Members in the Media
From: Science

Psychologists grow increasingly dependent on online research subjects

Science:

In May, 23,000 people voluntarily took part in thousands of social science experiments without ever visiting a lab. All they did was log on to Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk), an online crowdsourcing service run by the Seattle, Washington–based company better known for its massive internet-based retail business. Those research subjects completed 230,000 tasks on their computers in 3.3 million minutes—more than 6 years of effort in total.

The prodigious output demonstrates the popularity of an online platform that scientists had only begun to exploit 5 years ago. In 2011, according to Google Scholar, just 61 studies using MTurk were published; last year the number topped 1200. “This is a revolution in social and behavioral science,” says psychologist Leib Litman of the Lander College for Men in New York City, who generated the May data from TurkPrime, a website that he created last year with computer scientist Jonathan Robinson, also at Lander, to facilitate MTurk studies. “Research is moving from the lab to the cloud.”

Read the whole story: Science

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