Professor Eamonn Ferguson

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Professor Eamonn Ferguson is a chartered health and occupational psychologist, and Professor of Health Psychology at Nottingham University. 

 

His applied works translates his theoretical work to the (i) understanding of motivations, preferences and behaviour of blood and organ donors, (ii) development and evaluation of early stage interventions to enhance blood and organ donor recruitment, (iii) effect of pro-sociality on farmer’s decision making concerning biosecurity.

Quick facts about Eamonn

I have only read 6 books in my life and once pace made (in training) for a world record holding athlete

Cats

Skiathos in Greece (sunshine, fun and the Frog bar) and Newquy in Cornwall (lovely family holidays)

Line of Duty and Get Back

I listen to the Beatles, sixties and seventies music, and anything thing else that sounds similar to the Beatles or the sixties

More of a low point really,  talking about the dangers of lego on the radio when I was supposed to be talking about training for laparoscopy

Chocolate

Chess as it is the only game I can beat my 8 year old at

Playing guitar in a world famous band (but who wouldn’t)

In his recent DoRN Week of Talks presentation, Eamonn discusses how studying blood and organ donor behaviour not only allows researchers to help patients and understand better ways to recruit both blood and organ donors, but also provides valuable insights into understanding the nature of human cooperation. Therefore, by studying blood and organ donor behaviour, help can be provided to patients, donors, and feedback into the academic community.

 

 

To learn more about Eamonn’s work, please click on the free video below:

Q & As

The DoRN Week of Talks provided a unique opportunity to engage in an easy and convenient Q & A with presenters. Below we have listed the questions that we received for Eamonn, along with his answers. 

I think there is potential here. Critical is the idea of conditional cooperation [Fischbacher et al, 2002]. Conditional cooperation occurs when people are aware that others are cooperating and this motivates them also to cooperate. It is a powerful phenomenon and can be harnessed to increase cooperation. Indeed, conditional cooperation may be of particular importance in the context of recruiting blood donors, as recent work has shown that conditional cooperation is a stronger social force when free-riding is high [Ferguson et al., 2020], that is when the majority of people choose not to cooperate as in the context of blood donation. Targeted messages would be problematic here as they are likely to be based on descriptive norms with the potential for unforeseen negative consequences – that is, if most people don’t donate blood why should I. A simple social media status update such as – ‘I have just donated blood’- of a Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram status update icon for donating blood will likely have a major and positive impact on donor recruitment, as it has worked very well for organ-donation under an opt-in system [Cammeron et al., 2013] (see Table 1 below as well).

References

Cameron AM, Massie AB, Alexander CE, Stewart B, Montgomery RA, Benavides N R, Fleming GD, Segev DL. Social media and organ donation registration: The Facebook effect. Am. J. Transplant. 2013, 12: 2059-2065.

Ferguson E, Shichman R, Tan JHW. Lone Wolf Defectors Undermine the Power of the Opt-Out Default. Sci. Reps. 2020, 10: 8973.

Fischbacher U, Gächter S, Fehr E. Are people conditionally cooperative? Evidence from a public goods game. Econ. Letts. 2001, 71: 397-404



Voluntary Reciprocal Altruism is likely to be an all round good intervention to recruit donors. The answer to question 1 above addresses how conditional cooperation may be used via social media to recruit donors especially reluctant altruists.

I think adopting a voluntary reciprocal altruism approach both in general messaging but also more importantly when potential donors have logged onto donor services web-pages they are asked to consider the ‘acceptance’ question, as this is very proximal to the point of registration. I also think that the opportunity for someone to update that status as a blood donor may be very successful – not only as a way for people to signal their reputation but also to trigger a conditional cooperation response, especially if the update triggered a link to registration pages so that other could act contingently.

 

However, I feel that all the possibilities and suggestions above in answer to these 3 questions need to be tested properly with RCTs and feasibility studies before going live. This is to ensure that the wording is correct and that there are no unforeseen consequences.

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