Attitude-Behavior Inconsistency Management Strategies in MTurk Workers: Cognitive Dissonance in Crowdsourcing Participants?

Abstract

Crowdsourcing refers to an online micro-task market to access and recruit large groups of participants. One of the most popular crowdsourcing platforms is Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk). MTurkers are as reliable as traditional workers yet they receive much less monetary compensation (Pittman and Sheehan 2016). Many MTurk workers consider themselves exploited (Busarovs 2013), yet, despite this, many continue to complete tasks on MTurk. The purpose of this study is to investigate how MTurk workers dealing with inequities in effort and compensation. We experimentally manipulate expected effort and worker payment in order to compare how effort verses wage inequity affects workers’ attitudes towards a series of tasks. We found that those paid more rated the task as more enjoyable and important than those paid less. Implications of this study are discussed.