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Abstract:
Psychology is moving increasingly toward digital sources of data, with Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk) at the forefront of that charge. In 2015, up to an estimated 45% of articles published in the top behavioral and social science journals included at least one study conducted on MTurk. In this article, I summarize my own experience with MTurk and how I deduced that my sample was—at best—only 2.6% valid, by my estimate. I share these results as a warning and call for caution. Recently, I conducted an online study via Amazon’s MTurk, eager and excited to collect my own data for the first time as a doctoral student. What resulted has prompted me to write this as a warning: it is indeed too good to be true. This is a summary of how I determined that, at best, I had gathered valid data from 14 human beings—2.6% of my participant sample (N = 529).
