One of the readings this week that caught my attention, using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk website to conduct behavioral research. To those that are not aware of what Amazon Mechanical Turk is, it was designed by Amazon originally for human computation tasks. The idea was to build a platform for humans to do tasks that are very difficult or impossible for computers, such as extracting data from images, audio transcription, and filtering adult content. Additionally (shameless nerd moment here!), I loved the mention of the origins of the name. Mason and Suri discuss that the name “Mechanical Turk” came from a mechanical chess-playing automaton from the turn of the 18th century, designed to look like a Turkish “sorcerer,” which was able to move pieces and beat many opponents.
A valuable question then is, why Mechanical Turk? There are several benefits for
using Mechanical Turk as a platform for running online experiments: 1) subject
pool access; 2) subject pool diversity; and 3) low cost for running the
platform itself. For the Turker community, much of it focuses on the reputation
of requesters. Additionally, there are online forums such as Turker Nation and
others that can allow people to monitor worker’s reactions to a study, which
can provide insight into the individual’s methods or the overall focus of the
research itself. The Mechanical Turk user interface allows workers to send the
requester of a HIT a message (i.e. workers could contact requesters if part of
their HIT is unclear or confusing). I found the article fascinating and am
looking to learn more.
Reference
1) Mason, W., & Suri, S. (2012). Conducting behavioral research on
Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Behavior Research
Methods, 44 (1), 1-23. doi: 10.3758/s13428-011-0124-6
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