Abigail (Abby) Marsh

And I chose altruistic kidney donors to study in part because it had only very recently become even permissible in the United States to donate a kidney to a stranger, and at the time it was very, very rare.

And luckily, there are databases of people who have donated kidneys to strangers.

So I was able to reach out to start recruiting participants that way.

Yes, it was incredible.

When you're studying a rare group of people, which I have done in other contexts, it sometimes can take a long time, years, to recruit enough people to fill even a small study.

And I was shocked when I started recruiting altruistic kidney donors that the very first missive I sent out asking for altruistic kidney donors to please reach out if they would like to participate in research, I had sent right before leaving for a conference.

And I remember getting to the conference, sitting down in the coffee shop of the hotel, I think, opening my laptop to check my email and seeing an absolute flood of emails from people who had donated kidneys to strangers offering to participate in research in the most cheerful and just helpful way you could possibly imagine.

He did.

He did.

I couldn't believe it.

I said, no, no, no, of course, we will pay.

You don't have to pay to take part in our research.

We will cover everything for you.

It was incredible.

Absolutely.

And taking part in research is an altruistic thing to do because we don't compensate very much.

Unfortunately, we can't.

And that's also by design.

We don't want to be coercive and pay so much money that people will do it just for the money, even if it's something they don't want to do.

And so by design, psychology research is set up to require a little bit of altruism.