To clarify the rationale: I have a hunch that men spending time on Mechanical Turk are either less financially secure or care more about maximizing the money on

To clarify the rationale: I have a hunch that men spending time on Mechanical Turk are either less financially secure or care more about maximizing the money one earns from spare time. This may cause these men to prefer male friends who can help them make more money or raise their social status to help them find better work. Therefore, a sample of men who do not need to worry about money (and thus do not feel a want to use Mechanical Turk) may not feel a need to choose friends based on their usefulness to their financial or social status, and instead prefer male friends who are trustworthy and provide a higher level of emotional support. My hunch is backed up by this segment of a review paper from 2017 [0]: "Further, half of the MTurkers are employed part-time or unemployed. This is consistent with past findings (e.g., Ross et al., 2010; Behrend et al., 2011). A population of unemployed or underemployed participants offers a potentially interesting sampling opportunity for research questions related to job search behavior, underemployment, and unemployment (Roulin, 2015). At the same time, this could explain why MTurkers have a lower income on average as compared to nationally representative samples. "Taken together, our conclusions echo the conclusions of other researchers (cf., Behrend et al., 2011; Buhrmester et al., 2011; Berinsky et al., 2012; Casler et al., 2013; Brandon et al., 2014; Woo et al., 2015): MTurk samples are not representations of the general population." [0] From "Systems Perspective of Amazon Mechanical Turk for Organizational Research: Review and Recommendations" published in the Frontiers in Psychology journal: https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01359 https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01359