Organ Donation Decisions: When Deviating from the Status Quo Heightens Perceived Vulnerability
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BackgroundResearch suggests that the method used to determine voluntary consent (i.e., opt-in versus opt-out policies) greatly affects the number of registered organ donors in various countries. Although the concept of organ transplantation is broadly supported, the relatively low percentage of registered donors in opt-in countries is puzzling. We suggest that deviating from the status quo (such as signing an organ donor card in opt-in countries or removing oneself from the list of registered donors in opt-out countries) heightens one's sense of vulnerability.DesignWe examined our prediction in 2 online experiments involving participants from the United States (studies 1 and 2), which has an opt-in organ-donation policy, and from the United Kingdom (study 2), a country that has recently changed its policy to opt out.ResultsIn study 1, registered organ donors perceived their vulnerability as greater after being reminded of their decision, but vulnerability perceptions were not affected by such a reminder among nondonors who upheld the status quo. In study 2, imagining oneself making an organ donation decision that deviates from the status quo (signing a commitment under an opt-in policy or removing oneself from the registered donors list under an opt-out policy) increased participants' perceived personal vulnerability.ConclusionsThe decision to become an organ donor may affect individuals' sense of physical vulnerability, depending on their country's donation policy. Potentially, deviating from the status quo may curtail willingness for organ donation. Understanding the psychological barriers to organ donation may help overcome them by presenting the issue in a manner that takes such perceptions into account. We recommend future research to explore whether this heightened sense of vulnerability potentially deters organ donation in opt-in countries.HighlightsThe decision to become an organ donor may affect individuals' sense of physical vulnerability, depending on their country's donation policy (opt in versus opt out).Registered organ donors perceived their vulnerability as greater after being reminded of their decision, but vulnerability perceptions were not affected by such a reminder among nondonors who upheld the status quo.Imagining oneself making an organ donation decision that deviates from the status quo (signing a commitment under an opt-in policy or removing oneself from the registered donors list under an opt-out policy) increased participants' perceived personal vulnerability.Future research is needed to examine whether this heightened sense of vulnerability affects actual organ donation decisions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".