More dead than dead: perceptions of persons in the persistent vegetative state
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Published on: February 6, 2021
Kurt Gray1, T Anne Knickman, Daniel M Wegner
1Department of Psychology, University of Maryland, MD 20742, USA. kurtgray@umd.edu
Abstract:
Patients in persistent vegetative state (PVS) may be biologically alive, but these experiments indicate that people see PVS as a state curiously more dead than dead. Experiment 1 found that PVS patients were perceived to have less mental capacity than the dead. Experiment 2 explained this effect as an outgrowth of afterlife beliefs, and the tendency to focus on the bodies of PVS patients at the expense of their minds. Experiment 3 found that PVS is also perceived as "worse" than death: people deem early death better than being in PVS. These studies suggest that people perceive the minds of PVS patients as less valuable than those of the dead - ironically, this effect is especially robust for those high in religiosity.
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