One of the problems faced with psychology research — really, with all medical research — is finding enough appropriate subjects to study. Subjects have to be obtained in a way that is representative of the population as a whole for research findings to be generalizable.
Which is a real problem, because as I noted back in August 2010, there are literally thousands of psychology studies based upon nothing more than a bunch of college students from a single campus at a university in the U.S. While young adults who are attending college may indeed help us understand some aspects of human behavior, you can’t just assume that the behaviors you observed in those studies apply to 60-year-old women and men too.
Enter Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk service to the rescue. Can technology help solve the quandary of finding enough people that are more representative of the population, and do so in a cost-effective manner?