The Internet’s hidden science factory

PBS:

In a small apartment in a small town in northeastern Mississippi, Sarah Marshall sits at her computer, clicking bubbles for an online survey, as her 1-year-old son plays nearby. She hasn’t done this exact survey before, but the questions are familiar, and she works fast. That’s because Marshall is what you might call a professional survey-taker. In the past five years, she has completed roughly 20,000 academic surveys. This is her 21st so far this week. And it’s only Tuesday.

Marshall is a worker for Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, an online job forum where “requesters” post jobs, and an army of crowdsourced workers complete them, earning fantastically small fees for each task. The work has been called microlabor, and the jobs, known as Human Intelligence Tasks, or HITs, range wildly. Some are tedious: transcribing interviews or cropping photos. Some are funny: prank calling someone’s buddy (that’s worth $1) or writing the title to a pornographic movie based on a collection of dirty screen grabs (6 cents). And others are downright bizarre. One task, for example, asked workers to strap live fish to their chests and upload the photos. That paid $5 — a lot by Mechanical Turk standards.

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“Most of what’s happening in these studies involves trying to understand human behavior,” said Yale University’s David Rand. “Understanding bias and prejudice, and how you make financial decisions, and how you make decisions generally that involve taking risks, that kind of thing. And there are often very clear policy implications.”

As the use of online crowdsourcing in research continues to grow, some are asking the question: How reliable are the data that these modern-day research subjects generate?

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