What motivates men to offer sperm donation via the internet?

To investigate why men offer sperm donation via the internet, a questionnaire was disseminated via 39 Dutch-language websites thought to be visited by potential sperm donors. Nine internet donors completed the survey, men who typically knew the women they were donating to. Their responses were compared with those of a control group of 35 general sperm bank donors who were recruited using flyers in Dutch sperm banks, and who were typically unaware of the identity of the eventual recipients. The findings shed light on the motives and attitudes of internet donors. Both groups of donors indicated that their primary motivation for donating was altruism (>80% of all respondents). However, internet donors had a more pronounced desire to procreate than sperm bank donors (6 out of 9, i.e. 66 vs. 22%, respectively) and more often felt that they had good genes they wished to pass on (5 out of 9, i.e. 55 vs. 31%, respectively). The main reason internet donors gave for donating via the internet was that they wanted to know the prospective parents and be kept up to date on the progress of the offspring conceived from their donations. This distinguishes them significantly from sperm bank donors. A further finding was that they were not prompted to avoid the formal donation circuit for which, by law in the Netherlands, pregnancies resulting from donations have to be registered in a central database. This study is subject to several, in some cases inevitable, limitations, but it provides an interesting starting point that future studies can seek to confirm and extend.     

Sex-role orientation,achievement motivation,and causal attributions of college females

Female undergraduates were asked to state causal attributions for success or failure outcomes. Students worked in pairs so that one half of them cooperated with either a male or a female partner, while the other half competed with a male or female opponent. All female subjects were pretested on achievement motivation and sex-role orientation. Women who espoused the traditional feminine role were more self-derogating in causal attribution than nontraditional women. Achievement-oriented women, like their male counterparts, were more self-enhancing following failure. However, following competitive success against male opponents, women who scored high in achievement motivation were less self-enhancing than those who scored low.This article is part of a larger study originally prepared as the author's doctoral dissertation at Hofstra University, 1975. The author is indebted to Claire Ernhart, the dissertation chairperson, and to the committee members, Alfred Cohn and Dianne Krooth, for their guidance and support.     

Social exclusion and donation behaviour: What conditions motivate the socially excluded to donate?

Previous research has indicated that social exclusion can result in people becoming more focused on themselves than on others, and this may reduce their likelihood of engaging in prosocial behaviour. However, the question of how to promote prosocial behaviour in people who have experienced social exclusion remains. This study comprised two experiments that address this question in the context of donation advertising. Experiment 1 examined participants’ donation intentions after experiencing social exclusion in a ball‐passing game. Experiment 2 followed the same design as Experiment 1, except that real‐life donation behaviour was measured. Consistent with prior findings, our results indicated that those who experienced social exclusion displayed lower donation intentions (Experiment 1) and donated less (Experiment 2) than did those who did not experience social exclusion. However, when those who experienced social exclusion watched advertisements that only portrayed alienated people, they showed as much donation intent as those who did not experience social exclusion (Experiment 1) and ultimately donated more (Experiment 2). These findings indicate that social exclusion may increase an individual's tendency to help others who also are alienated.     

The role of identity in how whole‐blood donors reflect on and construct their future as a plasma donor

In the context of decreased demand for whole blood and increased demand for plasma‐derived products, donors in Australia are increasingly being asked to convert from whole‐blood to plasmapheresis donations. Plasmapheresis is a different type of donation to whole blood as the process takes longer and can be engaged in more frequently. What is unknown is whether whole‐blood donors view donating plasma as consistent with their donor identity and how they respond to the possibility of donating more frequently. To explore this, we undertook semistructured telephone interviews with 26 whole‐blood donors who had recently made their first plasma donation. Findings indicated that whereas donating plasma was viewed as a bigger ask than donating whole blood, the former was viewed as consistent with their identity as a donor because both behaviours were seen to benefit others and self and were located within the same institutional context. Donating plasma was an opportunity for donors to enhance their self‐concept as an altruistic giver. When contemplating their future donation behaviour, donors considered how their donor identity would fit alongside other salient roles. These findings have implications for how institutions can position their request of existing donors to give a different gift.     

Directed Altruistic Living Organ Donation: Partial but not Unfair

Arguments against directed altruistic living organ donation are too weak to justify a ban. Potential donors who want to specify the non-related person or group of persons to receive their donated kidney should be accepted. The arguments against, based on considerations of motivation, fairness and (non-)anonymity (e.g. those recently cited by an advisory report of the Dutch Health Council), are presented and discussed, as well as the Dutch Governments response. Whereas the Government argues that individuals have authority with regard to the allocation of their organs, partial considerations have not been sufficiently explored. In addition, it is argued that partial relationships govern human life, are significant and should be valued highly. These relationships are at the core of accepted living kidney donation between relatives (family members, partners, friends). Respecting the particular act of living donation goes beyond respect for autonomy; it touches upon our personal and social identity. Donation, e.g. of a kidney, is not undertaken strictly for the benefit of the recipient, but also to meet the moral standards we wish to set for ourselves. This consideration, rooted in a view of moral identity, provides the basis for many forms of directed donation that are both partial and justified. If the importance of this is not recognized, social policies can be neither adequate nor effective.     

Committing Altruism under the Cloak of Self-Interest: The Exchange Fiction

Two field studies tested the hypothesis that people's willingness to help a charitable organization is greater when the act is presented as an economic transaction than when it is presented as an act of charity. In Study 1 participants donated more money to a charity when offered a product in exchange for their donation, even though the product itself held little appeal for them. Participants' donation rates were also more responsive to the level of need of the victim group when they were offered a product in exchange for their donation, consistent with the idea that the exchange provided psychological cover for their act of compassion. In Study 2 participants' willingness to purchase a product from a charitable organization increased the more of a bargain the price was purported to be, but only when the victims' need was high. The source of people's desire to not reveal or even to recognize the full extent of their prosocial motivation is discussed, as are the implications of the exchange fiction for charity appeals.     

Cheapened altruism: Discounting personally affected prosocial actors

Are charitable donors always perceived as charitable? Three studies suggest that although having a personal connection to a cause motivates much charitable giving, donors who have been personally affected by the target cause are given less “credit” for their donations, i.e., are perceived as less intrinsically charitable. These donors are perceived as having selfish motivations even when they have nothing economic or social to gain from the donation. More specifically, personally-affected donors are perceived as driven by emotional selfishness, or a desire to improve their own hedonic state rather a desire to improve the welfare of others, which lessens the charitable credit that they receive. In addition, although donors who have been personally affected by the target cause are seen as less charitable, they are perceived more favorably in other ways (e.g., more loyal).     

A phenomenological approach to the ethics of transplantation medicine: sociality and sharing when living-with and dying-with others

Recent years have seen a rise in the number of sociological, anthropological, and ethnological works on the gift metaphor in organ donation contexts, as well as in the number of philosophical and theological analyses of giving and generosity, which has been mirrored in the ethical debate on organ donation. In order to capture the breadth of this field, four frameworks for thinking about bodily exchanges in medicine have been distinguished: property rights, heroic gift-giving, sacrifice, and gift-giving as aporia. Unfortunately, they all run into difficulties in terms of both making sense of the relational dimensions of postmortem and live organ donations and being normatively adequate in the sense of shedding light and providing guidance on ethical concerns when body parts are donated. For this reason, this article presents a phenomenological framework of giving-through-sharing, based on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy. This framework makes sense of relational dimensions of postmortem and live organ donation. It also sheds light on three highly debated concerns in organ donation ethics: indebtedness on the part of recipients, the fact that some live donors do not experience donation as a matter of choice, and the potentially painful experience of donors’ relatives, who need to make decisions about postmortem organ donation at a time of bereavement. It can indirectly support what may be called a normalization of bodily exchanges in medicine.     

Who’s chasing whom? The impact of gender and relationship status on mate poaching

Are women more interested in men who are already in a relationship? Female and male participants who were single or in a relationship viewed information about an opposite-sex other and indicated their interest in pursuing this target. Half of the participants were told that the target was single and half read that the target was currently in a relationship. The results showed that only single women were more interested in pursuing an attached target rather than a single target. We discuss how these results add to what is already known about mate poaching.     

陌生他人在场及其行为对个体道德伪善的影响

道德伪善既有印象管理或欺人的一面, 也有自欺的一面。道德伪善的影响因素众多, 而人际层面的影响因素则少有研究。本研究采用实验的方法, 以大学生为被试, 设置捐款情境, 探讨单个陌生他人在场及其真善/伪善行为能否抑制个体的道德伪善。结果表明：陌生他人单纯在场或做出伪善行为都不能抑制捐款情境中个体的道德伪善, 而在场陌生他人的真善行为可以有效抑制捐款情境中个体的道德伪善。     

Non-heart-beating organ donation: personal and institutional conflicts of interest

While procurement of organs from donors who are not "brain dead" does not appear to pose insurmountable moral obstacles, the social practice may raise questions of conflict of interest. Non-heart-beating organ donation opens the door for pressure on patients or families to forgo possibly beneficial treatment to provide organs to save others. The combined effects of non-heart-beating donation and organ shortages at major transplant centers brought about by the 1991 United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) local-use organ allocation policy created potential conflicts, including the fact that candidates for organs become potential donors far more frequently than previously. Hospitals with a major emphasis on transplantation have economic and academic interests that may have been hurt by the relative organ shortage. Some may view non-heart-beating organ donation as a way to restore weakened programs and thus unconsciously compromise recognition of problems associated with non-heart-beating donation.     

The effect of mood and incentives on helping: Are there some things money can't buy?

Happy, guilty, and neutral mood states were induced in participants who were then provided with an opportunity to donate blood for free, to donate in exchange for $5, or to choose between donating for free or for $5. As expected, there was a significantly higher incidence of helping when subjects felt happy and guilty as opposed to emotively neutral. Contrary to predictions, helping was unaffected by the type of incentive (donate for $5, donate for free, choose $5/free) subjects were offered in interaction with their mood state. However, the type of incentive did seem to influence the postdonation emotions of subjects: Guilty subjects who donated for money felt significantly less guilty following donation than prior to it and happy subjects felt more self-altruistic (kind and generous) following donation when they helped for free. The results are discussed in terms of Cialdini's negative state relief model (for negative moods) and the intrinsic qualities of helping (for positive moods).     

Community Norms and Blood Donation1

It is suggested that for social psychological theory and research on helping to provide an adequate general explanation of helping, more attention must be paid to supraindividual factors. Most studies of blood donation have failed to take into account a number of factors that may influence donations at the level of the organization, community or collectivity. This study examines the possibility that specific community norms may emerge that have an influence on the donating behavior of community members. Perceived normative support was found to exist in different degrees in communities that provide different levels of behavioral support for bloodmobile visits, and persons who report a greater degree of perceived community support for donation are more likely to have donated in the past year. Implications for donor recruitment procedures are discussed.     

大学生网络捐助的影响因素:求助者特征的视角

以往关于捐助的心理学研究主要聚焦于现实环境中的捐助行为,以及捐助者自身特点对捐助的影响,网络环境、求助者特征对捐助影响的研究较少。本研究以大学生为被试,比较不同信息发布者情境中,网络与现实中捐助的意愿,并确定求助者的身份特征和求助信息特征对网络捐助的影响。结果发现,在捐助意愿和捐助金额方面,网络渠道高于现实渠道、熟人发布高于陌生人发布;当求助者与捐助者同为大学生时,捐助者对求助者的理性求助信息比情绪性求助信息有更强的捐助意愿和更多捐助金额。以上结果与大学生网络社会支持水平较高、处理网络信息能力较强有关。     

大学生网络捐助的影响因素:求助者特征的视角

以往关于捐助的心理学研究主要聚焦于现实环境中的捐助行为,以及捐助者自身特点对捐助的影响,网络环境、求助者特征对捐助影响的研究较少。本研究以大学生为被试,比较不同信息发布者情境中,网络与现实中捐助的意愿,并确定求助者的身份特征和求助信息特征对网络捐助的影响。结果发现,在捐助意愿和捐助金额方面,网络渠道高于现实渠道、熟人发布高于陌生人发布;当求助者与捐助者同为大学生时,捐助者对求助者的理性求助信息比情绪性求助信息有更强的捐助意愿和更多捐助金额。以上结果与大学生网络社会支持水平较高、处理网络信息能力较强有关。     

Memory for the Experience of Donating Blood: Just How Bad Was It?

A field experiment investigated the accuracy of blood donor's memory for the emotions they experienced during blood donation. Compared to what they reported at the time of donation, the donors remembered a greater contrast between predonation and postdonation emotions. The donors also remembered experiencing more anxiety than they actually did. The bias in memory was especially pronounced among relatively inexperienced donors who had not been asked to report on their emotion prior to their actual donations. The memory boas was also related to donors' attitudes at the time of recall. Donors' intentions to donate blood again were reliably predicted by a combination of attitude and emotion measures. Discussion considers a potential intervention for improving donor return rates.     

Complicating Power in High-Tech Reproduction: Narratives of Anonymous Paid Egg Donors

This paper is informed by my own participant observation and uses my own ethnography which included conducting in-depth interviews with anonymous paid egg donors and observing a listserv for women considering, pursuing, or having completed egg donation, to illustrate the way that power operates at this particular site of the reproductive center in postmodernity. After outlining who the consumers and providers of eggs are, I will use Foucault's concepts of biopower, disciplinary power, and normativity to describe how anonymous paid egg donation plays a socially useful role in reproducing privilege and in preserving the myth of the nuclear family. Drawing on feminist theorizing to problematize altruism, I will show how the construction of the altruist narrative feeds the preservation of that myth by giving egg donors appropriately feminine motivations. Finally, I will focus on one particular site of resistance on the part of egg donors—controlling their self-presentation, tweaking the pool of eggs—to underscore the simultaneity of control of and control by egg donors.     

Uterus Transplantation: The Ethics of Using Deceased Versus Living Donors

Research teams have made considerable progress in treating absolute uterine factor infertility through uterus transplantation, though studies have differed on the choice of either deceased or living donors. While researchers continue to analyze the medical feasibility of both approaches, little attention has been paid to the ethics of using deceased versus living donors as well as the protections that must be in place for each. Both types of uterus donation also pose unique regulatory challenges, including how to allocate donated organs; whether the donor / donor's family has any rights to the uterus and resulting child; how to manage contact between the donor / donor's family, recipient, and resulting child; and how to track outcomes moving forward.     

Counselling needs of patients receiving treatment with gamete donation

Couples experiencing infertility may be offered treatment with gamete donation where other methods of treatment have failed or are inappropriate. This paper examines a range of concerns related to gamete donation. The paper does not attempt to present a comprehensive and critical review of the literature but concentrates on selecting from the literature, in addition to clinical material, issues which have been identified as contributing to an understanding of patients' experience of treatment with donated gametes. The concerns include feelings and attitudes towards the donor, the role the donor plays in the couple's relationship, feelings about not being the genetic parent and whether to disclose the donation to the potential child and others. These concerns form a basis for counselling couples about the implications of gamete donation for themselves and any children born as a result. The difficulties faced by some people are illustrated by consideration of a single case where the experience of donation linked up with unique aspects of that individual. Therapeutic counselling offers couples faced with such difficulties the opportunity to explore in a more extensive way the underlying dynamics of their concerns, enabling them to think about and make sense of their experience. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Developing a Commitment to Blood Donation: The Impact of One's First Experience1

The increasing demand for voluntarily donated blood has generated research concerned with the development of commitment to regular blood donation. Taking a developmental perspective, this paper explores the longitudinal impact of background, situational, and dispositional factors measured at one's first donation. Questionnaire responses from a sample of first-time donors are analyzed and logistic regression analysis is employed to predict successive “continuation decisions” (the decisions to donate twice, three times, and four times). Results suggest that factors may change in their magnitude and direction of impact across the donor's career. Externally focused social pressures and rewards are dominant at the early stages and self-originating factors at the later stages. Theoretical and practical implications of the findings are discussed.