You can buy just about anything on Amazon.com — clothes, books, electronics. You can buy answers, too. College students and professors are doing all sorts of research on an Amazon site called Mechanical Turk. …
When you type in the Web address MechanicalTurk.com, you’ll see a page full of gray rectangles, each one a different task. When I visited the site recently, I see one out of UCLA. They’re paying 25 cents for a 5-minute survey on consumer decision-making. The next one is 10 cents and it’s about dating preferences. When I scroll down, there’s one from Ohio State paying 50 cents for workers to fill out a survey about their political beliefs. CONT.
Gabrielle Emanuel, NPR