Foreword

Read this if you want to find out more about Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) and how psiTurk can help you run web-based experiments on AMT painlessly and quickly. This section will also tell you what problems psiTurk does and does not solve and help you gauge whether it will be useful to you.

What is Mechanical Turk

Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) is an online platform that lets you post a wide variety of tasks to a large pool of participants. Instead of spending weeks to run experiments in the lab, it lets you collect data of a large number of people within a couple of hours.

Some key terminology for understanding the AMT model:

• HIT (Human Intelligence Task):
  • A unit of work (e.g. a psychology experiment)
• Requester:
  • The person or entity that posts HITs (e.g. a researcher or lab)
• Worker:
  • The person that completes HITs (i.e. a participant in your study)

Workers get paid a fixed amount for each HIT which is determined by the requester. Requesters can also make bonus payments to specific workers. Amazon takes a small percentage from each payment.