@article{ref1,
title="More dead than dead: perceptions of persons in the persistent vegetative state",
journal="Cognition",
year="2011",
author="Gray, Kurt and Knickman, T. Anne and Wegner, Daniel M.",
volume="121",
number="2",
pages="275-280",
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 &quot;worse&quot; 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.<p /><p>Language: en</p>",
language="en",
issn="0010-0277",
doi="10.1016/j.cognition.2011.06.014",
url="http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2011.06.014"
}