ArticleBehavior research methods2023
Is it ethical to use Mechanical Turk for behavioral research? Relevant data from a representative survey of MTurk participants and wages.
Article in Behavior research methods, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 26 papers.
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Who cites it
26 citing papers in PubMed.
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- Psychotherapy Access Barriers and Interest in Digital Mental Health Interventions Among Adults With Treatment Needs: Survey Study.JMIR mental health · 2025Article
- Psychological effects of horizontal price display: how left-right location shapes reference price and perceived quality.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- Beyond the hype: longitudinal trends in virtual reality perceptions beyond the COVID-19 pandemic.Information research · 2025Article
- A Call to Analyze Sex, Gender, and Sexual Orientation in Psychopathology Research: An Illustration with ADHD and Internalizing Symptoms in Emerging Adults.Journal of psychopathology and behavioral assessment · 2025Article
- The Burden for High-Quality Online Data Collection Lies With Researchers, Not Recruitment Platforms.Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2024Article
- Rumination mediates associations between microaggressions and sleep quality in Black Americans: the toll of racial microstressors.Journal of behavioral medicine · 2024Article
- The SocialVidStim: a video database of positive and negative social evaluation stimuli for use in social cognitive neuroscience paradigms.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2024Article
- Designing and evaluating tasks to measure individual differences in experimental psychology: a tutorial.Cognitive research: principles and implications · 2024Review
- Evaluating CloudResearch's Approved Group as a solution for problematic data quality on MTurk.Behavior research methods · 2023Article
- Frustration and ennui among Amazon MTurk workers.Behavior research methods · 2023Article
- Research Ethics in the Age of Digital Platforms.Science and engineering ethics · 2023Article
- Gig Work and the Pandemic: Looking for Good Pay from Bad Jobs During the COVID-19 Crisis.Work and occupations · 2023Article
- Association between mental health symptoms and behavioral performance in younger vs. older online workers.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2023Article
- From Lab-Testing to Web-Testing in Cognitive Research: Who You Test is More Important than how You Test.Journal of cognition · 2023Article
- Assessing Social Media Data as a Resource for Firearm Research: Analysis of Tweets Pertaining to Firearm Deaths.Journal of medical Internet research · 2022Article
- Replication and Reproduction: Crises in Psychology and Academic Labour.Review of general psychology : journal of Division 1, of the American Psychological Association · 2022Article
- Burden of Covid-19 restrictions: National, regional and global estimates.EClinicalMedicine · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
To understand human behavior, social scientists need people and data. In the last decade, Amazon's Mechanical Turk (MTurk) emerged as a flexible, affordable, and reliable source of human participants and was widely adopted by academics. Yet despite MTurk's utility, some have questioned whether researchers should continue using the platform on ethical grounds. The brunt of their concern is that people on MTurk are financially insecure, subject to abuse, and earn inhumane wages. We investigated these issues with two representative probability surveys of the U.S. MTurk population (N = 4094). The surveys revealed: (1) the financial situation of people on MTurk mirrors the general population, (2) most participants do not find MTurk stressful or requesters abusive, and (3) MTurk offers flexibility and benefits that most people value above other options for work. People reported it is possible to earn more than $10 per hour and said they would not trade the flexibility of MTurk for less than $25 per hour. Altogether, our data are important for assessing whether MTurk is an ethical place for research.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.