On March 16, 2020, the US Government introduced strict social distancing protocols for the United States in an effort to stem the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. This had an immediate major effect on the job market, with millions of Americans forced to find alternative ways to make a living from home. As online labor markets like Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) play a major role in social science research, concerns have been raised that the pandemic may be reducing the diversity of subjects participating in experiments. Here, we investigate this possibility empirically. Specifically, we look at 15,539 responses gathered in 23 studies run on MTurk between February and July 2020, examining the distribution of gender, age, ethnicity, political preference, and analytic cognitive style. We find notable changes on some of the measures following the imposition of nationwide social distancing: participants are more likely to be less reflective (as measured by the Cognitive Reflection Test), and somewhat less likely to be white, Democrats (traditionally over-represented on MTurk), and experienced with MTurk. Most of these differences are explained by an influx of new participants into the MTurk subject pool who are more diverse and representative – but also less attentive – than previous MTurkers.

2020 年 3 月 16 日，美国政府为美国引入了严格的社会疏远协议，以阻止 COVID-19 大流行的蔓延。这对就业市场产生了直接的重大影响，数百万美国人被迫寻找其他方式在家谋生。由于像 Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) 这样的在线劳动力市场在社会科学研究中发挥着重要作用，人们担心这种流行病可能会减少参与实验的受试者的多样性。在这里，我们根据经验研究这种可能性。具体而言，我们查看了在 2020 年 2 月至 2020 年 7 月期间在 MTurk 上运行的 23 项研究中收集的 15,539 份回复，检查了性别、年龄、种族、政治偏好和分析认知风格的分布。我们发现在实施全国性社会隔离之后，一些措施发生了显着变化：参与者更有可能较少反思（根据认知反思测试），并且不太可能是白人民主党人（传统上在MTurk），并有使用 MTurk 的经验。大多数差异是由于新参与者涌入 MTurk 主题库，他们比以前的 MTurk 更多样化和更具代表性——但也不太专注。