Empirica: a virtual lab for high-throughput macro-level experiments

Abstract: Virtual labs allow researchers to design high-throughput and macro-level experiments that are not feasible in traditional in-person physical lab settings. Despite the increasing popularity of online research, researchers still face many technical and logistical barriers when designing and deploying virtual lab experiments. While several platforms exist to facilitate the development of virtual lab experiments, they typically present researchers with a stark trade-off between usability and functionality. We introduce Empirica: a modular virtual lab that offers a solution to the usability-functionality trade-off by employing a "flexible defaults" design strategy. This strategy enables us to maintain complete "build anything" flexibility while offering a development platform that is accessible to novice programmers. Empirica's architecture is designed to allow for parameterizable experimental designs, reusable protocols, and rapid development. These features will increase the accessibility of virtual lab experiments, remove barriers to innovation in experiment design, and enable rapid progress in the understanding of distributed human computation.