The cleverness is in the government’s own words: ‘Every Nova Scotian will have the opportunity to be an organ and tissue donor unless they opt out’
Nova Scotia’s decision to presume people’s consent to donating their organs after death is not just a North American first. It is also the latest example of how deeply behavioural psychology has changed policy debates.
This insight spawned a thousand metaphors in the following years. Malcolm Gladwell called it Blink, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein called it Nudge, behavioural economist Dan Ariely called it Predictably Irrational. But it was all the same idea. Science was offering short-cuts to policy success. As Thaler described the goal: “If you want to encourage people to do something, make it easy — or even better, automatic.
The cleverness is evident in the N.S. government’s own words, which play on the meaning of “opportunity”: “Every Nova Scotian will have the opportunity to be an organ and tissue donor unless they opt out.” The policy applies to kidneys, pancreas, heart, liver, lungs, small bowel, cornea, sclera, skin, bones, tendons and heart valves.
He referred to European statistics which showed vast differences in organ donation rights between neighbouring and culturally similar countries, such as Sweden and Denmark, or Germany and Austria. The key difference, he noted, was what he called “framing effects,” or how the question was asked.
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