Data quality in online human-subjects research: Comparisons between MTurk, Prolific, CloudResearch, Qualtrics, and SONA.

With the proliferation of online data collection in human-subjects research, concerns have been raised over the presence of inattentive survey participants and non-human respondents (bots). We compared the quality of the data collected through five commonly used platforms. Data quality was indicated by the percentage of participants who meaningfully respond to the researcher's question (high quality) versus those who only contribute noise (low quality). We found that compared to MTurk, Qualtrics, or an undergraduate student sample (i.e., SONA), participants on Prolific and CloudResearch were more likely to pass various attention checks, provide meaningful answers, follow instructions, remember previously presented information, have a unique IP address and geolocation, and work slowly enough to be able to read all the items. We divided the samples into high- and low-quality respondents and computed the cost we paid per high-quality respondent. Prolific ($1.90) and CloudResearch ($2.00) were cheaper than MTurk ($4.36) and Qualtrics ($8.17). SONA cost $0.00, yet took the longest to collect the data

Good Person or Bad Character? Personality Predictors of Morality and Ethics in Avatar Selection for Video Game Play

Popular video games often provide people with the option to play characters that are good or evil in nature, and yet, little is known about how individual differences in personality relate to the moral and ethical alignments people chose in their digital representations. We examined whether participants\u27 pre-existing levels of moral disengagement and Big 5 scores predicted the alignments they selected for their avatar in video game play. Results revealed that men, relative to women, were more likely to play bad guys and that moral disengagement predicted this finding. Agreeableness and conscientiousness mediated the relationship between moral disengagement and alignment such that those higher in these two traits were more likely to play good characters

You teach me and I’ll teach you: The role of social interactions on positivity elicited from playing Pokémon GO

Augmented Reality video games such as Pokémon GO have a structure that encourages face-to-face social interactions between players, leading to potentially unique benefits for positivity (positive affect). This study investigated how participants’ social interactions while playing Pokémon GO relate to their positivity after gameplay, crucially, after accounting for other non-social factors typically associated with positivity (participants’ satisfaction with their game accomplishments). Participants were 108 Pokémon GO players, consisting of 54 dyads who signed up for the study together. Dyads were asked to play Pokémon GO together for eight sessions over 2 weeks, and to report on their gameplay experiences and positivity after each session. Multilevel modelling analyses revealed that more positive social interactions with their gameplay partner incrementally predicted participants’ greater positivity post-gameplay. The association between positive social interactions and greater positivity was accentuated for participants who reported more frequent noxious mood states (depressive symptoms) at the start of the study. Findings suggest that above and beyond typical contributions such as achieving game accomplishments, there may be affective benefits for Pokémon GO players from the social interactions they have within the game, especially for those with noxious mood states

Virtually justifiable homicide: the effects of prosocial contexts on the link between violent video games, aggression, and prosocial and hostile cognition

Previous work has shown that playing violent video games can stimulate aggression toward others. The current research has identified a potential exception. Participants who played a violent game in which the violence had an explicitly prosocial motive (i.e., protecting a friend and furthering his nonviolent goals) were found to show lower short-term aggression (Study 1) and show higher levels of prosocial cognition (Study 2) than individuals who played a violent game in which the violence was motivated by more morally ambiguous motives. Thus, violent video games that are framed in an explicitly prosocial context may evoke more prosocial sentiments and thereby mitigate some of the short-term effects on aggression observed in previous research. While these findings are promising regarding the potential aggression-reducing effects of prosocial context, caution is still warranted as a small effect size difference (d = .2–.3), although nonsignificant, was still observed between those who played the explicitly prosocial violent game and those who played a nonviolent game; indicating that aggressive behavior was not completely eliminated by the inclusion of a prosocial context for the violence

Using field data to assess model predictions of surface and ground fuel consumption by wildfire in coniferous forests of California

Inventories of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from wildfire provide essential information to the state of California, USA, and other governments that have enacted emission reductions. Wildfires can release a substantial amount of GHGs and other compounds to the atmosphere, so recent increases in fire activity may be increasing GHG emissions. Quantifying wildfire emissions however can be difficult due to inherent variability in fuel loads and consumption and a lack of field data of fuel consumption by wildfire. We compare a unique set of fuel data collected immediately before and after six wildfires in coniferous forests of California to fuel consumption predictions of the first-order fire effects model (FOFEM), based on two different available fuel characterizations. We found strong regional differences in the performance of different fuel characterizations, with FOFEM overestimating the fuel consumption to a greater extent in the Klamath Mountains than in the Sierra Nevada. Inaccurate fuel load inputs caused the largest differences between predicted and observed fuel consumption. Fuel classifications tended to overestimate duff load and underestimate litter load, leading to differences in predicted emissions for some pollutants. When considering total ground and surface fuels, modeled consumption was fairly accurate on average, although the range of error in estimates of plot level consumption was very large. These results highlight the importance of fuel load input to the accuracy of modeled fuel consumption and GHG emissions from wildfires in coniferous forests. ©2014. American Geophysical Union. All Rights Reserved

A multi-site collaborative study of the hostile priming effect

In a now-classic study by Srull and Wyer (1979), people who were exposed to phrases with hostile content subsequently judged a man as being more hostile. And this “hostile priming effect” has had a significant influence on the field of social cognition over the subsequent decades. However, a recent multi-lab collaborative study (McCarthy et al., 2018) that closely followed the methods described by Srull and Wyer (1979) found a hostile priming effect that was nearly zero, which casts doubt on whether these methods reliably produce an effect. To address some limitations with McCarthy et al. (2018), the current multi-site collaborative study included data collected from 29 labs. Each lab conducted a close replication (total N = 2,123) and a conceptual replication (total N = 2,579) of Srull and Wyer\u27s methods. The hostile priming effect for both the close replication (d = 0.09, 95% CI [-0.04, 0.22], z = 1.34, p =.16) and the conceptual replication (d = 0.05, 95% CI [-0.04, 0.15], z = 1.15, p =.58) were not significantly different from zero and, if the true effects are non-zero, were smaller than what most labs could feasibly and routinely detect. Despite our best efforts to produce favorable conditions for the effect to emerge, we did not detect a hostile priming effect. We suggest that researchers should not invest more resources into trying to detect a hostile priming effect using methods like those described in Srull and Wyer (1979)