One thing that I noticed early on in my academic career was that
for pretty much every topic I was interested in there were at least forty pages
of bibliography on ISI Web of Knowledge. The task to produce novel and ground-breaking research feels harder when the wealth of studies already
published stares you in the face from your computer screen and gives your
dreams of academic grandeur a translucent texture. For many academics this is a
life-defining moment of embracing this vocational challenge and delving
straight into the proverbial sea of literature.
Rarely, however, an extraordinary thing
happens and you find yourself overviewing a handful of articles. The literature
on experiments using Amazon’s platform for cognitive testing Mechanical Turk is a case in point. It is still quite sparse
and for the student proficient in skimming will take no more than two hours to summarize.
In the table below I have noted some of the most prominent articles.
Importantly, the mere existence of these studies breaks two related myths. Yes,
the body of experimental research is much larger and there are quite a few
academics sceptical to the use and virtues of Mechanical Turk, especially when
it comes to representativeness of the results obtained from samples of Turkers.
Moreover, the ‘publishability’ of the results has been largely contested. In
reality, some good studies using Mechanical Turk (as it is with every topic and
research tool) are published in an array of prestigious journals such as Nature
and the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. This surely is only the
beginning. What better reason to try Mechanical Turk and see for yourself?
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