Without prosocial individuals, no money would be donated to charity, no volunteer work performed. Without blood donors, no blood products would be available for patient treatment. Four million patients are annually treated with blood products in Europe, given by voluntary donors. However, as little as 2-3% of the population in Europe is active as donor with decreasing numbers. At the same time, the demand for blood products and other substances of human origin (e.g. organs) is increasing, in times of demographic change. Hence, it is crucial that a country’s donor pools are sufficient to ensure access to all needed products. A thorough investigation of donor motives, as well as a dynamic approach to donor life courses is lacking. Yet, this information is fundamental to develop effective evidence-based donor management. Explaining (sustained) prosocial behaviour in humans requires innovative, multidisciplinary and dynamic approaches because we still do not fully understand why prosociality survives. The DONORS project has produced results relevant for both science and society to enhance knowledge about prosocial behaviour, and ultimately recruitment and retention of human substance donors, cornerstones of health care. Until now donor management is hardly, if at all evidence-based. Hence, besides through scientific publications and conference presentations, our results were disseminated throigh professional publications, social media posts and blogs, and public outreach events to summarise key outcomes of DONORS that relevant to policymaking.
Main aim of DONORS: Propose and test a life course model of prosociality, including (changes in) individual determinants, network characteristics and societal contexts to understand and predict donor motivations and behaviour.
This main aim is broken down in the following objectives:
• First, examine which individual and social network characteristics determine donor motivations and behaviour over the life course (WP1)
• Second, study to what extent and which genes contribute to explaining variation in prosociality and donor behaviour (WP2)
• Third, explain variation in individual donor behaviour across societal contexts (WP3)
Along the main aim and objectives, we have achieved the following. We contributed to development of theories on prosocial behaviour and altruism and tested our model in several empirical studies, using different observational, survey, registry and experimental (longitudinal) data. Together, this has contributed to innovating the study of blood, plasma, and organ donation by applying an integrated theoretical life-course framework, grounded in social and behavioral sciences to unravel how individual agency, relations within social networks and across life-stages, and socio-cultural context impact donation. This has resulted in a well-recognized multilevel model and shifted the dominant cross-sectional perspective on donation behavior to a dynamic one including attention to ethical considerations around blood and organ donation.