Crowdsourcing is a way to get jobs like deciphering images, ranking websites and answering surveys done for money by online workers. Several firms offer the service, including oDesk, CrowdFlower and Elance. But by far the most popular for scientific purposes is Mechanical Turk, which is run by Amazon and is named after an 18th-century chess-playing machine in which a human secretly moved the pieces.
For many researchers, though, the appeals of crowdsourcing—bargain prices, vast supply and enormous scale—are too attractive to ignore. Indeed, the new methodology might democratise the very practice of psychology, allowing those without a laboratory or university behind them to join in as well. Gabriele Paolacci, a marketing researcher at the Rotterdam School of Management who was once in precisely that position, has started a blog called “Experimental Turk” (experimentalturk.wordpress.com) to help draft guidelines for such freelance experiments.
The revolution, then, has begun. So far, Google Scholar, a website devoted to academic matters, counts 3,000 published papers that involve crowdsourced experiments. Discussions at conferences, among psychologists, behavioural economists, political scientists, linguists and computer scientists, suggest that may be the tip of the iceberg. It would be an exaggeration to say that crowdsourcing has turned the whole world into a laboratory. But it has certainly made psychology a lot less WEIRD.
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