5.65 Preregistration, crowdsourcing, and fake news: Ethical researchers are increasingly using the Internet to modernize their research and conduct it in a more ethical way. In one study, not yet peer-reviewed, Yale researchers found that increased exposure to fake news headlines led to increased perceptions that these headlines were accurate (Pennycook et al., 2018). The researchers described their methods as follows: “All data are available online (osf.io/txf46/). We preregistered our hypotheses, primary analyses, and sample size (osf.io/txf46/)…. All participants were recruited from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (Horton et al., 2011).”

a. Describe two ways in which the researchers are using ethical, transparent practices. Explain why these practices are ethical.

b. What is HARKing (see Chapter 1), and how does one of the practices described here make it impossible for the researchers to HARK?

c. What do the researchers mean when they say that they recruited participants from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk? What kind of a sample is this?

d. What are some of the benefits of collecting data in this way?

e. What are some of the drawbacks of collecting data in this way?