Crowdsourcing Intelligent Research Participants: A Student versus MTurk Comparison

What is it about?

To date, no study has compared the relative intelligence of online workers to student subjects. Such a comparison may be important to behavioral accounting researchers given the homogeneity and high mental ability of accounting students relative to online workers. While graduate students perform better than both undergraduate and MTurk participants on common intelligence tests, we find that MTurk participants are not low-quality in terms of their reasoning skills. Across two reasonably complex tasks, we find that task performance for MTurk participants is similar to undergraduate accounting students, providing incremental assurance that MTurk participants are suitable subjects when accounting expertise is not explicitly required. We also provide evidence that screening MTurk participants on intelligence scores may benefit researchers who require participants with relatively high cognitive ability.

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