Journal
COGNITION
Volume 121, Issue 2, Pages 275-280Publisher
ELSEVIER
DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2011.06.014
Keywords
Mind perception; Morality; End of life decisions; Medical ethics; Dualism
Categories
Funding
- Division Of Behavioral and Cognitive Sci
- Direct For Social, Behav & Economic Scie [0841746] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
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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. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
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