Don't Throw Your Heart Away: Medical Student Study 2

Publicly available outcome assessments for transplant programs do not make salient that some programs tend to reject many of the hearts they are offered, whereas other programs accept a broader range of donor offers. The investigators use empirical studies to test whether transplant center performance data (i.e. transplant and waitlist outcome statistics) that reflect center donor acceptance rates influence laypersons to evaluate centers with high organ decline rates less favorably than centers with low organ decline rates. 125 medical student participants will be recruited from University of Pittsburgh Medical School and randomized to one of two different information presentation conditions. Participants will be given an introduction to the donor organ match process, then asked to view the table of transplant outcomes corresponding to the condition they were randomized to. Each participant is asked to choose the hospital that they would consider to be "higher performing" between two hospitals: one hospital with a non-selective, "accepting" strategy (takes all donor heart offers), and one hospital with a more selective, "cherrypicking" strategy (tends to reject donor offers that are less than "excellent" quality).