Beyond the Turk: An Empirical Comparison of Alternative Platforms for Online Behavioral Research

What is it about?

The success of Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) as an online research platform has come at a price: MTurk exhibits slowing rates of population replenishment, and growing participants’ non-naivety. Recently, a number of alternative platforms have emerged, offering capabilities similar to MTurk while providing access to new and more naïve populations. We examined two such platforms, CrowdFlower (CF) and Prolific Academic (ProA). We found that both platforms’ participants were more naïve and less dishonest compared to MTurk. CF showed the best response rate, but CF participants failed more attention-check questions and did not reproduce known effects replicated on ProA and MTurk. Moreover, ProA participants produced data quality that was higher than CF’s and comparable to MTurk’s. We also found important demographic differences between the platforms. We discuss how researchers can use these findings to better plan online research, and their implications for the study of crowdsourcing research platforms.

Featured Image