Volunteer Science: An Online Laboratory for Experiments in Social Psychology

• In Event: 123 - Section on Social Psychology Refereed Roundtable Session (co-sponsored with Section on Sociology of Emotions and Section on Sociology of Mental Health).
  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: Table 10. Methodological and Theoretical Advances

Abstract

Experimental research in traditional laboratories comes at a significant logistic and financial cost while drawing data from demographically narrow populations. The growth of online methods of research including citizen science, the online survey industry, and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk workforce have resulted in effective means for social psychologists to collect large scale survey-based data in a cost-effective and timely manner. However, the same advancement has not occurred for social psychologists who rely on experimentation as their primary method of data collection. The aim of this paper is to provide an overview of one online laboratory for conducting experiments, Volunteer Science, and report the results of an initial battery of studies which test canonical behaviors tested in social experiments. Our results show that the online laboratory is capable of recruiting and managing large numbers of diverse volunteers. And the successful replication of an array of studies demonstrates the variety of experiments that can be done using an online laboratory framework. We argue the online laboratory is a valid and cost-effective way to perform social psychological experiments with large numbers of diverse subjects.

Authors

• Jason Scott Radford, University of Chicago

• Andrew Pilny, University of Kentucky

• Ashley Veronica Reichelmann, Northeastern University

• Brian Keegan, Harvard University

• Brooke Foucault Welles, Northeastern University

• Jefferson Hoye, Independent

• Katherine Ognyanova, Rutgers University

• Waleed Meleis, Northeastern University

• David Lazer, Northeastern University