Pseudo-dyadic “interaction” on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk

It is found that participants do behave as if a partner is real, even when doing so incurs a financial cost, and that they are sensitive to subtle information about the partner in a minimal-groups paradigm, supporting the use of MTurk for pseudo-dyadic research.

Abstract

Psychological researchers have begun to utilize Amazon's Mechanical Turk (MTurk) marketplace as a participant pool. Although past work has established that MTurk is well suited to examining individual behavior, pseudo-dyadic interactions, in which participants falsely believe they are interacting with a partner, are a key element of social and cognitive psychology. The ability to conduct such interdependent research on MTurk would increase the utility of this online population for a broad range of psychologists. The present research therefore attempts to qualitatively replicate well-established pseudo-dyadic tasks on MTurk in order to establish the utility of this platform as a tool for researchers. We find that participants do behave as if a partner is real, even when doing so incurs a financial cost, and that they are sensitive to subtle information about the partner in a minimal-groups paradigm, supporting the use of MTurk for pseudo-dyadic research.