Does Money Corrupt Online Research Participants?
How incentives affect performance in psychological web studies.
KEY POINTS
Money triggers dishonesty, not higher effort, in a cognitive performance task.
Cheating is linked to higher performance and higher individual profit.
Online measures of cognitive performance may be methodologically problematic, especially if they are well-known among the general public.
Managers should consider undesired side effects of performance-based pay.
We wondered if offering money for performing well on a psychological test could corrupt online data collection in research in the behavioral sciences. Our findings suggested that the answer is yes. People tended to cheat more when they could earn some extra cash. One additional click to another tab increased the odds of scoring higher on the original CRT by 39 percent. This observation indicates that many web searches were successful. Hence, it was relatively easy to cheat on the task to increase profits; and more individuals did so when CRT performance was incentivized." Around one-quarter of our respondents interrupted working on the CRT at least once, many of them, presumably, to search for the correct answers on the web. The group of people working on the original CRT was able to substantially increase their performance by cheating (see Figure 1). For the modified CRT version, we did not observe this performance improvement, of course, as correct answers could not be looked up on the internet.
But the broad availability of easily accessible information about the CRT (including the option to simply copy-and-paste the answers directly from Google) changes the rules of the game. Our findings align with the idea that online CRT performance improves under incentives because people more often look for the correct answers on the web. In other words, people are willing to cheat for higher profits.
People may be inclined to cheat when it pays to do so. Our research suggests that offering money for good performance may not always bring about the behaviors hoped for. Performance-based payment can have undesired side effects. Money, it seems, offers fertile ground for the emergence of dishonesty."
Read the full article on Psychology Today
Reflection: If you have participated in psychological web studies, have your performance been affected due to being compensated?
*I'm guilty of this one, as I didn't perform at my best and just wanted the study to be over so I could get my money. Not my proudest moment, but I do believe that money has a corrupting aspect to it.*
Hush....
#Money #PsychologyResearch #Corrupted
@professionalVision2624 I would say that payment encourages the participants to take place but it can affect the overall results sometimes as the participants may want to satisfy the researcher's purpose. I'm supporting that volunteering participants are always more reliable and self-motivated to contribute. Thank you for the post.
@calmDew1576
A great point! I agree with you! Thank you for your comment!
@professionalVision2624
I have not participated in any yet, but i can definitely see how that would happen!
Thanks for sharing the article💛💫
@innateJoy9602
Thank you for your response! I do hope you participate in one soon, it's a lot of fun!
I've never participated in that kind of experiment. It's not hard to see how it would play out, though...after all, who doesn't like money? I do.
A common saying is "money is the root of all evil" but that's incorrect. Money is just currency, an inanimate object. It is bits of data, or pieces of paper & base metal. I think it's the desire for money above all else that is responsible for a lot--but by no means all--of the human-caused evils we see in today's world.
@slowdecline48
Mhhhh <3 That's a really good perspective you have there and it's true, there is always a good/bad driving force and the "grey area" in between
@professionalVision2624
Getting people to participate in optional studies is challenging because it introduces volunteer bias into the study. Incentive is some way to try equalizing that disparity as many people find common ground in money but even that has its ethical concerns. There is a ethic rule that does not recognize studies that compensated their participants by large amounts as that can introduce considerable unwanted variables into a study.
@sunnyWriting4806
Yes I agree! To get money as compensation can corrupt and make the results skewed in unwanted directions since the participants motivation gets corrupted so to speak.