How to use worldview value to cope with non-organ donors’ fear of death in an online organ donation campaign

Organ donation is an ambivalent prosocial behavior. It triggers altruistic values and reminds people of death related thoughts at the same time. Due to the characteristics of organ donation, prior studies examined the impact of different types of mortality salience (conventional manipulation: ask participants to write down their thoughts once they are physically dead vs. narrative manipulation: ask participants to read a narrative of a cancer patient) on organ donation. However, without acknowledging the unique feature of organ donation, different types of mortality salience generated opposing results in organ donation. Hence, in this article, the purpose of Study 1 is to investigate if an organ donation campaign can remind people of their own mortality. Furthermore, although previous studies discovered that non-cognitive factors, such as mortality salience and medical mistrust, affect organ donation, few studies investigated how to resolve those non-cognitive factors to promote organ donation rate. Therefore, the purpose of Study 2 is to study how to help people address the fear of death caused by organ donation. Two online experiments were executed on Amazon Turk Prime to bridge the knowledge gaps. Study 1 found that an organ donation campaign can increase people’s death related thoughts. Study 2 discovered that an enhanced altruistic worldview value can help people diminish organ donation triggered fear by decreasing medical mistrust. In addition, this study also revealed that medical mistrust as a causal factor mediated the effect between worldview value and perceptions of organ donation.