Friday, September 24, 2021

"Thousands of scientific studies had to toss out weeks of data because of a 56-second TikTok video by a teenager."

Verge:

Online research makes it so much easier. You program a survey... you put it online, and within a day, you have 1,000 responses,” [the director of the Behavioral Lab at the Stanford School of Business] told The Verge. “That changed the face of social science.”

...

The [platform Prolific] offers more transparency, promises to treat survey participants more ethically, and promises higher-quality research subjects than alternative platforms like Mechanical Turk.

...

The July 23rd video is short and simple. It opens with recent Florida high school graduate and self-described “teen author” ... sitting in her bedroom and smiling at the camera.

“Welcome to side hustles I recommend trying — part one,” she says in the video, pointing users to the website Prolific.co. “Basically, it’s a bunch of surveys for different amounts of money and different amounts of time.”

...

In the days and weeks after [the teen author] posted her video, researchers scrambled to figure out what was happening to their studies.