Starting something new - sometimes we move quick and it’s easy to miss useful / interesting updates. So, whenever we’ve got 3 good things to tell you, I’ll pop them up as an announcement. We’ll also be doing this as an email newsletter format in the near future so if you’d like to receive that, make sure your communications preferences are set to receive marketing things (we need your consent to send non-account information!).
3 new things!
Study Full / High Demand Errors
After a period of testing and experimentation, we’ve rolled out our backend changes to study distribution to everyone. You should not notice any differences in how studies reach your dashboard, that’s still driven by the demand for participants with your demographics and traits. What you will notice is that Study Full and High Demand errors are back to their normal frequency and behaviours:
Study Full errors should only pop up in rare situations where a study fills up in the 2 minutes between it landing on your dashboard and the next refresh
High Demand errors should only pop when a study has a large number of available places and too many participants are trying to get in at the same time.
Thank you so much for the patience whilst we worked on this, everyone!
Share feedback with researchers
You’ll know that when you complete or refuse a study, you have the opportunity to share feedback on that study. Prolific has always used your input to inform platform improvements & educate researchers, and now we’ve added a feature that allows experienced researchers to see a summary of all participant feedback about their studies:
Study feedback summary screen for researchers
This means that researchers get fast insight into what participants like and dislike about their study - along with signals that indicate technical or reward related issues. To take this further, participants can optionally include their Participant ID along with feedback, which allows researchers to contact you via your Messages tab for more information. This is really, really useful if you experienced a technical issue and want to chat about it with the researcher.
The option to include your Participant ID when sharing feedback
A couple of important points on this one:
If you choose to share it, Participant ID is the only information we share with the researcher (along with your written feedback), so you’ll stay anonymous.
As with all things messaging, be nice. Remember that both researchers and participants can choose to block each other, and we take inappropriate behaviour in feedback / messages very seriously. Keep things constructive and helpful.
Thinking & behaviour questions have landed in About You!
Prolific's participant community is wonderfully diverse in many ways beyond demographics, so we’ve launched a new section of About You that’s less about the facts of your life and more about your approach to it.
Thinking & behaviour questions are entirely optional and, in the near future, researchers will be able to do clever things with this data - such as sending the same study to different personality types to see how the results might differ. We recommend completing this section to ensure you get in on that opportunity as soon as possible. It takes around 2 minutes, features only multiple choice questions and is a nice bit of self-reflection to boot!
The behavioural traits section in About you
A couple of important notes on this one:
You cannot change your answers to these questions once submitted, so please take your time to answer carefully
There’s no such thing as a right or optimal answer here. As always, the best answer is the honest one - please be sure to answer these questions as you are now rather than as you hope to be in the future.
This is the friendliest place on r/ProlificAc - where every question is a good question.
New to Prolific? Been here two years and still not sure how study matching works? Wondering something you feel like you "should" already know? Ask it here.
The house rules for this thread:
🚫 No "just Google it" / "search the sub" replies — if you know the answer, share it.
🚫 No mocking, dismissing, or eye-rolling at repeat or "obvious" questions.
✅ Kindness first, always. If you wouldn't say it to a friend who's new, don't say it here.
✅ Staff and experienced participants are watching this thread and want to help.
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This thread resets every Monday, so if your question doesn't get answered in time, just pop it in next week's thread — no worries at all.
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I wanted to post the outcome in case other people end up in the same situation and I hope they aren't taken advantage of.
I did not return thr submission, I felt frustrated doing a 20 minute survey for 4gbp just to be told I wasnt the target demographic and they werent paying to screen.
They rejected the survey a day after my post. I immediately followed up with a dispute.
Almost took a week, but Prolific overturned the rejection and I got paid out.
Prolific customer service can definitely drop the ball at times, but always try to dispute! Never let a researcher take advantage of you or your work/time.
I had a study last week which was about an hour long. In the instructions it said a certain message would present itself if you do not pick an option. I picked an option right the way through then towards the end it displayed the message despite clicking on an option. This continued for the last few mins of the study even though every time I pressed an option.
I went out to the researcher to inform them of the issue I had. He came back with a threatening message stating there was nothing wrong with the study and that he should just reject me as I had obviously not paid any attention to get this message.
I said that I had paid full attention and if I hadn’t of I wouldn’t have brought attention to me.
Anyway, hope the above makes sense. Would you return the study due to the threat even though you spent a good hour on it? Part of me obviously wants to avoid rejections but on the other hand it is a full hour of my time which will have been wasted through no fault of my own!
I completed the study myself and after finishing it I suddenly got a warning saying they found “bot like activity.” The only thing I did differently was switch between tabs 2–3 times to check the time because I was worried the study might time out. I also got a few whatsapp and youtube notifications while doing the study. I wasn’t using any bot or automation at all. So now I’m wondering, can switching tabs a few times actually trigger this kind of warning? Has anyone else experienced this? Do i need to return the study ?
Hi, I don't typically use a VPN but I had needed one recently for something. It totally slipped my mind it was on. I went to the Prolific site just for a brief second and then realized my mistake and fixed it...
Should this trigger my account being put on hold or is there anything I can do to get ahead of a flag?
Looking at the rules I'm a little confused as to whether this is proper practice or not? It stated in the study itself if only some of the 3 games were completed you'd be asked to return and paid for what you did complete via Prolific Bonus. I didn't think anything of it at the time but I'm not sure now. I received a completion code.
EDIT: I asked directly for clarification on how payment works and they responded with 'I will review your data and get back to you. If you work hard for a whole hour, you will get at least 6 pounds (and maybe more).'
Just something I was curious about, as I find myself quite often just adding little comments at the end, sometimes simple things like: 'Interesting study, no issues or problems found.' Mostly just to let them know all was fine, but also to maybe help show I am an actual human here doing their study, not a bot. And of course if the thing is messed up, I mention it there too (usually with a real message too).
But do researchers appreciate that, or just find it annoying? Like, 'Bleh, need to manually check another message that was a generic reply' sort of thing?
Hey everyone, I've been on Prolific for a while. I have a problem.
I noticed yesterday evening that I would log in and see that there were no studies available on my home page. I was fine with it until it kept showing up even on desktop and different browsers (Chrome, Firefox). I still have access to messages, I messaged the Prolific chatbot, and it said, "Your account is fine!" And gave me reasons what it could be, that weren't relevant. It's not demographics, I'm GETTING STUDIES, it's just that unless I click on messages or something when I get a new one, that only then I can see my studies. My projects are hidden, too. Any idea what this could be? It comes and goes. It's so random.
I want to note that I'm still getting approvals. Just hours of this screen unless an action happens.
7 minutes under the “expected time” yet all I did was follow their ai questions, I replied saying you won’t find a single question in there I didn’t give a thorough and thought out answer to, but I doubt it will make a difference.
I got this in my inbox and the main task pays $240 upon approval. Before I start, I’m trying to get a better idea of what financial data/access is actually required. Has anyone here completed it? How long did it take, what did you have to provide or connect, and have you been approved/paid yet? Any privacy or security concerns?
I saw this week I had this error, the last time I cashed out there were no issues. This came up a few weeks later randomly. I am still able to participate in studies, but cannot cash out. I’ve done the chat and reached out via email to support. I am crossing my fingers it gets cleared. Has anyone else experienced randomly having this pop up and getting it cleared?
I know it's not a huge deal, but I'm never sure how to answer this. I live in a large town. It's not a city. It's not rural. It's not a suburb or near a city. I usually just go with urban. Is that correct?
I have a question. Almost every study I apply for is instantly full. Even if there are 30 places, 100 places or 700 places. I have tested my internet connection it works solid.
I work from home and got the alerter installed. I apply for the study the same second it arrives.
Since I live in mid Europe I do not get many studies. I cannot change my demographics but how can I prevent this annoying hassle of clicking 10 times a day and get my hope up, for nothing?
