using mechanical turk for research

Perspectives on Psychological Science has a short piece on using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk as a subject pool: “Amazon’s Mechanical Turk: A New Source for Inexpensive, Yet High-Quality, Data?”

As Google Scholar shows, Mechanical Turk is being used in lots of clever ways.

Mechanical Turk has been called a digital sweatshop.  Here are two perspectives – an Economic Letters piece: “The condition of the Turking class: Are online employers fair and honest?”   And, a piece calling for intervention: “Working the crowd: Employment and labor law in the crowdsourcing industry.”

Here’s the Mechanical Turk page.  Here are some research-related tasks that you can get paid for.