Abstract
Life-saving transfusions and numerous other medical treatments are enabled by a minority of people that donate blood. But why do some people repeatedly engage in such prosocial behaviour, especially when it is costly to themselves? This study examines to what extent social contagion within neighbourhoods - changing behaviour in response to the behaviour of others - affects repeated blood donation behaviour. We draw on longitudinal survey and register data from a representative sample of blood donors in the Netherlands from 2007 to 2014 (N = 15,090). Using a panel data model and an instrumental variable approach, we find that donors are positively affected by donations made by other donors living in their neighbourhood. This effect does not seem to be mediated by normative or informational social influence. Exploratory analysis further attributes this finding to social contagion within donor couples. Our study contributes to the literature on repeated blood donation behaviour, and can inform retention strategies of blood banks.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 103072 |
| Pages (from-to) | 1-11 |
| Number of pages | 11 |
| Journal | Health and Place |
| Volume | 83 |
| Early online date | 7 Aug 2023 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Sept 2023 |
Bibliographical note
Copyright © 2023 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.Funding
This work was supported by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme [grant agreement No. 802227 to E.-M.M.]. Pamala Wiepking's position at the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy is funded by the Stead Family, her work at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam is funded by the Dutch Postcode Lotteries. The results from the IV approach support this finding (see Supplementary Material S2). The coefficient for donations by others is positive and significant (b = 0.227, p = 0.011). Because the IV approach estimates a local average treatment effect, the coefficient indicates that for those donors whose neighbours are actually affected by invitations to donate, a one-unit increase in the number of donations per inhabitant is estimated to increase the number donations by about 22%. Next, we adjust for multiple hypothesis testing of our six hypothesis (including the mediated relationships) to control for the false discovery rate (FDR) following Benjamini and Hochberg (1995). Controlling for the FDR, the significance threshold for H1 is reduced to p < 0.008, which the result for H1 does not meet. Finally, after excluding potential outliers (see Supplementary Material S1.3 for details) the estimate for the effect of the donations of others remains similar but no longer significant (b = 0.093, p = 0.091). Together with the results from a robustness check using the number of donors instead of the number of donations (see Supplementary Material Table S8), this might suggest that it is (clusters of) very active donors that influence others’ donation behaviour. To summarise, the result for H1 seems to be robust regarding potential time-constant and time-varying unobservables, but the estimated effect is small and therefore sensitive to the control of the FDR and exclusion of potential outliers.This work was supported by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme [grant agreement No. 802227 to E.-M.M.]. Pamala Wiepking's position at the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy is funded by the Stead Family, her work at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam is funded by the Dutch Postcode Lotteries.
| Funders | Funder number |
|---|---|
| Dutch Postcode Lotteries | |
| European Research Council | |
| Horizon 2020 | 802227 |
| Fondation du Risque |
Keywords
- Blood donations
- Conditional cooperation
- Neighbourhood effects
- Prosocial behaviour
- Social contagion
- Social influence