Department of Psychology, University of Maryland, MD 20742, USA.
Cognition. 2011 Nov;121(2):275-80. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2011.06.014. Epub 2011 Jul 27.
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.
持续性植物状态（PVS）患者可能在生物学上还活着，但这些实验表明，人们认为 PVS 的状态比死亡更接近死亡。实验 1 发现，与死者相比，人们认为 PVS 患者的精神能力更低。实验 2 将这种影响解释为来世信仰的结果，以及关注 PVS 患者身体而忽略其精神的倾向。实验 3 发现，PVS 也被认为比死亡“更糟糕”：人们认为早逝比处于 PVS 状态更好。这些研究表明，人们认为 PVS 患者的思维不如死者有价值——具有讽刺意味的是，这种影响对于宗教信仰程度较高的人来说尤为明显。
