When I graduated from undergrad, Mechanical Turk was just starting to make inroads in social psych research. One of my friends was actually one of the first st

When I graduated from undergrad, Mechanical Turk was just starting to make inroads in social psych research. One of my friends was actually one of the first students to manage a survey for the social psych professor using MTurk. It's been promoted relatively heavily at conferences since. It's been discussed here [0] as well, but it's important to highlight that prior to MTurk social psychology studies were (and actually probably still are to a great extent) widely susceptible to the "college sophomore problem" wherein a sample meant to provide conclusions that would generalize to the wider population of the human race was composed almost exclusively of college age children. This meant that a large number of conclusions in social psychology have historically been based on non-representative samples. Methodologically, MTurk can be seen as a major improvement over the status quo in this regard. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17789595 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17789595