PVS Seen as State Worse than Death

Patients in persistent vegetative state (PVS) may be biologically alive, but experiments by psychologists in the University of Maryland's "Mind Perception and Morality Lab" indicate that people see PVS as a state curiously more dead than dead.  The results of the experiments were just published online in COGNITION.  

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.