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.”

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