众包,心理学家将其应用到实验心理学中,并取得一定成果。众包比直接施测与本科生更加经济且更具多样性,相关研究人员运用众包方式重复了电车实验和公共物品游戏两项经典实验,研究范围更加全球化,得到了新结论。虽然因报酬问题受到争议,但其前景已受到不同领域科学家们的广泛关注。
【译文】
Experimental psychology
实验心理学
The roar of the crowd
人群的咆哮
Crowdsourcing is transforming the science of psychology
众包正在改变社会心理学
May 26th 2012
ACCORDING to Joseph Henrich and his colleagues at the Universityof British Columbia, most undergraduates are WEIRD. Those who teach them might well agree. But Dr Henrich did not intend the term as an insult when he popularised it in a paper published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences in 2010. Instead, he was proposing an acronym: Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic.
据英属哥伦比亚大学的约瑟夫·亨利奇及其同事称,大多数本科生是“古怪的”。他们的老师会认同这一说法,但当2010年,亨利奇博士将“古怪”一词用于发表在《行为与大脑科学》上的论文中时,并无冒犯之意。而且他提出了一个新的缩写WEIRD,表示:西方、教育、工业化、发达、民主。
One reason these things matter is that undergraduates are also psychology’s laboratory rats. Incentivised by rewards, in the form of money or course credits, they will do the human equivalents of running mazes and pressing the levers in Skinner boxes until the cows come home.
其中一个重要原因是本科生成为了心理学家们的实验鼠。通过金钱或学分的奖励作为激励,他们将不停歇地上演人类版的小鼠走迷津和斯金纳箱中的小鼠按杠杆实验。
Which is both a blessing and a problem. It is a blessing because it provides psychologists with an endless supply of willing subjects. And it is a problem because those subjects are WEIRD, and thus not representative of humanity as a whole. Indeed, as Dr Henrich found from his analysis of leading psychology journals, a random American undergraduate is about 4,000 times more likely than an average human being to be the subject of such a study. Drawing general conclusions about the behaviour of Homo sapiens from the results of these studies is risky.
福兮祸兮,福为心理学家们会拥有无尽的实验对象资源;祸在被试因其属性WERID所以不具代表性。其实亨利奇博士从对核心心理学期刊的分析中发现,与此类的常规人类研究相比,随机美国本科生数量已多出约4000倍。从这些研究中得出关于人类行为的一般结论尚存风险。
This state of affairs, though, may be coming to an end. The main reasons undergraduates have been favoured in the past are that they are cheap, and easy for academics to recruit. But a new source of supply is now emerging: crowdsourcing.
但事件终会果。本科生广受欢迎的主要原因在于他们廉价且人数多。不过目前出现一项新的资源供应形式:众包。
Hivemind软件
Crowdsourcing is a way to get jobs like deciphering images, ranking websites and answering surveys done for money by online workers. Several firms offer the service, including oDesk, CrowdFlower and Elance. But by far the most popular for scientific purposes is Mechanical Turk, which is run by Amazon and is named after an 18th-century chess-playing machine in which a human secretly moved the pieces.
众包是在线工作者通过有偿做图像解码、网站排序及回答问卷的工作方式。oDesk, CrowdFlower和Elance公司提供此项服务。但到目前为止,亚马逊的土耳其机器人是最广受欢迎的为科学目的服务应用程序,这一名称源自18世纪步步精准的象棋机器人。
Mechanical Turk has more than 500,000 people, known as Turkers, in its workforce. For the hard-pressed, cash-strapped psychologist, this is a godsend. Turkers, despite the fact that half of them have at least one degree, are willing to work for peanuts. (Their median wage is about $1.40 an hour.) Most, indeed, seem to regard the tasks they are set as more like a paying hobby than an actual job. And, crucially, they are growing more cosmopolitan with each passing year. Though 40% are still fromAmerica, a third are Indian and the rest come from about 100 other countries. That diversity means the “W” of WEIRD, at least, can be dropped, and the “I”, “R” and “D” may often be dispensed with as well. Of course, another bias—that of signing up for crowdsourcing—is introduced. But using Turkers instead of undergrads does offer some genuine diversity.
土耳其机器人有五十多万人,称为“特客”。对于压力山大又资金紧缺的心理学家而言,真是福音。暂不考虑半数以上至少获得一个学位,他们愿意接受平均每小时1.40美元的微薄收入。实际上他们中多数人并没有与认为这是份工作,而是爱好。而且关键在于,过去的每年中人数增长都更加世界化。虽然40%的人来自美国,但也有1/3来自印度,其余人来自世界其他100多个国家。这一多样性意味着至少WEIRD中的“W”可以删去了,似乎也可以一同删去“I”“R”和“D”。无疑,众包签约的其他趋势也日益浮现。雇佣特客而非大学生带来了名副其实的多样化。
One researcher who has taken advantage of that diversity is David Rand, a lecturer in psychology atHarvardUniversity. He is using Mechanical Turk to reconsider the results of several experiments originally conducted mainly on students. In a recent study of moral decision-making, for example, he recruited hundreds of Turkers to repeat a classic thought experiment known as the trolley problem. This confronts its participants with a dilemma—a runaway railway trolley will kill a group of people unless the subject of the study chooses to push a single individual in front of it, in order to slow it down. Doing so will kill that individual, so the dilemma is whether to kill one person deliberately, or several through inaction.
哈佛大学的心理学讲师大卫·兰德是一位受益于多样性的研究人员。他使用土耳其机器人重新考虑一些施于大学生的原创实验的结果。在最近一项道德决策实验中,他招募到上百名特客来重复一项经典实验——电车难题。实验中被试会面临一个困境:除非研究中主试指定一名被试挡在车前,让停车下,否则这辆正在行驶的有轨电车将会撞向一群人且无一幸免。
Dr Rand is unwilling to discuss the results of his re-run in detail, because they have not yet been formally published. But he will say that he found he could replicate the prior findings of trolleyology, as this branch of psychology is often known, only among the atheists in his sample of Turkers. Those with strong religious beliefs behaved in a dramatically different way, and such believers are more common among Turkers than Harvard undergraduates.
由于兰德博士重复此项实验的结果尚未发表,所以他不愿透露细节。虽然样本只有无神论的特客,但正如心理学这一分支的研究者所熟知的,博士的实验结果会和先前电车难题实验结果相同。有强烈宗教信仰的人的行为会很不一样,与哈佛本科生相比,特客中有更多这样的人。
This result suggests that other studies whose findings might be sensitive to religious belief need revisiting. Nor is religion the only area where this is true. Dr Rand is, for example, conducting another cross-cultural experiment, to see why Americans and western Europeans treat co-operation and punishment differently from people in other places. In this he is building on previous work, rather than breaking genuinely new ground. But he is also showing how crowdsourcing can permit psychologists to do easily and cheaply what was once complicated and expensive.
实验结果表示,对于宗教信仰过于敏感的研究结果也许需要重新审视。宗教并不是使结论正确的唯一条件。比如兰德博士做的另一项跨文化实验——美国及欧洲国家对待合作和惩罚与其他国家的差异研究。此项研究建立在博士先前研究基础之上,取得了突破性结果。同时他展现了众包如何让心理学家更方便经济地进行曾经昂贵复杂的实验。
Many hands make light work分工合作