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Doubts about Amazon Mechanical Turk, which means trouble for Experimental Philosophy

Folks interested in XPhil should read this, if they have not already.  Comments welcome from those knowledgeable about the issues.

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3 responses to “Doubts about Amazon Mechanical Turk, which means trouble for Experimental Philosophy”

  1. The issue of low quality Amazon Turk data has been known for years now. Many experimental philosophers, perhaps most, have moved to other platforms that do not suffer from similar issues.

  2. "Are you a robot?" seems an improper question to use as a filter in a survey on free will v. determinism.

  3. As Edouard said, experimental philosophers are aware of concerns about data quality on MTurk. And most will have read Florian's post, since it was on the main x-phi blog. But I think it is important to note that this should not be thought of as trouble for experimental philosophy, for a few reasons. First, it's worth noting that the concerns are supported by the results of an experimental philosophy study done by an experimental philosopher, who goes on to suggest that an alternative platform that is also widely used, Prolific, may fare better in the relevant respects. Second, there are ongoing discussions of how to maintain data quality on MTurk and other platforms, e.g. on twitter regularly, and Florian links to one helpful discussion about MTurk by Nick Byrd toward the end of his post (this is not to disagree at all with Florian's concerns). Lastly, any problems with MTurk data are not problems for experimental philosophy in particular, since it's not only experimental philosophers, but psychologists, cognitive scientists, and other researchers who have used this tool for participant recruitment. So how we think about these concerns matters quite a lot.

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