Turkers are the new lab rats for psychologists

[ithinkican]

I like doing the surveys, but not enough to spend half an hour doing one that pays 50 cents. Or the ones that take 15 minutes and they only allow 15 minutes on the clock, so you end up not getting paid. I've been seeing a lot more of these lately.

[Diali]

I'm pretty much OK with this.

Actually I even enjoy that fact a little bit :P

[coosacat]

I mostly do surveys on MT, expecially ones from universities. The are usually interesting and sometimes quite fun (involving games and puzzles). It seems to me that this would be a great research tool - as others have pointed out, the pool of participants is much more varied. And while I don't know much about this, it seems that using MT would be cheaper than doing surveys in most other ways.

I just did one involving playing a memory game and got a nice surprise bonus from the Requestor with a "thank you for good work." And I'm such an approval hound that the "thank you" meant about as much as the bonus!

[Saxon]

I have done some sociology research/studies at my university, mostly involving how people react to risk. We use case studies, I wish the psych. people would take notice and start implementing more surveys that center around a hypothetical situation. I have found some that do, however the vast majority I fill out are the same questions on a 1-5 scale of agree to disagree. Way more fun to be had being thrown into a random problematic scenario and deciding your way out, in my opinion

[lolabear]

thats pretty much all ive done today is surveys, there seemed to be a lot of them. although they all seem to ask the same questions so its hard to remember if i did that one already or not

[silasgreenback]

I just did one involving playing a memory game and got a nice surprise bonus from the Requestor with a "thank you for good work." And I'm such an approval hound that the "thank you" meant about as much as the bonus!

That's always nice, whether it's from a bonus or just something they've said in the HIT status field. Most of the time if I do a survey and enjoyed it even a little bit, I'll write in the comments something to the effect of: "This was an interesting survey, thanks for the opportunity to participate." It feels good when the acknowledgement comes from the other side.

[clark - Closed]

Learning how to weed out bad surveys was the first skill I learned on Mturk. The more surveys the better; they can poke and prod me all they want. Plus, the survey thread is very valuable, with many helpful people pitching in so turkers can avoid many of the duds. Doing every survey doesn't work -- you'll make about $3.00/hr. You can't live off surveys, but you can pull in a quick $5-10 a day by being picky.

[genoa]

...the survey thread is very valuable, with many helpful people pitching in so turkers can avoid many of the duds. Doing every survey doesn't work -- you'll make about $3.00/hr. You can't live off surveys, but you can pull in a quick $5-10 a day by being picky.

The survey thread is a must read for new Turkers. There are good requesters that pay a fair rate.

After articles like these two, mTurk is going to see a flood of low-paying hits that need to be avoided. No wonder we're seeing so many studies being published with results that could only come for lunatics or people that are not being truthful in their answers. Paying only $1.00 an hour will not result in good, thoughtful answers IMHO.

[quizno]

I don't mind being a "lab rat"... I did actual medical studies during college so this is a logical next step

[jupiter]

I kinda like being this sort of guinea pig. I'd actually take a small reduction in pay for an email of the full text of the results. I'm a huge fan of evidence based psychology, though, and find some (a lot even, but not all) of the experiments interesting and well designed. And then there are some where I never can figure out what they're testing, and it would be cool to eventually know.