Online crowdsourcing for psychology ain't without pitfalls

You may not know this, but a great deal of our data about the human mind is based on a relatively small but intensively studied population: First-year undergraduate university students.

There has long been concern about the over-reliance on students as a source of data, particularly around lack of demographic diversity and limited sample sizes. Both concerns have been implicated in the current crisis in psychological research, in which many key effects have not been replicated by subsequent studies.

But now there's a new tool in the psychologist’s arsenal, one that has shown it can produce valid data, which can help broaden the population of test subjects: Amazon's Mechanical Turk. Read more...