One of the common misbeliefs about Mechanical Turk is that it is a virtual sweatshop, essentially taking advantage of poor people in third world countries that are doing tedious tasks for pennies. Therefore, many people are afraid of outsourcing research tasks on Mechanical Turk, being afraid that the results will be either of very poor quality, or they will not be representative of the actual U.S. population.
Those that read the previous, qualitative survey about Mechanical Turk would have realized that the profile of the typical Turker is not of a person that completes tasks for a living in a developing country. Instead, Mechanical Turk tends to be often a replacement for TV, or simple something to spend some free time and get some spare cash in reward.
The next survey that I conducted focused more on the demographics of the Turkers. Are they uneducated, unemployed people with no income? Well, as you will see below the Turkers are a pretty representative sample of the online population, perhaps with a slight bias towards females and towards young participants. (See a detailed comparison on how the demographics of Mechanical Turk users compare to general demographics of Internet users)
Let's see the main results!
First, I would start with the country breakdown.
United States | 76.25% |
India | 8.03% |
United Kingdom | 3.34% |
Canada | 2.34% |
The clear result is that most of the participants are coming from the US and not from a third world country, despite the common misconception. This is due to the fact that in order to get paid, someone has to have a US bank account, or be willing to be paid using Amazon gift certificates.
Then, the gender breakdown:

Next, the age distribution:

And what about education?

Similarly, the income distribution also follows closely the income distribution in the US:


If you have any more questions that you would like to see answered, let me know!
See also