Who gives life? understanding, explaining and predicting donor behaviour
Background: Why do individuals repeatedly help strangers even when this incurs personal costs? Current evidence on prosocial behaviour is contradictory, scattered across disciplines, restricted to one-country studies, not taking into account contextual influences, and fails to capture its dynamic nature. An integrated model is needed to increase understanding of prosociality as a societal core value.

Aim: To break with monodisciplinary approaches, and grasp the dynamic and contextual nature of prosocial behaviour, I propose a life course model to link individual determinants, social network characteristics and societal contexts. I will test the model in the case of blood donation, as example of real world prosociality where a stranger is helped at a donor’s personal costs.

Approach: DONORS comprises three interlinked work packages. 1) Dynamic interplay among individual and network determinants of donor behaviour over the life course. 2) Genetic determinants of prosociality. 3) Contextual variation in donor behaviour. To validate my model, I use six unique, complementary datasets, including prospective, retrospective, country-comparative survey, genetic and registry data.

Innovation: 1) A multidisciplinary view —including demography, sociology, psychology— within a dynamic life course approach to enhance theory building. 2) A multi-method design, linking sociological survey with objective health-registry data and combining psychosocial with genetic data. 3) Using country-comparisons to account for the societal contexts in which donor behaviour occurs.

Impact: DONORS will inspire a new era of multidisciplinary research on prosocial behaviour. With backgrounds in Medicine, Social Sciences and Psychology, years of experience in science and practice and high-level, award-winning international publications, I am uniquely suited to combine insights from social and health sciences to set the stage for a comprehensive, innovative scientific view on donor behaviour.