Among 147 next-of-kin who consented to organ donation, 4% said they would not consent if they could decide again, according to Rodrigue, Cornell and Howard’s US interview study of 285 next-of-kin (Am J Transplant, 2008). The overwhelming majority — 94% — said they would make the same decision, with 2% unsure. UNOS data record that US deceased organ donors first exceeded 10,000 in 2017 (10,281 donors), so tens of thousands of next-of-kin now face this decision each year, typically under acute clinical time pressure with limited opportunity for deliberation. The constrained decision environment contributes to post-hoc doubt independent of the direction of the choice, but on the consent side that doubt is rare.
Refusal proved far less stable: of the 138 next-of-kin who declined donation, 27% said they would now consent if they could decide over, while only 64% would refuse again and 9% were unsure. A 2021 Singapore national survey (BMJ Open, n=973) helps explain the mechanism: 68.1% of respondents were willing to donate their own organs but only 51.8% would consent for a relative — a roughly 16-point gap showing that people apply a higher bar to a relative’s body than to their own. When that hesitation later meets evidence of donation’s value, the refusal becomes the decision people most often wish they could take back.
Under Gilovich and Medvec’s temporal model, inaction typically generates more durable long-term regret, and the gap here — 27% of refusers reversing versus 4% of consenters — is consistent with that pattern. The caveat is that both rates come from a single US study that measured decision instability (would you decide the same way again) rather than a validated regret scale, and from a one-time interview rather than a multi-year trajectory. The robust signal is the asymmetry: refusing is reversed roughly seven times as often as consenting. The precise percentages should be read as directional, not as population norms.