On the Volunteer Science website, you can play games and take surveys to provide scientists with data they need to answer today’s largest research questions.
‘Volunteer Science is a collaboration among scientists from leading research universities to expand the tools available for social and behavioural research. Most social and behavioural research is expensive and time intensive because it requires recruiting and maintaining pools of participants.
Volunteer Science is a web laboratory that will accelerate behavioural research by improving statistical power by involving more people, lower costs by using open standards, reduce data collection time by creating a community of active and engaged participants, and promote citizen engagement with and interest in scientific research.’
There is currently a collection of 10 multiplayer and single player games on their website. Check them out!
In 2016, their researchers published a paper in Social Psychology Quarterly where they replicated classic experiments in social science using our online platform.
Abstract:
Experimental research in traditional laboratories comes at a significant logistic and financial cost while drawing data from demographically narrow populations. The growth of online methods of research has resulted in effective means for social psychologists to collect large-scale survey-based data in a cost-effective and timely manner. However, the same advancement has not occurred for social psychologists who rely on experimentation as their primary method of data collection. The aim of this article is to provide an overview of one online laboratory for conducting experiments, Volunteer Science, and report the results of six studies that test canonical behaviours commonly captured in social psychological experiments. Our results show that the online laboratory is capable of performing a variety of studies with large numbers of diverse volunteers. We advocate for the use of the online laboratory as a valid and cost-effective way to perform social psychological experiments with large numbers of diverse subjects.
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0190272516675866