Altruism and Kidney Donation Discussion

We have discussed altruism in class, often focusing on the righteous Gentiles of the Holocaust. New work on costly altruism is looking at people who have chosen to donate a kidney to a stranger (while alive) Would you do this? What type of people do? There are links to articles below with some introductions or abstracts given. Take a few minutes to read through the “You Don’t Need Two Kidneys To Climb Mount Kilimanjaro” article and video.

Then pick one or two of the academic articles and read them. While I was doing this I ended up on the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network and looked at Texas using their data. Right now Texas has 8.74% of the US population (29,145,505 out of 331,449,281 people.) But we only have four living people who have given a kidney to a non-related, non-biological, non-domino donor, out of 46. This does not sound too bad, but Utah with .97% of the population, also has 4 donors.

Extraordinary Altruism: Who Gives A Kidney To A Stranger?

I have a colleague who would not be alive today if it were not for a complete stranger, who volunteered to give her a kidney. Her kidneys were failing, and she would not have survived for long. Now she is healthy, and has been for some years. So I understand in a personal way that living kidney donation is an extraordinary gift, a far-too-rare act of pure altruism.

Yet I have not offered to make the same gift of my kidney. I have a friend who did, who donated one of her kidneys to a stranger, just out of the goodness of her heart. I admired her, but it made me nervous when she did it, for the same reason that it makes me nervous now. What if something goes wrong? What if my remaining kidney should fail? What if a loved one needs a kidney somewhere down the line?

Making a living kidney donation is not risk-free, which is why it’s called extraordinary altruism. Very little is known about the origins of such unusual generosity, in part because it’s so rare. Fewer than one in 10,000 people take such a step, so it’s been almost impossible to study the social and psychological precursors of this action.

Until now. Two Georgetown University psychological scientists recently figured out a way to explore the roots of unambiguous altruism, using aggregate data from states and national surveys. Kristin Brethel-Haurwitz and Abigail Marsh wanted to test an idea—called the “engine model” of well-being—which basically says that people become kind and generous when their own lives are going well. More specifically, the model predicts that objective measures of well-being—like income and good health—lead to positive emotions and a greater sense of meaning and purpose, which in turn promote genuine beneficence.

The two scientists had observed that living kidney donation is not uniform across the country. It varies significantly from region to region. They also knew that subjective well-being varies greatly from region to region in the U.S., and is linked to lesser forms of altruism, like volunteer work and charitable giving. Brethel-Haurwitz and Marsh wondered if there might be a connection between regional well-being and the prevalence of unusual altruism—a strong enough connection to support their model.

To test this idea, they turned to the Organ Procurement and Transplant Network, which has maintained records of all altruistic kidney donations since 1999. To fit the OPTN definition, a donation must be made to an anonymous stranger—eliminating any possibility of self-serving motivation. The scientists also tapped into a recently available, region-by-region assessment of subjective well-being, called the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index. This extensive sampling has been going on since 2008, and is more thorough and dimensional than any previous well-being survey. They examined the relationship between state well-being and state rates of altruistic donation, controlling for age, gender, education and race.

Here’s what they found, and report in an article to appear in the journal Psychological Science: There were only 955 altruistic kidney donations during the decade they studied, and these varied widely by state. Delaware and Mississippi recorded zero donations during this period, and Utah had the highest rate of donation, by far. Well-being also varied fairly widely state-by-state, from a low in West Virginia to a high in Hawaii. When the scientists crunched these data together, they found a clear connection between state well-being and state levels of altruistic donation. This pattern held up when they collapsed the state data into nine broad geographical regions, and it also held true for a single year and for a decade. What’s more, the data clearly support the engine model: That is, increases in objective well-being—like income—lead to a greater subjective sense of well-being, which in turn promotes acts of kindness to strangers.

There is growing interest in public policies that boost well-being. These findings point to a possible concrete benefit of such policies—an increase in life-saving acts of altruism. It’s well known that altruism itself promotes a sense of well-being, so such policies could—the scientists believe—create a “virtuous circle,” with well-being boosting altruism, which then boosts well-being, and on and on.

Meanwhile, more than 5000 Americans are dying every year while awaiting a kidney transplant. If the national rate of altruistic donation matched that of Utah, the most altruistic state, it could yield more than 900 additional, life-saving donations every year. Intriguingly, between 11 and 54 percent of people say they would consider making an altruistic donation, but actual donations are far below that. Other factors must be nudging potential donors to actually act on that impulse, and well-being may be one of those factors.

Some individuals commit extraordinary acts of kindness which often carry considerable risk, such as donating a kidney to a stranger. Researchers have been studying these individuals. “Here’s what they found, and report in an article to appear in the journal Psychological Science: There were only 955 altruistic kidney donations during the decade they studied, and these varied widely by state. Delaware and Mississippi recorded zero donations during this period, and Utah had the highest rate of donation, by far. Well-being also varied fairly widely state-by-state, from a low in West Virginia to a high in Hawaii. When the scientists crunched these data together, they found a clear connection between state well-being and state levels of altruistic donation. This pattern held up when they collapsed the state data into nine broad geographical regions, and it also held true for a single year and for a decade. What’s more, the data clearly support the engine model: That is, increases in objective well-being—like income—lead to a greater subjective sense of well-being, which in turn promotes acts of kindness to strangers.”

“You Don’t Need Two Kidneys To Climb Mount Kilimanjaro”

On March 10, 2022, Steve Wilson stood more than 19,000 feet above sea level, overlooking the rocky plains of Tanzania. He and 19 others — all of whom were fellow kidney donors — had reached the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro, achieving their goal of making it to the top of the tallest free-standing mountain in the world to raise awareness for living kidney donation.

“We wanted to prove to people that you don’t need two kidneys to climb Mount Kilimanjaro,” says Wilson, who climbed with friends from an awareness group called Kidney Donor Athletes. “It was a very emotional moment, and one that I’ll never forget.”

Subjective Well-Being and Prosociality Around the Globe Happy People Give More of Their Time and Money to Others.pdf

Subjective well-being (SWB) is positively related to prosocial giving and helping others, but so far, research has not explored the association of individual aspects of well-being with prosocial behavior across the world. We used a representative sample from the Gallup World Poll across 163 countries from 2006 to 2017 to explore the relationship between each aspect of well-being and prosocial behavior (N ¼ 1,797,630). We found that different aspects of SWB are not equally associated with prosocial behavior: While life satisfaction and positive affect consistently predicted being more prosocial across the globe, negative affect did not consistently predict being more or less prosocial. We further explore economic and cultural moderators of these relationships. Our findings underline the importance of studying the effects of the different components of SWB separately, indicating that life satisfaction and positive emotions—more so than negative emotions—consistently predict being more prosocial across the globe.

Donor registration, college major, and prosociality Differences among students of economics, medicine and psychology.pdf

The demand for organ transplants far exceeds supply. Underlying this shortfall is the fact that some people choose to register as organ donors, whereas many others decide not to. Why do people vary in their attitudes and choices regarding organ donation? We hypothesize that attitudes toward organ donation and decisions to register as a donor are linked to prosociality. We test this hypothesis across two studies, both of which suggest that prosociality is linked to attitudes toward organ donation or actual donor status. Study 1 demonstrates that two groups (economics students and psychology students) that have previously been shown to differ in prosocial orientations have different attitudes toward organ donation and are registered as organ donors at different rates. Study 2 investigated three groups (economics, psychology, and medical students), and it found that messages framing organ donation as a prosocial act affect willingness to become a donor, but only among economics students and among students who score lower on an instrument designed to measure prosociality. Implications and future research directions are offered.

Super Altruists – Brain Activity – Empathy.

These super altruists also show increased brain activity related to empathy.

The findings suggest that – at least for this group of “extraordinary altruists” – empathy for others may be a relevant driving force. Compared with demographically matched controls, the altruists showed a greater amount of overlap in the neural activity they exhibited during their first-hand experience of pain and when observing a stranger in pain.

The US research team, led by Kristen Brethel-Haurwitz at the University of Pennsylvania, invited the 25 kidney donors and the 27 controls to their lab and had them complete various sessions in the brain scanner, during which they either experienced painful pressure applied to their own thumb, or they witnessed a live video feed of a previously unfamiliar study partner (actually a research confederate) suffering the same pain. For comparison, some sessions for both the participant and their partner were completely safe and pain-free, allowing the researchers to investigate brain activity during experienced pain, the anticipation of possible pain, and during safety.

Social discounting and distance perceptions in costly altruism.pdf

Extraordinary acts of altruism towards strangers represent puzzling phenomena not easily explained by dominant biological models of altruism, such as kin selection and reciprocity. These theories stipulate that genetically or socially close others should be the beneficiaries of costly generosity. Extraordinary altruists exhibit increased empathic sensitivity and a fast, intuitive decision-making style, but no clear explanation yet exists for the most perplexing feature of these altruists, which is that they incur significant risks to benefit strangers. Here, we considered two related proximal mechanisms—social discounting (valuational) and social distancing (perceptual)—that have been proposed to explain why costly help is preferentially given to close others. We hypothesized that variations in one or both mechanisms drive costly altruism towards distant others. We show that extraordinary altruists exhibit reduced social discounting, with altruists discounting the subjective value of outcomes for socially distant others less than controls. Group differences in social discounting were associated with self-reported other-oriented preferences and could not be accounted for by variation in social distancing. These results suggest a psychological mechanism by which costly helping behaviour towards genetically and socially close others might be extended to unrelated others

Love thy stranger as thyself

Extraordinary altruists risk their own health and life to help anonymous strangers. A study now shows that extraordinary altruists are motivated to do good to distant others not because they feel socially closer to them, but because they genuinely care more for the welfare of strangers.

Discussion Board Assignment:

1. Describe your thoughts on living kidney donations to a total stranger?
2. Read the abstracts (not the full articles) and give your thoughts on one.
3. How could you encourage your families, friends, churches, and students at DBU to “genuinely care (altruism) more for the welfare of strangers”?