled "Cognitive Dissonance and Attitudes Toward Unpleasant Medical Screenings " (2016), researchers Michael R. Ent and Mary A. Gerend informed the study participants about a discomforting test for a specific (fictitious) virus called the "human respiratory virus-27". The study used a fake virus to prevent participants from having thoughts, opinions, and feeling about the virus that would interfere with the experiment. The study participants were in two groups; one group was told that they were actual candidates for the virus-27 test, and the second group were told they were not candidates for the test. The researchers reported, "We predicted that [study] participants who thought that they were candidates for the unpleasant test would experience dissonance associated with knowing that the test was both unpleasant and in their best interest—this dissonance was predicted to result in unfavorable attitudes toward the test."


title: Cognitive dissonance

text: Cognitive dissonance may also occur when people seek to explain or justify their beliefs, often without questioning the validity of their claims: After the earthquake of 1934, Bihar, India, irrational rumors based upon fear quickly reached the adjoining communities unaffected by the disaster because those people, although not in physical danger, psychologically justified their anxieties about the earthquake. The same pattern can be observed when one's convictions are met with a contradictory order. In a study conducted among 6th grade students, after being induced to cheat in an academic examination, students judged cheating less harshly. Nonetheless, the confirmation bias identifies how people readily read information that confirms their established opinions and readily avoid reading information that contradicts their opinions. The confirmation bias is apparent when a person confronts deeply held political beliefs, i.e. when a person is greatly committed to their beliefs, values, and ideas.


title: Cognitive dissonance

text: If a contradiction occurs between how a person feels and how a person acts, one's perceptions and emotions align to alleviate stress. The Ben Franklin effect refers to that statesman's observation that the act of performing a favor for a rival leads to increased positive feelings toward that individual. It is also possible that one's emotions be altered to minimize the regret of irrevocable choices. At a hippodrome, bettors had more confidence in their horses after the betting than before.


title: Cognitive dissonance

text: The management of cognitive dissonance readily influences the apparent motivation of a student to pursue education. The study "Turning Play into Work: Effects of Adult Surveillance and Extrinsic Rewards on Children's Intrinsic Motivation" (1975) indicated that the application of the effort justification paradigm increased student enthusiasm for education with the offer of an external reward for studying; students in pre-school who completed puzzles based upon an adult promise of reward were later less interested in the puzzles than were students who completed the puzzle-tasks without the promise of a reward.


title: Cognitive dissonance

text: The incorporation of cognitive dissonance into models of basic learning-processes to foster the students' self-awareness of psychological conflicts among their personal beliefs, ideals, and values and the reality of contradictory facts and information, requires the students to defend their personal beliefs. Afterwards, the students are trained to objectively perceive new facts and information to resolve the psychological stress of the conflict between reality and the student's value system. Moreover, educational software that applies the derived principles facilitates the students' ability to successfully handle the questions posed in a complex subject. Meta-analysis of studies indicates that psychological interventions that provoke cognitive dissonance in order to achieve a directed conceptual change do increase students' learning in reading skills and about science.


title: Cognitive dissonance

text: The general effectiveness of psychotherapy and psychological intervention is partly explained by the theory of cognitive dissonance. In that vein, social psychology proposed that the mental health of the patient is positively influenced by his and her action in freely choosing a specific therapy and in exerting the required, therapeutic effort to overcome cognitive dissonance. That effective phenomenon was indicated in the results of the study "Effects of Choice on Behavioral Treatment of Overweight Children" (1983), wherein the children's belief that they freely chose the type of therapy received, resulted in each overweight child losing a greater amount of excessive body weight.


title: Cognitive dissonance

text: In the study "Reducing Fears and Increasing Attentiveness: The Role of Dissonance Reduction " (1980), people with ophidiophobia (fear of snakes) who invested much effort in activities of little therapeutic value for them (experimentally represented as legitimate and relevant) showed improved alleviation of the symptoms of their phobia. Likewise, the results of "Cognitive Dissonance and Psychotherapy: The Role of Effort Justification in Inducing Weight Loss" (1985) indicated that the patient felt better in justifying their efforts and therapeutic choices towards effectively losing weight. That the therapy of effort expenditure can predict long-term change in the patient's perceptions.


title: Cognitive dissonance

text: Cognitive dissonance is used to promote positive social behaviours, such as increased condom use; other studies indicate that cognitive dissonance can be used to encourage people to act pro-socially, such as campaigns against public littering, campaigns against racial prejudice, and compliance with anti-speeding campaigns. The theory can also be used to explain reasons for donating to charity.


title: Cognitive dissonance

text: Cognitive dissonance can be applied in social areas such as racism and racial hatred. Acharya of Stanford, Blackwell and Sen of Harvard state cognitive dissonance increases when an individual commits an act of violence toward someone from a different ethnic or racial group and decreases when the individual does not commit any such act of violence. Research from Acharya, Blackwell and Sen shows that individuals committing violence against members of another group develop hostile attitudes towards their victims as a way of minimizing cognitive dissonance. Importantly, the hostile attitudes may persist even after the violence itself declines (Acharya, Blackwell, and Sen, 2015). The application provides a social psychological basis for the constructivist viewpoint that ethnic and racial divisions can be socially or individually constructed, possibly from acts of violence (Fearon and Laitin, 2000). Their framework speaks to this possibility by showing how violent actions by individuals can affect individual attitudes, either ethnic or racial animosity (Acharya, Blackwell, and Sen, 2015).


title: Cognitive dissonance

text: Pleasure is one of the main factors in our modern culture of consumerism. Once a consumer has chosen to purchase a specific item, they often fear that another choice may have brought them more pleasure. Post purchase dissonance occurs when a purchase is final, voluntary, and significant to the person. This dissonance is a mental discomfort arising from the possibility of dissatisfaction with the purchase, or the regret of not purchasing a different, potentially more useful or satisfactory good. Consequently, the buyer will "seek to reduce dissonance by increasing the perceived attractiveness of the chosen alternative and devaluing the non chosen item, seeking out information to confirm the decision, or changing attitudes to conform to the decision." In other words, the buyer justifies their purchase to themselves in whatever way they can, in an attempt to convince themself that they made the right decision and to diminish regret. Usually these feelings of regret are more prevalent after online purchases as opposed to in-store purchases. This happens because an online consumer does not have the opportunity to experience the product in its entirety, and must rely on what information is available through photos and descriptions. On the other hand, in-store shopping can sometimes be even more of an issue for consumers in regards to impulse buying. While the ease of online shopping proves hard to resist for impulse buyers, in-store shoppers may be influenced by who they are with. Shopping with friends increases the risk of impulse buying, especially compared to shopping with people such as one's parents.


title: Cognitive dissonance

text: Post-purchase dissonance does not only affect the consumer; brands are dependent on customer loyalty, and cognitive dissonance can influence that loyalty. The more positive experiences and emotions that a customer associates with a specific brand, the more likely they are to buy from that brand in the future, recommend it to friends, etc. The opposite is also true, meaning any feelings of discomfort, dissatisfaction, and regret will weaken the consumer's perception of the brand and make them less likely to return as a customer.


title: Cognitive dissonance

text: The study "Beyond Reference Pricing: Understanding Consumers' Encounters with Unexpected Prices " (2003), indicated that when consumers experience an unexpected price encounter, they adopt three methods to reduce cognitive dissonance: (i) Employ a strategy of continual information; (ii) Employ a change in attitude; and (iii) Engage in minimisation. Consumers employ the strategy of continual information by engaging in bias and searching for information that supports prior beliefs. Consumers might search for information about other retailers and substitute products consistent with their beliefs. Alternatively, consumers might change attitude, such as re-evaluating price in relation to external reference-prices or associating high prices and low prices with quality. Minimisation reduces the importance of the elements of the dissonance; consumers tend to minimise the importance of money, and thus of shopping around, saving, and finding a better deal.


title: Cognitive dissonance

text: Cognitive dissonance theory might suggest that since votes are an expression of preference or beliefs, even the act of voting might cause someone to defend the actions of the candidate for whom they voted, and if the decision was close then the effects of cognitive dissonance should be greater.


title: Cognitive dissonance

text: This effect was studied over the 6 presidential elections of the United States between 1972 and 1996, and it was found that the opinion differential between the candidates changed more before and after the election than the opinion differential of non-voters. In addition, elections where the voter had a favorable attitude toward both candidates, making the choice more difficult, had the opinion differential of the candidates change more dramatically than those who only had a favorable opinion of one candidate. What wasn't studied were the cognitive dissonance effects in cases where the person had unfavorable attitudes toward both candidates. The 2016 U.S. election held historically high unfavorable ratings for both candidates.


title: Cognitive dissonance

text: After the 2020 election, which Joe Biden won, supporters of former President Donald Trump questioned the results, citing voter fraud. This continued even after such claims were dismissed by numerous state and federal judges, election officials, governors, and government agencies as false. This was described as an example of Trump supporters suffering cognitive dissonance.


title: Cognitive dissonance

text: Cognitive dissonance theory of communication was initially advanced by American psychologist Leon Festinger in the 1960s. Festinger theorized that cognitive dissonance usually arises when a person holds two or more incompatible beliefs simultaneously. This is a normal occurrence since people encounter different situations that invoke conflicting thought sequences. This conflict results in a psychological discomfort. According to Festinger, people experiencing a thought conflict try to reduce the psychological discomfort by attempting to achieve an emotional equilibrium. This equilibrium is achieved in three main ways. First, the person may downplay the importance of the dissonant thought. Second, the person may attempt to outweigh the dissonant thought with consonant thoughts. Lastly, the person may incorporate the dissonant thought into their current belief system.


title: Cognitive dissonance

text: Dissonance plays an important role in persuasion. To persuade people, you must cause them to experience dissonance, and then offer your proposal as a way to resolve the discomfort. Although there is no guarantee your audience will change their minds, the theory maintains that without dissonance, there can be no persuasion. Without a feeling of discomfort, people are not motivated to change. Similarly, it is the feeling of discomfort which motivates people to perform selective exposure (i.e., avoiding disconfirming information) as a dissonance-reduction strategy.


title: Cognitive dissonance

text: It is hypothesized that introducing cognitive dissonance into machine learning may be able to assist in the long-term aim of developing 'creative autonomy' on the part of agents, including in multi-agent systems (such as games), and ultimately to the development of 'strong' forms of artificial intelligence, including artificial general intelligence.


title: Cognitive dissonance

text: In "Self-perception: An alternative interpretation of cognitive dissonance phenomena" (1967), the social psychologist Daryl Bem proposed the self-perception theory whereby people do not think much about their attitudes, even when engaged in a conflict with another person. The Theory of Self-perception proposes that people develop attitudes by observing their own behaviour, and concludes that their attitudes caused the behaviour observed by self-perception; especially true when internal cues either are ambiguous or weak. Therefore, the person is in the same position as an observer who must rely upon external cues to infer their inner state of mind. Self-perception theory proposes that people adopt attitudes without access to their states of mood and cognition.


title: Cognitive dissonance

text: As such, the experimental subjects of the Festinger and Carlsmith study ("Cognitive Consequences of Forced Compliance", 1959) inferred their mental attitudes from their own behaviour. When the subject-participants were asked: "Did you find the task interesting?", the participants decided that they must have found the task interesting, because that is what they told the questioner. Their replies suggested that the participants who were paid twenty dollars had an external incentive to adopt that positive attitude, and likely perceived the twenty dollars as the reason for saying the task was interesting, rather than saying the task actually was interesting.


title: Cognitive dissonance

text: The theory of self-perception (Bem) and the theory of cognitive dissonance (Festinger) make identical predictions, but only the theory of cognitive dissonance predicts the presence of unpleasant arousal, of psychological distress, which were verified in laboratory experiments.


title: Cognitive dissonance

text: In "The Theory of Cognitive Dissonance: A Current Perspective" (Aronson, Berkowitz, 1969), Elliot Aronson linked cognitive dissonance to the self-concept: That mental stress arises when the conflicts among cognitions threatens the person's positive self-image. This reinterpretation of the original Festinger and Carlsmith study, using the induced-compliance paradigm, proposed that the dissonance was between the cognitions "I am an honest person." and "I lied about finding the task interesting."


title: Cognitive dissonance

text: The study "Cognitive Dissonance: Private Ratiocination or Public Spectacle?" (Tedeschi, Schlenker, etc. 1971) reported that maintaining cognitive consistency, rather than protecting a private self-concept, is how a person protects their public self-image. Moreover, the results reported in the study "I'm No Longer Torn After Choice: How Explicit Choices Implicitly Shape Preferences of Odors" (2010) contradict such an explanation, by showing the occurrence of revaluation of material items, after the person chose and decided, even after having forgotten the choice.


title: Cognitive dissonance

text: Fritz Heider proposed a motivational theory of attitudinal change that derives from the idea that humans are driven to establish and maintain psychological balance. The driving force for this balance is known as the "consistency motive", which is an urge to maintain one's values and beliefs consistent over time. Heider's conception of psychological balance has been used in theoretical models measuring cognitive dissonance.


title: Cognitive dissonance

text: According to balance theory, there are three interacting elements: (1) the self (P), (2) another person (O), and (3) an element (X). These are each positioned at one vertex of a triangle and share two relations:


title: Cognitive dissonance

text: Under balance theory, human beings seek a balanced state of relations among the three positions. This can take the form of three positives or two negatives and one positive:


title: Cognitive dissonance

text: People also avoid unbalanced states of relations, such as three negatives or two positives and one negative:


title: Cognitive dissonance

text: In the study "On the Measurement of the Utility of Public Works" (1969), Jules Dupuit reported that behaviors and cognitions can be understood from an economic perspective, wherein people engage in the systematic processing of comparing the costs and benefits of a decision. The psychological process of cost-benefit comparisons helps the person to assess and justify the feasibility (spending money) of an economic decision, and is the basis for determining if the benefit outweighs the cost, and to what extent. Moreover, although the method of cost-benefit analysis functions in economic circumstances, men and women remain psychologically inefficient at comparing the costs against the benefits of their economic decision.


title: Cognitive dissonance

text: When these self-guides are contradictory psychological distress (cognitive dissonance) results. People are motivated to reduce self-discrepancy (the gap between two self-guides).


title: Cognitive dissonance

text: During the 1980s, Cooper and Fazio argued that dissonance was caused by aversive consequences, rather than inconsistency. According to this interpretation, the belief that lying is wrong and hurtful, not the inconsistency between cognitions, is what makes people feel bad. Subsequent research, however, found that people experience dissonance even when they feel they have not done anything wrong. For example, Harmon-Jones and colleagues showed that people experience dissonance even when the consequences of their statements are beneficial—as when they convince sexually active students to use condoms, when they, themselves are not using condoms.


title: Cognitive dissonance

text: In the study "How Choice Affects and Reflects Preferences: Revisiting the Free-choice Paradigm" (Chen, Risen, 2010) the researchers criticized the free-choice paradigm as invalid, because the rank-choice-rank method is inaccurate for the study of cognitive dissonance. That the designing of research-models relies upon the assumption that, if the experimental subject rates options differently in the second survey, then the attitudes of the subject towards the options have changed. That there are other reasons why an experimental subject might achieve different rankings in the second survey; perhaps the subjects were indifferent between choices.


title: Cognitive dissonance

text: Although the results of some follow-up studies (e.g. "Do Choices Affect Preferences? Some Doubts and New Evidence", 2013) presented evidence of the unreliability of the rank-choice-rank method, the results of studies such as "Neural Correlates of Cognitive Dissonance and Choice-induced Preference Change" (2010) have not found the Choice-Rank-Choice method to be invalid, and indicate that making a choice can change the preferences of a person.


title: Cognitive dissonance

text: Festinger's original theory did not seek to explain how dissonance works. Why is inconsistency so aversive? The action–motivation model seeks to answer this question. It proposes that inconsistencies in a person's cognition cause mental stress, because psychological inconsistency interferes with the person's functioning in the real world. Among the ways for coping, the person can choose to exercise a behavior that is inconsistent with their current attitude (a belief, an ideal, a value system), but later try to alter that belief to be consonant with a current behavior; the cognitive dissonance occurs when the person's cognition does not match the action taken. If the person changes the current attitude, after the dissonance occurs, they are then obligated to commit to that course of behavior.


title: Cognitive dissonance

text: Cognitive dissonance produces a state of negative affect, which motivates the person to reconsider the causative behavior in order to resolve the psychological inconsistency that caused the mental stress. As the affected person works towards a behavioral commitment, the motivational process then is activated in the left frontal cortex of the brain.


title: Cognitive dissonance

text: The predictive dissonance model proposes that cognitive dissonance is fundamentally related to the predictive coding (or predictive processing) model of cognition. A predictive processing account of the mind proposes that perception actively involves the use of a Bayesian hierarchy of acquired prior knowledge, which primarily serves the role of predicting incoming proprioceptive, interoceptive and exteroceptive sensory inputs. Therefore, the brain is an inference machine that attempts to actively predict and explain its sensations. Crucial to this inference is the minimization of prediction error. The predictive dissonance account proposes that the motivation for cognitive dissonance reduction is related to an organism's active drive for reducing prediction error. Moreover, it proposes that human (and perhaps other animal) brains have evolved to selectively ignore contradictory information (as proposed by dissonance theory) to prevent the overfitting of their predictive cognitive models to local and thus non-generalizing conditions. The predictive dissonance account is highly compatible with the action-motivation model since, in practice, prediction error can arise from unsuccessful behavior.


title: Cognitive dissonance

text: The study "Neural Activity Predicts Attitude Change in Cognitive Dissonance" (Van Veen, Krug, etc., 2009) identified the neural bases of cognitive dissonance with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI); the neural scans of the participants replicated the basic findings of the induced-compliance paradigm. When in the fMRI scanner, some of the study participants argued that the uncomfortable, mechanical environment of the MRI machine nevertheless was a pleasant experience for them; some participants, from an experimental group, said they enjoyed the mechanical environment of the fMRI scanner more than did the control-group participants (paid actors) who argued about the uncomfortable experimental environment.


title: Cognitive dissonance

text: The results of the neural scan experiment support the original theory of Cognitive Dissonance proposed by Festinger in 1957; and also support the psychological conflict theory, whereby the anterior cingulate functions, in counter-attitudinal response, to activate the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and the anterior insular cortex; the degree of activation of said regions of the brain is predicted by the degree of change in the psychological attitude of the person.


title: Cognitive dissonance

text: As an application of the free-choice paradigm, the study "How Choice Reveals and Shapes Expected Hedonic Outcome" (2009) indicates that after making a choice, neural activity in the striatum changes to reflect the person's new evaluation of the choice-object; neural activity increased if the object was chosen, neural activity decreased if the object was rejected. Moreover, studies such as "The Neural Basis of Rationalization: Cognitive Dissonance Reduction During Decision-making" (2010) and "How Choice Modifies Preference: Neural Correlates of Choice Justification" (2011) confirm the neural bases of the psychology of cognitive dissonance.


title: Cognitive dissonance

text: "The Neural Basis of Rationalization: Cognitive Dissonance Reduction During Decision-making" (Jarcho, Berkman, Lieberman, 2010) applied the free-choice paradigm to fMRI examination of the brain's decision-making process whilst the study participant actively tried to reduce cognitive dissonance. The results indicated that the active reduction of psychological dissonance increased neural activity in the right-inferior frontal gyrus, in the medial fronto-parietal region, and in the ventral striatum, and that neural activity decreased in the anterior insula. That the neural activities of rationalization occur in seconds, without conscious deliberation on the part of the person; and that the brain engages in emotional responses whilst effecting decisions.


title: Cognitive dissonance

text: The results reported in "Contributions from Research on Anger and Cognitive Dissonance to Understanding the Motivational Functions of Asymmetrical Frontal Brain Activity" (Harmon-Jones, 2004) indicate that the occurrence of cognitive dissonance is associated with neural activity in the left frontal cortex, a brain structure also associated with the emotion of anger; moreover, functionally, anger motivates neural activity in the left frontal cortex. Applying a directional model of Approach motivation, the study "Anger and the Behavioural Approach System" (2003) indicated that the relation between cognitive dissonance and anger is supported by neural activity in the left frontal cortex that occurs when a person takes control of the social situation causing the cognitive dissonance. Conversely, if the person cannot control or cannot change the psychologically stressful situation, they are without a motivation to change the circumstance, then there arise other, negative emotions to manage the cognitive dissonance, such as socially inappropriate behavior.


title: Cognitive dissonance

text: The anterior cingulate cortex activity increases when errors occur and are being monitored as well as having behavioral conflicts with the self-concept as a form of higher-level thinking. A study was done to test the prediction that the left frontal cortex would have increased activity. University students had to write a paper depending on if they were assigned to a high-choice or low-choice condition. The low-choice condition required students to write about supporting a 10% increase in tuition at their university. The point of this condition was to see how significant the counterchoice may affect a person's ability to cope. The high-choice condition asked students to write in favor of tuition increase as if it were their completely voluntary choice. The researchers use EEG to analyze students before they wrote the essay, as dissonance is at its highest during this time (Beauvois and Joule, 1996). High-choice condition participants showed a higher level of the left frontal cortex than the low-choice participants. Results show that the initial experience of dissonance can be apparent in the anterior cingulate cortex, then the left frontal cortex is activated, which also activates the approach motivational system to reduce anger.


title: Cognitive dissonance

text: The results reported in "The Origins of Cognitive Dissonance: Evidence from Children and Monkeys" (Egan, Santos, Bloom, 2007) indicated that there might be evolutionary force behind the reduction of cognitive dissonance in the actions of pre-school-age children and Capuchin monkeys when offered a choice between two like options, decals and candies. The groups then were offered a new choice, between the choice-object not chosen and a novel choice-object that was as attractive as the first object. The resulting choices of the human and simian subjects concorded with the theory of cognitive dissonance when the children and the monkeys each chose the novel choice-object instead of the choice-object not chosen in the first selection, despite every object having the same value.


title: Cognitive dissonance

text: The hypothesis of "An Action-based Model of Cognitive-dissonance Processes" (Harmon-Jones, Levy, 2015) proposed that psychological dissonance occurs consequent to the stimulation of thoughts that interfere with a goal-driven behavior. Researchers mapped the neural activity of the participant when performing tasks that provoked psychological stress when engaged in contradictory behaviors. A participant read aloud the printed name of a color. To test for the occurrence of cognitive dissonance, the name of the color was printed in a color different than the word read aloud by the participant. As a result, the participants experienced increased neural activity in the anterior cingulate cortex when the experimental exercises provoked psychological dissonance.


title: Cognitive dissonance

text: The study "Cognitive Neuroscience of Social Emotions and Implications for Psychopathology: Examining Embarrassment, Guilt, Envy, and Schadenfreude" (Jankowski, Takahashi, 2014) identified neural correlations to specific social emotions (e.g. envy and embarrassment) as a measure of cognitive dissonance. The neural activity for the emotion of Envy (the feeling of displeasure at the good fortune of another person) was found to draw neural activity from the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex. That such increased activity in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex occurred either when a person's self-concept was threatened or when the person experienced embarrassment (social pain) caused by salient, upward social-comparison, by social-class snobbery. That social emotions, such as embarrassment, guilt, envy, and "Schadenfreude" (joy at the misfortune of another person) are correlated to reduced activity in the insular lobe, and with increased activity in the striate nucleus; those neural activities are associated with a reduced sense of empathy (social responsibility) and an increased propensity towards antisocial behavior (delinquency).


title: Cognitive dissonance

text: Artificial neural network models of cognition provide methods for integrating the results of empirical research about cognitive dissonance and attitudes into a single model that explains the formation of psychological attitudes and the mechanisms to change such attitudes. Among the artificial neural-network models that predict how cognitive dissonance might influence a person's attitudes and behavior, are:


title: Telly Savalas

text: Aristotelis "Telly" Savalas (January 21, 1922 – January 22, 1994) was an American actor and singer whose career spanned four decades. Noted for his bald head and deep, resonant voice, he is perhaps best known for portraying Lt. Theo Kojak on the crime drama series "Kojak" (1973–1978) and James Bond archvillain Ernst Stavro Blofeld in the film "On Her Majesty's Secret Service" (1969).


title: Telly Savalas

text: Savalas' other roles include "Birdman of Alcatraz" (1962), "The Greatest Story Ever Told" (1965), "Battle of the Bulge" (1965), "The Dirty Dozen" (1967), "Kelly's Heroes" (1970), "Horror Express" (1972), "Lisa and the Devil" (1974) and "Escape to Athena" (1979). For "Birdman of Alcatraz", he was nominated for the Academy Award and Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actor.


title: Telly Savalas

text: As a singer, Savalas released a cover of the Bread song "If", which became a UK No. 1 single in 1975. The song also peaked at number 12 in Australia.


title: Telly Savalas

text: Aristotelis Savalas was born in Garden City, New York, on January 21, 1922, the second of five children born to Greek parents Christina (née Kapsalis), an artist who was a native of Sparta, and Nick Savalas, a restaurant owner. His paternal grandparents came from the Greek village of Ierakas. Savalas and his brother, Gus, sold newspapers and polished shoes to help support the family. Savalas initially spoke only Greek when he entered grade school, but later learned English. He attended Cobbett Junior High School in Lynn, Massachusetts. He won a spelling bee there in 1934; due to an oversight, he did not receive his prize until 1991, when the school principal and the "Boston Herald" awarded it to him.


title: Telly Savalas

text: Savalas graduated from Sewanhaka High School in Floral Park, New York in 1940. A renowned swimmer, he worked as a beach lifeguard after graduation from high school. However, on one occasion, he was unsuccessful in saving a father from drowning; as he attempted resuscitation, the man's two children stood nearby crying for their father to wake up. This affected Savalas so much that he spent the rest of his life constantly promoting water safety, and later made all six of his children take swimming lessons.


title: Telly Savalas

text: In 1941, Savalas was drafted into the United States Army. From 1941 to 1943, Savalas served in Company C, 12th Medical Training Battalion, 4th Medical Training Regiment at Camp Pickett, Virginia. In 1943, he was discharged from the Army with the rank of corporal after being severely injured in a car accident. Savalas spent more than a year recuperating in hospital with a broken pelvis, sprained ankle and concussion. He then attended the Armed Forces Institute where he studied radio and television production.


title: Telly Savalas

text: He received a bachelor's degree in psychology from Columbia's School of General Studies in 1946 and started working on a master's degree while preparing for medical school.


title: Telly Savalas

text: After the war, he worked for the U.S. State Department as host of the "Your Voice of America" series, then at ABC News. In 1950, Savalas hosted a radio show called "The Coffeehouse in New York City".


title: Telly Savalas

text: Savalas began as an executive director and then as senior director of the news special events at ABC. He then became an executive producer for the "Gillette Cavalcade of Sports", where he gave Howard Cosell his first job in television. Before his acting career took off, Savalas directed Scott Vincent and Howard Cosell in "Report to New York", WABC-TV's first regularly-scheduled news program in fall 1959.


title: Telly Savalas

text: Savalas did not consider acting as a career until asked if he could recommend an actor who could do a European accent. He did but as the friend in question could not go, Savalas himself went to cover for his friend and ended up being cast on "And Bring Home a Baby", an episode of "Armstrong Circle Theatre" in January 1958. He appeared on two more episodes of the series in 1959 and 1960, one, acting alongside a young Sydney Pollack. He was also in a version of "The Iceman Cometh".


title: Telly Savalas

text: Savalas quickly became in much demand as a guest star on TV shows, appearing in "Sunday Showcase", "", "Dow Hour of Great Mysteries" (an adaptation of "The Cat and the Canary"), "Naked City" (alongside Claude Rains), "The Witness" (playing Lucky Luciano in one episode and Al Capone in another), "The United States Steel Hour", and "The Aquanauts." He was a regular on the short-lived NBC series "Acapulco" (1961) with Ralph Taeger and James Coburn.


title: Telly Savalas

text: Savalas made his film debut in "Mad Dog Coll" (1961), playing a cop. His work had impressed fellow actor Burt Lancaster, who arranged for Savalas to be cast in the John Frankenheimer directed "The Young Savages" (also 1961 and again playing a cop). Pollack worked on the film as an acting coach.


title: Telly Savalas

text: In one of his most acclaimed performances, Savalas reunited with Lancaster and Frankenheimer for "Birdman of Alcatraz" (1962), where he was nominated for the Academy Award and Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actor. The same year, he appeared as a private detective in "Cape Fear" (directed by J. Lee Thompson whom Savalas would work with in future films), and "The Interns", reprising his role from the latter film in "The New Interns" (1964).


title: Telly Savalas

text: Savalas also guest starred in a number of TV series during the decade including "The New Breed", "The Detectives", "Ben Casey", "The Twilight Zone" (the episode "Living Doll"), "The Fugitive (1963 TV series)" and "Arrest and Trial" among others.


title: Telly Savalas

text: He continued supporting roles in films such as "The Man from the Diners' Club", "Love Is a Ball" and "Johnny Cool" (all 1963), Savalas, already at a late stage of male-pattern baldness, shaved his head to play Pontius Pilate in "The Greatest Story Ever Told" (1965) and kept his head shaven for the rest of his life. He reunited with J. Lee Thompson in "John Goldfarb, Please Come Home!" (1965), and was one of many names in "Genghis Khan" (also 1965).


title: Telly Savalas

text: He was part of an all-star cast in "The Dirty Dozen" (1967), playing Archer Maggott (the worst of the dozen), in a role Jack Palance turned down. He reunited with Burt Lancaster and Sydney Pollack in the Western "The Scalphunters" (1968), and also featured in the comedy "Buona Sera, Mrs. Campbell" (also 1968) — noted as one of his favorite roles — and the all-star action movie "Mackenna's Gold" (1969), his third film for J. Lee Thompson. Savalas attributed his success to "his complete ability to be himself."


title: Telly Savalas

text: Savalas' first leading role in film was in the British crime comedy "Crooks and Coronets" (1969). The same year he appeared in the James Bond movie "On Her Majesty's Secret Service", playing Ernst Stavro Blofeld. He continued to appear in films during the 1970s including "Kelly's Heroes" (1970) (with Clint Eastwood), "Clay Pigeon" (1971), and several European features such as "Violent City" (1970) (with Charles Bronson), "A Town Called Bastard" (1971), "Horror Express" (with Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee), "A Reason to Live, a Reason to Die", the title role in "Pancho Villa" (all 1972), and "Redneck" (1973). He reunited with Christopher Lee in the 1976 thriller "Killer Force", and also appeared in Peter Hyams' "Capricorn One" (1978).


title: Telly Savalas

text: "I had worked my way up to star billing", he later said, "when the bottom dropped out of the movie business. I could have stayed in Europe and made Italian movies but I discovered the big difference between an Italian and American movie is that in the American movie you get paid."


title: Telly Savalas

text: Savalas first played Lt. Theodopolus "Theo" Kojak in the TV movie "The Marcus–Nelson Murders" (CBS, 1973), which was based on the real-life Career Girls Murder case.


title: Telly Savalas

text: Kojak was a bald New York City detective with a fondness for lollipops and whose tagline was "Who loves ya, baby?" (He also liked to say, "Everybody should have a little Greek in them.") Although the lollipop gimmick was added in order to indulge his sweet tooth, Savalas also smoked heavily onscreen—cigarettes, cigarillos and cigars—throughout the first season's episodes. The lollipops had apparently given him three cavities, and were part of an (unsuccessful) effort by Kojak (and Savalas himself) to curb his smoking. The critic Clive James explained the lead actor's appeal as Kojak: "Telly Savalas can make bad slang sound like good slang and good slang sound like lyric poetry. It isn't what he is, so much as the way he talks, that gets you tuning in."


title: Telly Savalas

text: David Shipman later wrote: "Kojak was sympathetic to outcasts and ruthless with social predators. The show maintained a high quality to the end, mixing tension with some laughs and always anxious to tackle civic issues, one of its "raisons d'etre" in the first place. It was required viewing in Britain every Saturday evening for eight years. To almost everyone everywhere Kojak means Savalas and vice versa, but to Savalas himself the series was merely an interval, albeit a long one, in a distinguished career."


title: Telly Savalas

text: "Kojak" aired on CBS for five seasons from October 24, 1973, until March 18, 1978, with 118 episodes produced. The role won Savalas an Emmy and two Golden Globes for Best Actor in a Drama Series. Co-stars on the show included Savalas' younger brother George as Detective Stavros – a sensitive, wild-haired, quiet, comedic foil to Kojak's street-wise humor in an otherwise dark dramatic series – Kevin Dobson as Kojak's trusted young partner, Det. Bobby Crocker, whose on-screen chemistry with Savalas was a success story of 1970s television, and Dan Frazer as Captain Frank McNeil.


title: Telly Savalas

text: Due to a decline in ratings, the series was canceled by CBS in 1978. Savalas and Frazer were the only actors to appear in all 118 episodes. Savalas was unhappy about the show's demise but got the chance to reprise the Kojak persona in several television movies, starting in 1985. The first film, subtitled "The Belarus File" and broadcast in February 1985, reunited Savalas with several of his co-stars from the series: younger brother George, Dan Frazer, Mark Russell (Det. Saperstein) and Vince Conti (Det. Rizzo); this marked those actors' final appearances in the "Kojak" franchise.


title: Telly Savalas

text: A further six "Kojak" TV movies were produced, titled "" (1987), "Ariana", "Fatal Flaw" (both 1989), "Flowers for Matty", "It's Always Something" – with Kevin Dobson reprising his role of Bobby Crocker, now an Assistant District Attorney – and "None So Blind" (all 1990).


title: Telly Savalas

text: Savalas wrote, directed and starred in the 1977 independent thriller "Beyond Reason". However, the film was not released in cinemas; it was made available only on home media in 1985. Savalas was part of an all-star cast in the movies "Escape to Athena" (1979), "Beyond the Poseidon Adventure" (both 1979) and "Cannonball Run II" (1984), and continued to appear in a number of film and television guest roles during the 1980s, including "Border Cop" (1980) and "Faceless" (1988), the series "Tales of the Unexpected" (1981), and two episodes each of "The Love Boat" (1985) and "The Equalizer" (1987): the latter series was produced by James McAdams, who had also produced "Kojak."


title: Telly Savalas

text: Savalas was the lead actor in the TV movie "Hellinger's Law" (1981), which was originally planned as a pilot for a series but ultimately never materialized.


title: Telly Savalas

text: In 1992, he appeared in three episodes of the TV series "The Commish" (his son-in-law was one of the producers). This was Savalas' final television role. He would appear in two further feature films before his death, "Mind Twister" (1993) and the posthumous release "Backfire!" (1995).


title: Telly Savalas

text: As a singer, Savalas had some chart success. His spoken word version of Bread's "If", produced by Snuff Garrett, reached No. 1 in both the UK and Ireland in March 1975, but just No. 88 in Canada, and his version of Don Williams's "Some Broken Hearts Never Mend" topped the charts in Switzerland in February 1981. He worked with composer and producer John Cacavas on many albums, including "Telly" (1974) (which peaked at No. 49 in Australia) and "Who Loves Ya, Baby" (1976).


title: Telly Savalas

text: In the late 1970s, Savalas narrated three UK travelogues titled "Telly Savalas Looks at Portsmouth", "Telly Savalas Looks at Aberdeen", and "Telly Savalas Looks at Birmingham". They were produced by Harold Baim, and were examples of quota quickies, which were then part of a requirement that cinemas in the United Kingdom show a set percentage of British produced films. In the 1980s and early 1990s, Savalas appeared in commercials for the Players' Club Gold Card. In 1982, along with Bob Hope and Linda Evans, he participated in the "world premiere" television ad introducing Diet Coke to Americans. On October 28, 1987, Savalas hosted "Return to the Titanic Live", a two-hour television special broadcast from Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie in Paris. He also hosted the 1989 video "UFOs and Channeling."


title: Telly Savalas

text: He received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1983. In 1999, "TV Guide" ranked him number 18 on its 50 Greatest TV Stars of All Time list.


title: Telly Savalas

text: Savalas was married three times. In 1948 after his father's death from bladder cancer, Savalas married his college sweetheart, Katherine Nicolaides. Their daughter Christina, named after his mother, was born in 1950. In 1957 Katherine filed for divorce. She urged him to move back to his mother's house during that same year. While Savalas was going broke, he founded the Garden City Theater Center in his native Garden City. While working there he met Marilyn Gardner, a theater teacher. They married in 1960. Marilyn gave birth to their daughter, Penelope, in 1961. A second daughter, Candace, was born in 1963. They divorced in 1974, after a long separation.


title: Telly Savalas

text: In January 1969, while working on the movie "On Her Majesty's Secret Service", Savalas met actress Sally Adams (billed as Dani Sheridan, one of Blofeld's "Angels of Death"), an actress 25 years his junior whose daughter from a previous relationship is Nicollette Sheridan. Savalas later moved in with Sally, who gave birth to their son Nicholas Savalas on February 24, 1973. Although Savalas and Sally Adams never legally married, she went by the name Sally Savalas. They stopped living together in December 1978; she filed a palimony lawsuit against him in 1980, demanding support not only for herself and their son, but also for Nicollette.


title: Telly Savalas

text: In 1977, during the last season of "Kojak", Savalas met Julie Hovland, a travel agent from Minnesota. The couple were married from 1984 until his death and had two children: Christian, an entrepreneur, singer and songwriter, and Ariana, an actress and singer/songwriter. Savalas was close friends with actor John Aniston, and was godfather to his daughter Jennifer, a successful TV and film actress.


title: Telly Savalas

text: Savalas held a degree in psychology and was a world-class poker player who finished 21st at the main event in the 1992 World Series of Poker. He was also a motorcycle racer and lifeguard. His other hobbies and interests included golfing, swimming, reading romantic books, watching football, traveling, collecting luxury cars, and gambling. He loved horse racing and bought a racehorse with movie director and producer Howard W. Koch. Naming the horse Telly's Pop, it won several races in 1975 including the Norfolk Stakes and Del Mar Futurity.


title: Telly Savalas

text: In his capacity as producer for "Kojak", he gave many stars their first break, as Burt Lancaster had done for him. He was considered by those who knew him to be a generous, graceful, compassionate man. He was also a strong contributor to his Greek Orthodox roots through the Saint Sophia and Saint Nicholas cathedrals in Los Angeles and was the sponsor of bringing electricity in the 1970s to his ancestral home, Ierakas, Greece.


title: Telly Savalas

text: Savalas had a minor physical handicap in that his left index finger was deformed. This deformed digit was often indicated on screen; the "Kojak" episode "Conspiracy of Fear" in which a close-up of Savalas holding his chin in his hand clearly shows the permanently bent finger.


title: Telly Savalas

text: As a philanthropist and philhellene, Savalas supported many Hellenic causes and made friends in major cities around the world. In Chicago, he often met with Illinois state senators Steven G. Nash and Samuel C. Maragos, also of Greek descent, as well as millionaire Simeon Frangos, who owned the Athens North nightclub and the Flying Carpet Hotel near O'Hare Airport.


title: Telly Savalas

text: In 1993, Savalas appeared on an Australian TV show, "The Extraordinary", with a paranormal tale where he talked about an experience that he had that he could not explain.


title: Telly Savalas

text: In the 1980s, Savalas began to lose close relatives. His brother George Savalas, who played Stavros in the original series, died in 1985 of leukemia at age 60. His mother, Christina, who had always been his best friend, supporter and devoted parent, died in 1988. On November 22, 1989, Savalas was diagnosed with transitional cell cancer of the bladder.


title: Telly Savalas

text: Savalas died on January 22, 1994, the day after his 72nd birthday, of complications of prostate cancer at the Sheraton-Universal Hotel in Universal City, California. He had lived at the Sheraton in Universal City for 20 years, becoming such a fixture at the hotel bar that it was renamed Telly's. Savalas was interred at the George Washington section of Forest Lawn – Hollywood Hills Cemetery in Los Angeles, California. The funeral, held in the Saint Sophia Greek Orthodox Church, was attended by his third wife, Julie, and his brother Gus. His first two wives, Katherine and Marilyn, also attended with their own children. The mourners included Angie Dickinson, Nicollette Sheridan, Jennifer Aniston (his goddaughter), Kevin Sorbo, Sally Adams, Frank Sinatra, Don Rickles, and several of Savalas's "Kojak" co-stars – Kevin Dobson, Dan Frazer, and Vince Conti.


title: Carly Rae Jepsen

text: Carly Rae Jepsen (born November 21, 1985) is a Canadian singer and songwriter. After studying musical theatre for most of her school life and while in university, Jepsen garnered mainstream attention after placing third on the fifth season of "Canadian Idol" in 2007. In 2008, Jepsen released her folk music-influenced debut studio album, "Tug of War", exclusively in Canada before it was internationally released in 2011.


title: Carly Rae Jepsen

text: Jepsen's breakthrough came in 2012 with her universally acclaimed single "Call Me Maybe", being declared the best-selling single of that year, selling over 18 million copies, reaching number one in more than 19 countries, and leading to major record deals with School Boy Records and Interscope Records. Jepsen's sophomore album, "Kiss", released later that year and included the single "Good Time" with Owl City, charting in the top ten in Canada and the United States. In 2014, Jepsen made her Broadway theatre stage debut, playing the titular character in "Cinderella" for 12 weeks. The following year, she released her third studio album, "Emotion", influenced by 1980s music, dance-pop and synth-pop, which included the singles, "I Really Like You", "Your Type" and “Run Away with Me”. In 2016, Jepsen performed in the television special "" and voiced in the animated film "Ballerina". Her fourth studio album, "Dedicated", which included the singles "Party for One", "Now That I Found You", and "No Drug Like Me", was released in 2019, along with a B-side follow-up titled "Dedicated Side B" a year later. Her sixth studio album, "The Loneliest Time", which includes the singles "Western Wind" and "Beach House", was released in October 2022.


title: Carly Rae Jepsen

text: Jepsen has received three Juno Awards, three " Billboard" Music Awards, and an Allan Slaight Award, in addition to nominations for the Grammy Awards, MTV Video Music Awards, Polaris Music Prize and People's Choice Awards.


title: Carly Rae Jepsen

text: Jepsen was born in Mission, British Columbia to Alexandra and Larry Jepsen, the second of their three children. She is of Danish, English and Scottish descent. Jepsen has an older brother, Colin, and a younger sister, Katie. She attended Heritage Park Secondary School and had a passion for musical theatre, appearing in student productions of "Annie" where she played Annie, "Grease" where she played Sandy Olsson, and "The Wiz" where she played Dorothy Gale. Her parents and stepparents were teachers, so Jepsen considered a career in music instruction as a second option. She applied to music-related programs, including those at Capilano University and the University of British Columbia, but at the advice of her high school drama teacher, she auditioned for the Canadian College of Performing Arts in Victoria, British Columbia and was one of 25 female students to gain admission into its year-long program in 2004.


title: Carly Rae Jepsen

text: After graduation, Jepsen relocated to Vancouver's west side and held several jobs, including a barista, assistant pastry chef, and bartender. At this time, she slept on a pull-out sofa and wrote songs in her spare time.


title: Carly Rae Jepsen

text: In 2007, Jepsen was convinced to audition for "Canadian Idol" by her high school drama teacher. In the audition, she performed her original song "Sweet Talker". In the competition, she finished in third place, which she considered the best possible outcome in retrospect. Her demo recording attracted the attention of music manager Jonathan Simkin, who signed Jepsen to a management deal with 604 Records that year. Jepsen released her debut single, a cover of John Denver's song "Sunshine on My Shoulders", in June 2008. Her debut album, "Tug of War", was released in September 2008, and sold 10,000 copies in Canada. The singles "Tug of War" and "Bucket" peaked in the top 40 of the Canadian Hot 100, and received Gold certifications for sales of 40,000 units each. "Sour Candy", a duet with Josh Ramsay of Marianas Trench was released as the final single. In 2009, Jepsen toured western Canada with Marianas Trench and Shiloh.