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1. Introduction
Crowd work is the paid performance of online tasks by distributed people with their collective intelligence and human computation capabilities (Malone et al., 2009; Quinn and Bederson, 2011; Kittur et al., 2013). Crowd work platforms such as Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) have been popular among scholars to conduct human subjects research, which refers to the investigation about living individuals as research participants (Final Rule, 2018). Since MTurk’s inception, many scholars have praised the research validity and data quality via crowd work as comparable and even superior to the other conventional recruitment venues such as professional panels and student samples (Buhrmester et al., 2011; Kees et al., 2017; Jensen-Doss et al., 2021). Meanwhile, numerous empirical and theoretical studies have critiqued various ethical issues in crowd work, such as the commodification of human labor (Bergvall-Kåreborn and Howcroft, 2014; Aloisi, 2015), the exploitation of crowd workers (Busarovs, 2013; Irani and Silberman, 2013) and the privacy violations and vulnerabilities (Xia et al., 2017; Xia and McKernan, 2020). However, they overwhelmingly focused on labor ethics or human rights issues in crowd work. As regards ethics in human subjects research via crowd work (in this paper, we refer to it as crowd work-based research [1]), the existing investigation is in dearth by contrast. Such a dearth of inquiry into ethical issues in crowd work-based research does not mean their absence or insignificance. For instance, an exploratory study has revealed that many scholars may have overlooked or overestimated crowd work-based research’s validity and data quality (Xia, 2022). The scholars’ unconscious and collective action to avoid rejecting crowd workers may undermine the reputational system to deter data spamming and fraud in crowd work (Xia, 2022). Consequently, it would engender a “Tragedy of the Commons” in crowd work-based research, when the overall data quality and validity would deteriorate, and all the scholars would suffer from decreased data quality and have to spend more research funding to solicit high-quality data (Xia, 2022).
This paper presents a critical analysis of ethics in crowd work-based research. It argues that some ethical issues, related to and embodied in the Belmont principles of respect for persons, beneficence and justice, exist and persist in crowd work-based research due to three fundamental problems...