The effect of message framing on the communication of organ donation

Organ transplantation provides a longer and higher quality life. However, it is limited to the number of donated organs. The gap between organ supply and demand is increasing. Although many social awareness projects are carried out in order to increase organ donation rates, they are not very effective. Therefore it is important to understand how the content of the messages are presented in order to increase the donation behavior. The aim of this study is to investigate the effects of message framing in organ donation decision. For this purpose, we examined how the framing of messages about organ donation as loss-gain and statistical-exemplar affects the donation decision. In addition, it was investigated how organ donation attitudes, empathy and altruism tendencies predict donation intention. Results showed that message frame of loss/gain was significant on organ donation intention and altruism while the statistical/examplar message frame was not significant on all veriables. It can be stated that an increase of organ donation intention is stimulated by the increase of the altruism level under the gain condition; while the loss frame condition stimulated the opposite effect due to reducing organ donation intentions. In addition, the analysis do not show a significant interaction effect of message frames statistical/examplar and gain/loss. Considering the gender effects, it was seen that women reported more intention to donate organs than men, since they have more positive attitudes towards organ donation and have higher levels of altruism and empathy. The mediation analysis, showed that fears of bodily mutilation mediated the relationship between the message frame and the intention to donate organs.