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Lighter Footprints Protocol

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A Lee edited this page Feb 17, 2015 · 4 revisions

#Lighter Footprints Protocol

Subject Recruitment

  • Create a single ExperimentSession via the subject recruitment at /subject-pool, set the start date / end date on Monday at midnight - Friday at 11:59 PM and capacity to number of requested participants. The location is Online.
  • Create Invitations for N * capacity and set the following fields
  • Invitation subject: [vcweb] experiment invitation
  • Invitation text:

We are conducting experiments that investigate how people think, act, and make decisions and would like to invite you to participate in an online experiment. It will be scheduled over the course of 5 days where you will be able to participate by signing into the experiment website and performing virtual actions on the website. The expected time commitment is about 2 minutes a day and your participation in this study is completely voluntary.

For participating in this study, you can earn up to $25 ($5 per day) depending on the decisions you and the other participants make during the experiment. After the experiment is completed you will have until final-payment-date to collect your payment in person at the Tempe campus. After you've signed up for the experiment session below you will receive an email on Sunday evening, day-before-experiment-starts, with more detailed instructions on how to log in and the rules of the exercise.

Please note that the start time of 12:00 AM in the session below is when the experiment will become available. You do not need to be physically present at any location in order to participate, this is a purely online experiment.

  • Make sure to edit the final-payment-date and the day-before-experiment-starts dates
  • Preview message, verify, and then send invitations. Sending emails to over a thousand students takes a long time, the browser will probably time out.

Verify Experiment Configuration

Verify experiment parameterizations - there is a test suite but manual inspection of the participant interface is still needed to ensure that the logic to switch between treatment information displays are working correctly.

Verify Email Templates

Verify that the emails that are sent out are correct. This includes the experiment registration email template at experiment/lighterprints/templates/lighterprints/email/experiment-registration.txt and customized when registering participants for the experiment with text like the following:

Thank you for signing up for this online experiment. You have been randomly placed in a group of five participants. Thus this is a group containing you and four other participants. The experiment is about reducing the carbon footprint of some common everyday activities that we all do. You will have a period of five days where you can login to the experiment website and perform virtual actions representing actual behavioral choices one can make to reduce their carbon footprint. Please note that you don’t have to actually perform these actions yourself in the real world. Every (virtual) action has a point score associated with it that represents the carbon emissions saved, and your earnings will depend on the actions of all five people in your group.

Register Participants

Once recruiting is finished and there are N participants signed up, partition participants into treatments via random sample and start the participant registration process in experiment/<id>/register-email-list. The start date is very important here (Note: this info is duplicated with the ExperimentSession in the subject pool currently, see #26 for more context).

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