Motivational Nudges in Citizen Science: Experimental Approach
How will the research idea benefit from the grant? ¶
Our study intends to explore different mechanisms of supporting sustained contributions in urban citizen science projects. The concept of situational decision-making assumes that motivation plays a role and is mediated by decision-making context and mental schemas, which, in our case, are connected to the perception of the urban environment. Access to crowdsourcing input will allow us to get insight into factors behind people’s mental mapping of the urban spaces. We will recruit participants for behavioural experiments and factorial surveys, uncovering factors behind mental maps. In addition, crowdsourcing will allow us to access a geographically and socio-demographically diverse population of participants, overcoming the limitations of traditional convenience samples. Some particular examples of tasks are using crowdsource workers to elicit local attractions perception coordinates, i.e. local vs tourist, quiet vs crowded, etc., and discovering a new dimension of actual human perception of locations. Putting humans in the loop will increase the ecological validity of our study compared to the analysis of user-generated data.
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Toloka is mostly a crowdsource platform for mapping datasets for ML, but toloka workers are real individuals, who as many other people could effectively estimate the power and invasiveness of nudging messages. More about Toloka Academy.