{"id":4,"date":"2004-06-22T09:13:15","date_gmt":"2004-06-22T08:13:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/67.18.176.78\/dsn\/?p=4"},"modified":"2012-03-23T13:30:42","modified_gmt":"2012-03-23T17:30:42","slug":"do-defaults-save-lives","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.decisionsciencenews.com\/?p=4","title":{"rendered":"Do Defaults Save Lives?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www0.gsb.columbia.edu\/whoswho\/bio.cfm?ID=55614\">Eric Johnson<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.dangoldstein.com\">Dan Goldstein<\/a> have published an investigation of the effect of policy defaults on organ donation in the journal <em>Science<\/em> <a href=\"http:\/\/www.dangoldstein.com\/papers\/DefaultsScience.pdf\">[Download]<\/a>. Defaults determine whether a citizen is in the organ donor pool unless they choose not to be (an &#8220;opt out&#8221; system, as in some European countries) or is <em>not <\/em>in the organ donor pool unless they choose to be (an &#8220;opt in&#8221; system as, in the United States). Looking at real-world data from a variety of European countries in addition to experimental data, it is found that most people stick with the default category they are assigned to. <\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" alt=\"Organ donation rates in Europe\" src=\"http:\/\/www.decisionsciencenews.com\/archives\/optinout.gif\" width=\"551\" height=\"323\" border=\"0\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Across European countries the opt out countries have drastically higher proportions of the population in the potential organ donor pool: a difference of 60 percentage points minimum.<\/p>\n<p>Does the size of the donor pools matter? Johnson and Goldstein find that opt out countries are home to more organ transplantation, and presumably lives saved. This is supported by a regression analysis that controls for religion, educational level, and medical infrastructure.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Eric Johnson and Dan Goldstein have published an investigation of the effect of policy defaults on organ donation in the journal Science [Download]. Defaults determine whether a citizen is in the organ donor pool unless they choose not to be (an &#8220;opt out&#8221; system, as in some European countries) or is not in the organ [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-research-news"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4LKj-4","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.decisionsciencenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.decisionsciencenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.decisionsciencenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.decisionsciencenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.decisionsciencenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.decisionsciencenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3217,"href":"https:\/\/www.decisionsciencenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4\/revisions\/3217"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.decisionsciencenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.decisionsciencenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.decisionsciencenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}