In the past, when psychologists wanted to find out something about human nature, they hired a couple of 18-to-21-year-olds and experimented on them. But as you might imagine, that was pretty limited, as they’re hardly representative of, well, the human race.
But now, the Economist reports, a new trend called crowdsourcing is slipping inside the net as a way for clinicians to do psych experiments, cheaply and easily, according to a story by Laura Shin. Shin reports that psychologists are finding that crowdsourcing -- a way of soliciting opinions from a large group of people, usually online, or to gather psychological information from people across the globe – is changing the very nature of psychology.
The most well-known site that allows psychologists to find subjects on the Internet is Mechanical Turk, run by Amazon, and named after an 18th-century chess-playing machine in which a human secretly moved the pieces. Workers called “Turkers,” Shin wrote, “are only 40 percent American. . . a third, Indian. . . and earn a median $1.40 per hour.” It’s a way to get opinions from a lot of people for very little money, Crowdsourcing allows psychologists to run experiments quickly.
Studies that once would have taken months or years can now be finished in a few days — both because of access to subjects and because of funds. After all, Turkers willing to be subjects for less than $2 an hour cost much less than undergrad who would expect to make at least 10 times that. And psychologists are using it in all kinds of ways. Shin noted that Gabriele Paolacci, a marketing researcher at the Rotterdam School of Management and a former freelance psychologist, launched a blog called Experimental Turk to help draft guidelines for freelance experiments.
But, some think we shouldn’t get so caught up in what it is, but on what it does. As eBay is less about the online auction software program and more about “the millions of people who inform, populate, and run the application,” said Glendon L. Moriarty, Psy.D. “Crowdsourcing is about “harnessing social networking.”
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Edited by
Amanda Ciccatelli
