Common (Mis)Beliefs about Memory: A Replication and Comparison of Telephone and Mechanical Turk Survey Methods
Common (Mis)Beliefs about Memory: A Replication and Comparison of Telephone and Mechanical Turk Survey Methods
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DOI：
10.1371/journal.pone.0051876
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发表时间：
2012-12-18
期刊：
影响因子：
3.7
通讯作者：
Chabris, Christopher F.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Simons, Daniel J.;Chabris, Christopher F.
关于记忆的错误观念有着广泛的影响。我们最近报道了一项调查结果，显示相当一部分美国公众对记忆的看法与记忆专家的看法相冲突。在该调查中，受访者使用电话键盘回答录制的问题。虽然这种机器人投票产生了可靠的结果，准确地预测了选举结果，但它有四个主要缺点：(1)电话投票成本高；(2)通常情况下，只有不到10%的电话能完成一次完整的调查；(3)电话不能到达没有固定电话的家庭；(4)电话对老年人抽样过多，对年轻人抽样不足。在这里，我们使用Amazon Mechanical Turk （MTurk）复制了我们的电话调查，以探索抽样人口统计数据的异同以及结果的模式。总的来说，这两项调查都没有接近美国人口的统计数据，但它们在偏离2010年人口普查数据的程度上有所不同。然而，在对每项调查的结果进行加权以符合人口普查统计数据之后，这两种方法产生了非常相似的结果：在这两项调查中，平均超过50%的人同意科学共识显示为错误的陈述。这项研究的结果重复了我们的发现，即大众观点与专家观点之间存在巨大差异，并表明在MTurk上进行的调查可以产生具有代表性的美国人口样本，其结果与更昂贵的调查技术一致。
Incorrect beliefs about memory have wide-ranging implications. We recently reported the results of a survey showing that a substantial proportion of the United States public held beliefs about memory that conflicted with those of memory experts. For that survey, respondents answered recorded questions using their telephone keypad. Although such robotic polling produces reliable results that accurately predicts the results of elections, it suffers from four major drawbacks: (1) telephone polling is costly, (2) typically, less than 10 percent of calls result in a completed survey, (3) calls do not reach households without a landline, and (4) calls oversample the elderly and undersample the young. Here we replicated our telephone survey using Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) to explore the similarities and differences in the sampled demographics as well as the pattern of results. Overall, neither survey closely approximated the demographics of the United States population, but they differed in how they deviated from the 2010 census figures. After weighting the results of each survey to conform to census demographics, though, the two approaches produced remarkably similar results: In both surveys, people averaged over 50% agreement with statements that scientific consensus shows to be false. The results of this study replicate our finding of substantial discrepancies between popular beliefs and those of experts and shows that surveys conducted on MTurk can produce a representative sample of the United States population that generates results in line with more expensive survey techniques.