Red Brain Blue Brain Crowdsourcing Contest

PLEASE NOTE: THE CONTEST HAS NOW ENDED. All winners have been contacted and their payments processed. We received over 800 submissions across both contests. Thank you to everybody who participated.

Welcome! This is the home page for a crowdsourcing contest in which participants can earn money for submitting high-quality trivia questions in two categories:

A “Knowledge Desert” question

A “False Belief” question

A Knowledge Desert question tests for knowledge that a Republican is likely to have, but that a Democrat is unlikely to have, or vice versa. These trivia questions should be related to differences in cultural habits, media preferences, and lifestyles between Republicans and Democrats, but the questions should NOT be explicitly political. For example, Republicans may be more likely to correctly answer trivia questions about country music, firearms, or NASCAR, while Democrats may be more likely to correctly answer questions about R&B, coffee, and basketball. (You may object that these examples reflect political/cultural stereotypes. Nevertheless, our research so far indicates that these are indeed areas in which political affiliation is correlated with level of knowledge.)

False Belief questions are more political in content. Here, both Republicans and Democrats have strong hunches about the answer, but one side is correct, and the other is incorrect. For example, Democrats (but not Republicans) tend to overestimate the percentage of gun deaths that involve assault-style rifles, while Republicans (but not Democrats) tend overestimate the proportion of illegal immigrants who commit violent crimes.

We are running two separate crowdsourcing contests, one seeking high-quality “Knowledge Desert” questions and one seeking high-quality “False Belief” questions. The questions should be in multiple choice format, with one correct answer and three incorrect answers. All high-quality question submissions will receive a $100 prize. Please see the “Judging” section of each contest page for information about what counts as a “high-quality” question. We may give additional monetary bonuses for questions that we consider especially clever or insightful.

The contest website for “Knowledge Desert” questions, is located here.

The contest website for “False Belief” questions, is located here.