Editorial: The Use of Mechanical Turk Data in Psychological Research

Abstract

As psychological researchers increasingly collect data from Workers on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk), we examine the history of this data collection platform, reasons for both confidence and caution in the use of the data, and factors that differentiate MTurk data from data collected using more traditional methods. This discussion includes issues of recruitment, responder bias, the psychometric quality of the data, and ethical issues relating to incentives and compensation.