Department of Psychology, Miami University, 90 N. Patterson Ave., Oxford, OH 45056, USA.
Behav Res Methods. 2013 Mar;45(1):116-24. doi: 10.3758/s13428-012-0250-9.
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.
心理学研究人员已经开始将亚马逊的 Mechanical Turk（MTurk）市场作为参与者群体来使用。虽然过去的研究已经证实 MTurk 非常适合研究个体行为，但在虚假二元互动中，参与者错误地认为他们正在与一个伙伴进行互动，这是社会和认知心理学的一个关键要素。如果能够在 MTurk 上进行这种相互依存的研究，那么这个在线群体对于广泛的心理学家来说将更加有用。因此，本研究试图在 MTurk 上对经过充分验证的虚假二元任务进行定性复制，以确定该平台作为研究工具的效用。我们发现，即使这样做会产生经济成本，参与者的行为确实就像有一个真实的伙伴一样，而且他们在最小群体范式中对伙伴的细微信息很敏感，这支持了使用 MTurk 进行虚假二元研究。
