The Ad Page

The way that the experiment is advertised to participants depends on the recruitment method.

Generic recruiter

The ‘generic’ recruiter is used for experiments that are not integrated with a crowdsourcing provider. In such cases, participants simply navigate to the experiment via a pre-specified link. In this case PsyNet does not display an ad to the participant.

Prolific

Prolific participants see an ad in their Prolific interface. This ad looks something like this:

Prolific ad example

The content of this ad is initially populated by PsyNet with reference to your experiment config, in particular fields like title, config, wage_per_hour, and so on. You can customize the content via the Prolific interface.

MTurk and CAP-Recruiter

With MTurk and CAP-Recruiter the ad page is hosted by PsyNet itself. This ad page is again initially populated by PsyNet with reference to your experiment config, but can be customized by editing methods of the Experiment class, as detailed below.

1. General description of the experiment

Add a description using the description keyword in the experiment’s config.txt file, e.g.:

description = The <span style=”font-style: italic;”>Max Planck Insitute for Empirical Aesthetics</span> is looking for online participants for a brief psychology experiment.<br>In this experiment, you will listen to sounds and answer questions.

You can make use of HTML’s style attribute to adapt the text’s appearance as shown in the above example.

2. Requirements

Five default requirements are added automatically. These are:

  • The experiment can only be performed using a laptop (desktop computers are not allowed).
  • You should use an updated Google Chrome browser.
  • You should be sitting in a quiet environment.
  • You should be at least 18 years old.
  • You should be a fluent English speaker.

More requirements can be added, e.g. by augmenting your experiment class with the following code:

@property
def ad_requirements(self):
    return super().ad_requirements + [
        'You must be wearing <span style="font-weight: bold;">headphones</span> and sitting in a quiet place.'
    ]

Organize requirements according to your needs by using custom Python code.

3. Payment information

The following payment information text will be rendered by default unless amended (or completely overriden) in the experiment class:

We estimate that the task should take approximately n minutes. Upon completion of the full task,
you should receive a reward of approximately $x.yz depending on the amount of work done.
In some cases, the experiment may finish early: this is not an error, and there is no need to write to us.
In this case you will be paid in proportion to the amount of the experiment that you completed.

You could add another line of text using this code, e.g.:

@property
def ad_payment_information(self):
    return super().ad_payment_information
    + '<br>Send us your <span style="font-weight: bold;">bank account information</span> to receive refunds.'

Again, you can make use of HTML’s style attribute to adapt the text’s appearance to your needs.

Note

To completely override the appearance of the ad page you can add an ad.html file to the templates directory of your experiment.