Altruistic kidney donation initiators are less than half as likely to be right-wing as controls in an online sample

Introduction

I have a longstanding hypothesis that the strongest psychological mediator, on an individual level, of leftwing politics is impartial altruism. That is altruism directed towards strangers and acquaintances, as opposed to friends and family.

The most natural test of impartial altruism is charitable giving. There have been various attempts to study how politics relates to charitable giving. A frequent confound is that right-wingers are more likely to donate to religious charities, but the motives for donating to these charities are very different from typical impartial giving. Also, wealth and income are related to leftwing and rightwing attitudes, as is age, both of which affect giving for all sorts of reasons, etc. etc. More research is needed.

So when I became aware of a reasonably large sample of people who had given their kidneys to others, I thought this might be an excellent test. The underlying population is unusual (readers of Scott Alexander’s Astral Codex Ten blog) but it’s an interesting opportunity.

Methods

Thanks to Scott Alexander for the data- see here.

To maximize the sample size, I looked at everyone who had commenced the kidney donation process, even if they did not complete it, or were still going. This included everyone who:

1. Is currently going through the process

2. Have already donated a kidney

3. Have gone through some of the process but dropped out voluntarily

4. Have went through some of the process but were rejected

The comparison group was those who said they were not interested in Kidney donation. We excluded those who were interested but had not yet started the process, and those who left the question blank. A quick look at those who were interested but hadn’t started the process suggested they were substantially to the left of those not interested, but not quite as far as those who had initiated the process- unsurprising.

Results

15/105 respondents who had initiated the process of Kidney donation were rightwing (14%) on the political spectrum (score 6 or above). In comparison, 35% of the 4031 respondents not interested in kidney donation were rightwing. P < 0.0001

Those who have gone through at least some of the process of Kidney donation, then, are about 2.5 times less likely to be rightwing compared to those with no interest in Kidney donation. While the sample of donors and donor process initiators is small, it is large enough for the effect to be very much statistically significant, given the effect size.

What if we look at clearly right-wing ideologies versus clearly left-wing ideologies? I classified the alt-right, neoreaction and conservatism as clearly rightwing. I classified Marxism and social democracy as clearly leftwing. This excludes two additional ideologies: libertarianism and liberalism which many people feel, can be either left or right. 7 respondents who had initiated the donation process subscribed to clearly rightwing philosophies. 43 respondents who had initiated the donation process belonged to clearly leftwing philosophies. By contrast, among the non-donors, there were 582 respondents subscribing to clearly rightwing philosophies and 1200 subscribing to clearly leftwing philosophies- a strong difference in odds ratios, and significant despite the small sample.

If we instead bite the bullet and code liberalism as leftwing and libertarianism as rightwing, we get: 18 versus 86 in favour of leftwing ideologies in the kidney donation initiation group and 1440 versus 2517 in the not interested group- greatly significant.

Discussion

One suggestion worth considering is that there are many altruistic right-wingers, but they tend to be religious, meaning they’re absent from this sample, which is very non-religious because it’s gathered around a ‘rationalist’ blog. There weren’t really enough religious people in the sample to test this, given the low baseline of kidney donation.

Although given the subculture’s emphasis on altruistic kidney donation, it is likely that kidney donors are engaging in impartial altruism, it is also possible that a significant number of kidney donors were donating to family or close friends. If so, this may suggest that leftwingers are more altruistic to some combination of both family and strangers than rightwingers, or that the gap may become even more stark when non-impartial donation is excluded. We need data that specifically excludes donations to family and close friends.

It’s also worth noting that donating or even commencing the process of donating a kidney is a truly exceptional act of altruism. At more normal levels of altruism, it may be that the left and right are more evenly matched.

While I believe the negative relationship between impartial altruism and right-wing views is directly causal, I cannot demonstrate this using such simple correlational data, of course. Still, the relationship is of interest whether directly causal or not, especially given the considerable effect size (such ratios between conceptually distinct variables are rare in the social sciences).

If impartial altruism is a leading psychological driver of being leftwing, hypotheses that see the difference as arising from different factual assessments (e.g. about the effectiveness of welfare) should be challenged. Political differences may, to a substantial degree, represent different desires and non-instrumental preferences, e.g. for self versus other.

The limitations in inferring from this unusual sample to the larger population are obvious, but the results are at least suggestive, thus we end in the style of all psychology research everywhere: further research is needed.

A proper study, controlling for age, religiosity gender, tertiary education and income on a large and more diverse group of Kidney donation initiators donating exclusively to strangers would be welcome.