Inside the Turk: Understanding Mechanical Turk as a Participant Pool

Mechanical Turk (MTurk), an online labor market created by Amazon, has recently become popular among social scientists as a source of experimental data. The workers who populate this market have been assessed on dimensions that are universally relevant to understanding whether, why, and when they should be recruited as research participants. I'll discuss the characteristics and the mechanisms of MTurk as a participant pool for behavioral sciences, devoting particular attention to the issue of participant non-naivety and to how it can affect data quality.