Articles

Some New Account Rules For Participants

Phelim Bradley
|August 31, 2017

Some new rules for participant accounts
We wanted to let you know in advance about some changes we’ll be rolling out soon for participant accounts.

Our platform hosts real scientific research conducted by leading researchers and universities.

These changes will help to improve data quality for researchers and to improve the security of the platform for all participants.

We don’t want to cause any unnecessary inconvenience for participants so we wanted to be clear about these changes and the reasons behind them.

We’d also like to invite you to feedback and welcome other suggestions.

1. Only one member of a household can participate in each study.
It’s often important for researchers to be sure that participants aren’t related and haven’t had any opportunity to share information about a study with other participants. We’ll be enforcing this rule more strictly in the future on Prolific with a number of automatic checks. Please don’t attempt to circumvent this rule, as it may result in rejection from studies or banning, but please do let us know if you think our attempts to restrict this are preventing you taking a study in error when no one else in your household has taken the study.

2. PayPal/Circle accounts must only be linked to a single account
To prevent attempts at fraud we can only let PayPal or Circle accounts be linked to a single participant account, multiple participant accounts can’t pay out to the same PayPal/Circle account.

3. Phone verification will be mandatory
In the future participant accounts will not be able to verify using only Facebook. Before you are able to cash out you will need to verify at least your email address AND phone number. This information will not be used for marketing purposes in any way.