Phlebotomist Haley Hampton, right, helps Lee Ann Denham donate blood Wednesday at the Blood Assurance office on Third Street in Chattanooga. In the background, LPN and phlebotomist Kathy Garcia assists donor Jeremiah Lynn.

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Turns out, altruism isnt dead after all.

A new study completed in part by UTC researchers shows that those who donate blood often do so out of a genuinely altruistic motivation. That may seem obvious. But for years, many academics have argued that altruism is a facade, that even when people act selflessly, they often have other self-centered motivations.

Blood donors never know who they are helping. They are giving their blood but they have no idea about the patient and who gets their blood, said Sevdenur Dzgner, a visiting scholar at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. It seems like an altruistic behavior. But we cannot easily say all blood donations are altruistic.

Dzgner studied the motivations of blood donors in the U.S. and in her native Turkey for doctoral research, which found similar altruistic motivations from donors in both countries, with religious motivations playing a role in both Chattanooga and Turkey. But Dzgner did find distinctions between the two as the very nature of altruism varied across the continents. In the religiously diverse U.S., donors reported a feeling of personal responsibility to give blood. In predominantly Muslim Turkey, the act of giving was viewed as more of a societal responsibility.

The American mind was more individualistic and the Turkish mind was more collective, she said. In America, people say this is my own responsibility and this is my own decision. While in Turkey, most people say this is a kind of personal responsibility but the way they perceive them as responsible is a little different. They think as human beings we should help others, that living in a society this is important not just for them as an individual.

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UTC study finds selflessness motivating most blood donations