Skip to main content
Go to the home page of the European Commission (opens in new window)
English English
CORDIS - EU research results
CORDIS

Who gives life? Understanding, explaining and predicting donor behaviour

Project description

A model to predict prosocial behaviour

Many people are eager to help, yet reluctant to give. Others will help strangers despite incurring personal costs. Prosocial behaviour is a key research issue for charity marketers. The EU-funded DONORS project has set out to understand, explain and predict donor behaviour. It will develop a life course model to link individual determinants, social network characteristics and societal contexts. The project will test the model using the case of blood donation, a real-world scenario in which a stranger is helped at a donor’s personal cost. To validate the model, DONORS will use six unique, complementary data sets, including prospective, retrospective, country-comparative surveys, and genetic and registry data. Combining insights from social and health sciences, the findings will inspire a new era of multidisciplinary research on prosocial behaviour.

Objective

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.

Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)

CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.

You need to log in or register to use this function

Keywords

Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)

Programme(s)

Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.

Topic(s)

Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.

Funding Scheme

Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.

ERC-STG - Starting Grant

See all projects funded under this funding scheme

Call for proposal

Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.

(opens in new window) ERC-2018-STG

See all projects funded under this call

Host institution

STICHTING VU
Net EU contribution

Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.

€ 1 252 720,00
Address
DE BOELELAAN 1105
1081 HV Amsterdam
Netherlands

See on map

Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
Links
Total cost

The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.

€ 1 252 720,00

Beneficiaries (1)

My booklet 0 0