Interesting study explores attitudes toward death. It seems that to many people, somebody in a persistent vegetative state is seen to be “deader” than someone buried in a coffin. This is especially true for religious people. The authors of the study postulate that belief in the afterlife is a cause of that discrepancy.

David Berreby comments. He wonders about the implications of such perceptions:

Still, most of us in industrialized societies don’t see death or severe brain damage up close. Hence, a tendency to see mental incapacity as somehow more dead than death could have practical and political consequences—especially in an ever-grayer societies in which instances of dementia are expected to double in the next 20 years.