Understanding how people think about significant medical interventions not only has practical implications, it can also shed light on how people conceptualize themselves and their bodies. That's one reason psychologists have investigated how people think about organ transplants and their sources, with some intriguing results. A 2011 paper by Bruce Hood and colleagues, for example, found that people were much less happy about the idea of receiving a heart transplant from a violent murderer than from a volunteer worker. The researchers speculated that this could reflect a fear of "moral contagion," the idea that morally bad characteristics or their...
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