What will encourage people to donate organs?

Generally people donate money when they believe that their donations will directly help someone. Why then is it difficult to commit them to donate organs? One reason could be that their contribution is for an unknown future recipient in the unfortunate event of the donor or a family member dying. And another could be that the thought of death brings distress. Therefore, to encourage people to donate organs, we must first know how to do that and what have we been doing wrong all this while.

A team of psychologists- Inbal Harela, Tehila Koguta, Meir Pinchasa, and Paul Slovic, did an interesting investigation to answer this question. They examined how media presentation about organ donation affects people willingness to donate their own or a loved one’s organs post demise. First, they studied how does media report cases related to organ donation- do they tell stories of recipients or of donors? From a variety of media sources including USA today, Wall Street Journal, and Maariv, among others, they reviewed 229 articles and found that 70% or more gave details of the donor, and didn’t talk of the recipient. Next, they prepared questionnaires for 130 undergraduate students that narrated a story. A young man gets killed in a car accident. He is a registered organ donor so his parents decide to donate his organs. His kidney is transplanted into the body of another young man, whose life is saved as a result. Then they provide the name and a picture of the donor or of the recipient. Interestingly, this photograph is the same person in both the cases, just labeled differently. But the students didn’t know that. They were then asked if they would like to commit to donating organs post death. Scientists found that more people were willing to commit for organ donation after reading about the receiver, than after reading the same case with the donor. They published their results in a recent issue of PNAS. 

Similar questionnaires revealed that people were more likely to commit to donating organs of their loved ones after death, support a public policy that promotes organ donation, and donate a kidney while they were alive, when they knew about who receives and benefits from organ donation. This study was done at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel, Decision Research, and Department of Psychology, University of Oregon, Eugene, in Oregon.

The scientists are confident that creating an optimistic image of organ donation cases will have a beneficial effect on public opinion, and will increase the number of potential organ donors and supporters and help save the lives of those waiting for organ transplants.“If media includes more stories of organ receivers, we believe that with time, people will have a more positive image of organ donation, which in turn has the potential to increase support for organ donations”,says Dr. Tehila Kogut at the Ben-Gurion University in Israel. In US alone, 0.1 million people are awaiting life saving organ transplants. This study can help NGOs and hospitals in designing media campaigns to benefit this cause.

Reference: PNAS. doi-10.1073/pnas.1703020114.

By Bhavya Khullar