3 tools for behavioural research: Recommended by Prolific 2024

If you're a behavioural researcher, Prolific is here to help you connect with the participants you need to do your best research. Our platform has become a go-to resource for academics, businesses, and organizations worldwide, offering access to a diverse, high-quality participant pool that can significantly enhance the scope and validity of your studies.

But did you know our platform also integrates with tools that can make your research even more efficient and effective? In the fast-evolving landscape of behavioral science, having the right tools at your disposal can be the difference between good research and groundbreaking discoveries. These integrations are designed to streamline your workflow, from experiment design to data collection and analysis.

By leveraging these integrated tools, you can:

1. Save time on participant recruitment and management
2. Design more sophisticated experiments with ease
3. Ensure higher data quality and consistency across studies
4. Collaborate more effectively with colleagues and peers
5. Scale your research to reach broader, more diverse participant groups

Here are three of our top picks, and how you can use them to make a real difference to your studies. Each of these tools brings unique capabilities to the table, complementing Prolific's strengths and helping you push the boundaries of behavioral research. Whether you're conducting complex psychological experiments, gathering large-scale survey data, or running longitudinal studies, these integrations can help you achieve your research goals more efficiently and effectively.

Gorilla

With Gorilla, running studies on complex behaviour isn’t complicated.

Its Experiment Builder helps you take your research out of the lab and into the real world. It provides powerful, simple-to-use, cloud-based tools for:

• Experimental psychology
• Developmental psychology
• Health psychology
• Consumer psychology
• AI datasets
• UX and UI research
• Behavioural science

So, whatever your field, you can quickly and easily create and deploy behavioural experiments online.

Gorilla can help with your entire research process. You can use it to run prototypes and pilots when you first spark an idea, helping you with experiments and longitudinal studies, and empowering you to make an impact with interventions and roll-outs.

Our favourite features include its:

• Intuitive interface: Gorilla is super easy to use. You don’t even need development skills – though there are options to add custom code, if you can and want to.
• High level of accuracy: By using modern browser features – like high-resolution timers for correct reaction times – Gorilla enables you to measure participants’ inputs to the millisecond.
• Free-to-build model: With Gorilla, you can build your surveys for free, only paying for data collection.

Whether you’re looking to run a questionnaire, a multi-day training study, or a randomised controlled trial, Gorilla is a great choice.

Find out how to integrate Prolific with Gorilla in our integration guide.

Pavlovia

Meanwhile, Pavlovia is a place for the behavioural research community to run, share, and explore each other’s experiments online. It hosts nearly 100,000 of these, built by over 35,000 designers.

On the platform, you can:

• Run new public and private experiments
• Check out the underlying code behind these
• Copy and modify existing experiments
• Manage your online participants and experiment results
• Participate in forum discussions with likeminded scientists

Pavlovia uses GitLab to run its experiments, which means you can:

• Keep on top of changes over time and manage experiment versions
• Track any issues with experiments, and their solutions
• Work collaboratively, merging individual contributions
• Document your studies using wiki pages

Plus, you can use it to create online questionnaires, which you can use alone or with your experiments.

Find out how to integrate Prolific with Pavlovia in our integration guide.

Inquisit

Finally, Inquisit by Millisecond is a platform that offers licensing options for in-person (local) and online (remote) behavioural testing, assessments, and integrations to researchers across:

• All types of psychology, from cognitive to forensic
• Clinical trials and psychopharmacology
• Cognitive neuroscience, neuroimaging and brain mapping
• Behavioural economics and decision making
• Market research, consumer behaviour and communications
• Human factors and usability
• HR and employment screening

Inquisit’s products include:

• Inquisit Lab: A stand-alone app for in-person testing, local data collection and test programming.
• Inquisit Web: A cloud service for online testing on computers and mobile devices.
• Inquisit Edu: A cloud service for student research in undergrad psychology classes.

We particularly love Inquisit’s free test library. This features 751 tests from almost all psychology domains.

You can fully customise them, access them in multiple languages and across all operating systems, and they’re ready for you to run on- or offline.

The platform also boasts fast and affordable programming services, so you can create custom or novel tasks. (Another one for the developers out there.)

Find out how to integrate Prolific with Inquisit in our integration guide.

Final thoughts

Each tool integrates with Prolific, allowing researchers to leverage Prolific's participant pool alongside these specialized research platforms. Researchers can refer to specific integration guides for each tool on Prolific's website.

Whichever of these sounds useful to you and your use case, enjoy the benefits of these integrations – and our high-quality participant pool – by signing up with Prolific today.

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