Social scientists are turning to online retail giant Amazon.com to cheaply recruit people around the world for research studies Social scientists nowadays are ordering research subjects through Amazon.com. The company runs an online marketplace called Mechanical Turk for people across the world available to do work on computers. (The name is a reference to an 18th century chess-playing "machine" that actually worked by virtue of a man hidden inside.) For tiny sums, anyone can hire people to perform almost any kind of simple task, such as tagging items in images. It's predicted that many more social science papers using MTurk will appear in the coming years.