14 DAY TRIAL // According to a new research, presented at the Cheltenham Science Festival, people would rather take organs from someone of high moral value and integrity than from criminals. Most of them, even if in critical conditions, have a great deal of adversity oriented against those who brought harm upon others, and say that they would rather not have anything to do with these individuals. At this point, more than 16 million people in the United Kingdom are registered on the organ donor list, but they span all social categories and lifestyles, and those who receive the organs seldom are told many things about the person giving them their new “body parts.”
“Some of the psychological changes many patients experience have very good physiological explanations, however according to one survey of transplant patients, approximately one in three attribute this change to taking on psychological characteristics of the donor even though conventional science has generally rejected the idea that such transference is possible,” said at the scientific conference University of Bristol cognitive neuroscientist professor Bruce Hood, as quoted by BBC News. He added that the most negative feelings were recorded for a murderer's heart.
“We ensure that organs donated for transplant are matched and allocated based on clinical need and criteria including, age, size, blood group and for kidneys, the tissue type. Clinical analysis shows that these criteria are most relevant to the successful outcome of a transplant,” said in a statement a spokesperson for the National Health Service (NHS) Blood and Transplant group. The representative added that the transplants are regularly anonymous, so not even the donors know where their organs are going. They sign policies beforehand, which legally ensure that this is the case.
For the study, 20 students were given a set of pictures, containing the faces of average people, and were then told about each of them that they were either good or bad. Based on the perceived idea that they got from the researchers, the students had to grade their willingness to receive an organ from the people in the photos they were holding. When they were told that the person in the image was bad, they showed a large amount of reluctance in agreeing to potentially receiving an organ from such an individual. The opposite was proven true when they were told that the people they were looking at were good.