What Crowdsourcing Can Offer to Cross-Cultural Psychological Science

Although the benefits of crowdsourcing research models have been outlined elsewhere, very little attention has been paid to the application of these models to cross-cultural behavioral research. In this manuscript, we delineate two types of crowdsourcing initiatives—researcher crowdsourced and participant crowdsourced. Researcher crowdsourced refers to initiatives where researchers are gathered to work toward a shared goal. Participant crowdsourced refers to those which allow a researcher to gather a large number of participants within a short time frame. We explore the utility of each type of initiative while providing readers with a framework that can be used when deciding whether researcher or participant crowdsourcing initiatives would be most fruitful for their work. Perceived strengths of a researcher crowdsourced initiative with a cross-cultural focus is based on contributor data from Psi Chi’s Network for International Collaborative Exchange (NICE) and is integrated into this framework. Claims are made for the utility of both researcher and participant crowdsourcing as a way to increase generalizability and reliability, decrease time burdens, democratize research, educate individuals on open science, and provide mentorship. These claims are supported with data from NICE contributors.