One class of questions you didn’t bring up has to do with perceptions of risk. There was a poster at this year’s USENIX Security about a Mechanical Turk experiment that purported to be a Starbucks study evaluating the usability of a new method of accessing the wi-fi at Starbucks locations: click here to install this new root certificate! (Nearly 3⁄4 of participants did so.) I can’t find the poster online, but this short paper accompanied it at SOUPS.
Risks, biases, and heuristics would be good to look into. One would have to be careful to avoid using measures that participants have prior exposure though (a problem that is unusually common in MTurk), so surveys probably would have to create unique measures.
Most social-science studies are designed to elicit answers in such a way that the participant doesn’t realize what question is actually being asked. For example, when William Labov studied the distribution of rhoticity in spoken English, he asked people innocuous questions whose answers contained the sound /r/ in (phonetic) environments where rhoticity can occur. He’d go into a multi-story department store, look at the map, and ask an employee something along the lines of “Where can I find towels?” so that the person would answer “Those are on the fourth floor.” Similarly, the wi-fi study wasn’t looking at usability any more than Labov was interested in towels; they were really eliciting “willingness to do something dangerous” as a proxy for (lack of) risk awareness. As long as the measure is wearing unique clothing, participants shouldn’t be able to recognize it.
One class of questions you didn’t bring up has to do with perceptions of risk. There was a poster at this year’s USENIX Security about a Mechanical Turk experiment that purported to be a Starbucks study evaluating the usability of a new method of accessing the wi-fi at Starbucks locations: click here to install this new root certificate! (Nearly 3⁄4 of participants did so.) I can’t find the poster online, but this short paper accompanied it at SOUPS.
Risks, biases, and heuristics would be good to look into. One would have to be careful to avoid using measures that participants have prior exposure though (a problem that is unusually common in MTurk), so surveys probably would have to create unique measures.
Most social-science studies are designed to elicit answers in such a way that the participant doesn’t realize what question is actually being asked. For example, when William Labov studied the distribution of rhoticity in spoken English, he asked people innocuous questions whose answers contained the sound /r/ in (phonetic) environments where rhoticity can occur. He’d go into a multi-story department store, look at the map, and ask an employee something along the lines of “Where can I find towels?” so that the person would answer “Those are on the fourth floor.” Similarly, the wi-fi study wasn’t looking at usability any more than Labov was interested in towels; they were really eliciting “willingness to do something dangerous” as a proxy for (lack of) risk awareness. As long as the measure is wearing unique clothing, participants shouldn’t be able to recognize it.