Experimental Design Details
Subjects who enroll as workers on Amazon Mechanical Prime will be recruited. Amazon does not allow any individuals below the age of 18 to work on the Mechanical Turk platform, hence we will only recruit subjects of at least 18 years of age. A total of 600 adult workers will be recruited through the platform. Recruitment will be restricted to MTurkers who are based in the US. This can be done using MTurk’s graphics interface so that the work announcement (also called a HIT [Human Intelligence Task]) will only be accessible for US MTurkers.
Workers receive financial compensation for participation. All US MTurkers are eligible, and the task will close as soon as 600 subjects have entered it. Inclusion criteria are that the target population are all US-based MTurkers. The recruitment of turkers is to work for something labelled as an elderly care home timesheet, with the different labels for the type of organization constituting the variation in intervention. Participants are asked if they utilized tools that might help them in the task (a calculator). Additional measures are nine items that tap the individual’s conscientiousness taken from the Big Five personality traits inventory. People are also asked about their gender, age and what type of organization they do work for (public, private or nonprofit). The final question is a manipulation check, asking participants if they remember whether the organization mentioned on the time sheets is a public or private, for-profit organization. At end of the study, part pants are debriefed and informed about the full purpose of the study.