Table 1. Popular recruitment platforms and some of their characteristics.
| Mechanical Turk | Prolific academic | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Participants | Potentially available | 10k–500k | 5k |
| Mostly originate from | USA, India | USA, UK | |
| Can specify country from which to recruit? | yes | yes | |
| Participant reputation system | yes | yes | |
| Money | Fee on top of participant fee | 10%–30%a | 10% |
| Bonus Payments possible | yes | yes (on request) | |
| Minimum payments | no | yes | |
| Access without US credentials? | no | yes | |
| Researcher-participant messaging | yes | yes | |
Notes.
a
Note that some MTurkers have a “Masters” performance-based qualification (see https://www.reddit.com/r/mturk/comments/1qmaqc/how_do_i_earn_masters_qualification/). MTurk charges researchers 30% of their participant fees for recruiting from this Masters group. Be aware that when creating a task for MTurkers to do using Amazon’s own ‘web interface’ creation tool, ‘Masters’ is set as the default group from which you wish to recruit.