About The goal of this blog is reporting evidence concerning the reliability of Amazon Mechanical Turk as an online subject pool for experiments in economics, psychology, and social sciences in general. Using AMT to run web-based experiments allows researchers to obtain large quantities of data in a cheap and efficient way. However, there is lack of evidence regarding the actual reliability of AMT’s workforce as a subject pool; as any new instrument, AMT requires to be tested thoroughly in order to be used confidently. This blog aims at collecting any individual effort made in order to validate AMT as a research tool. It reports results from experiments that increase or decrease the reliability of AMT as an online subject pool, as well as general guidance for running experiments through this service.

Performing human-subjects experiments on Amazon Mechanical Turk offers many benefits, including very low experiment costs, quick turn-around rates, and relatively simple approvals from human subjects boards. But you have to be careful to avoid bias and error; we describe some techniques below.

TurKit is a Java/JavaScript API for running iterative tasks on Mechanical Turk.