Amazon Mechanical Turk
The Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) service is a crowdsourcing website that you can use to recruit experiment subjects.
Getting started
To get started with MTurk, visit the website and choose 'Sign in as a Requester'. Sign in with your Amazon account, or create one if necessary.
Paying subjects
In order to pay subjects you need to load money into your MTurk account. To do this:
- Visit your 'My account' page on MTurk.
- Purchase prepaid HITs in the amount you require. These will increase the available balance for paying subjects.
Using research funds
If you have research funds you can ask Belen to purchase prepaid HITs for you. At the present time (Fall 2020) this is awkward to do remotely but can be accomplished with these steps:
First
Contact lingmgr@berkeley.edu (Libby) to request that a specific dollar amount from your research funds be approved for use in MTurk. She will check your available funds and approve and forward your request to Belen for completion.
At this point there are two options for Belen to make the transaction:
Option 1:
You can provide Belen with your Amazon login information so that she can temporarily add the department's credit card to your account and make the transaction. If you do this, you will need to temporarily change the password on your Amazon account to give to Belen.
Option 2:
Instead of giving Belen your Amazon password, you can share control of your computer screen over Zoom so that Belen can enter and delete the credit card information from your Amazon account while you handle the Amazon authentication.
- Sign in to your MTurk account and open the 'My account' page.
- Initiate a Zoom meeting with Belen. You must use the Zoom desktop app.
- In Zoom share the web browser screen that displays the MTurk account page.
- In the Zoom sharing controls click on the 'Remote Control' button and give mouse/keyboard control to Belen. For Mac OSX, you will need to give Zoom access in the Accessibility tab in the Privacy and Security preferences of your Mac.
- Belen will add a credit card payment method and add the funds.
- Click on the Manage your Amazon Wallet link from the prepaid HITs page and log in to your Amazon account, if prompted.
- Belen will delete the department credit card from your Amazon payment methods.
