Pseudo-dyadic "interaction" on Amazon's Mechanical Turk.
Psychological researchers have begun to utilize Amazon's Mechanical Turk (MTurk) marketplace as a participant pool. Although past work has established that MTurk is well suited to examining individual behavior, pseudo-dyadic interactions, in which participants falsely believe they are interacting with a partner, are a key element of social and cognitive psychology. The ability to conduct such interdependent research on MTurk would increase the utility of this online population for a broad range of psychologists. The present research therefore attempts to qualitatively replicate well-established pseudo-dyadic tasks on MTurk in order to establish the utility of this platform as a tool for researchers. We find that participants do behave as if a partner is real, even when doing so incurs a financial cost, and that they are sensitive to subtle information about the partner in a minimal-groups paradigm, supporting the use of MTurk for pseudo-dyadic research.
Department of Psychology, Miami University, 90 N. Patterson Ave., Oxford, OH 45056, USA. summera@muohio.edu
Amy
A
Summerville
Christopher R
CR
Chartier
D000704:Analysis of Variance; D017004:Codependency, Psychological; D003657:Decision Making; D005717:Games, Experimental; D006801:Humans; D020407:Internet; D007398:Interpersonal Relations; D012938:Social Perception; D013647:Task Performance and Analysis