Abigail (Abby) Marsh

Exactly.

And across testing sessions and countries, we see that people have very limited desire to share resources, to sacrifice, to benefit people that they don't know or barely know.

When we tested the altruistic kidney donors in the social discounting task, we found a curve unlike any that's ever been found in any social discounting task, which was a curve that dropped almost not at all across social distances.

So people who donate kidneys to strangers...

are willing to sacrifice as much to help a stranger as most people are willing to sacrifice to help somewhere between a distant friend and an acquaintance, even though they don't know that person at all.

That person's welfare clearly intrinsically matters to them.

Exactly.

They have a much wider circle of caring.

They view the outcomes of people they've never met before as intrinsically valuable, as something that it's worth caring about and worth sacrificing for.

So Harold was one of the first altruistic kidney donors in the country, and he was the first in Washington, D.C.

He actually donated to Georgetown, where I work.

And Harold came up with the idea to donate a kidney to a stranger on his own.

He had never known anybody who'd done it before, but he knew you could donate bone marrow to strangers, and he knew you could donate kidneys to people you know.

And so he thought, hey, if I could donate a kidney to somebody I know, and I don't know anybody that needs a kidney, why don't I just donate to somebody that needs a kidney?

And so he called around to several transplantation organizations and they sent him a bunch of pamphlets for deceased donation.

And he said, well, that's not what I want.

I want to donate to somebody now who needs my kidney.

And he didn't hear anything for a while.

And then eventually they ran a pilot program in D.C.

to try non-directed altruistic kidney donation.