Participant Feedback & Survey Platform
ActiveA reusable Shiny platform for online surveys that give participants immediate, personalised feedback on their own results — its flagship deployment, the Machiavellianism self-test (TDMS), has been completed by more than 40,000 participants who chose to share their data.
This codebase is a generic template for participant-facing survey websites: a respondent completes a set of items and immediately sees a personalised summary of their own results, rather than a bare “thank you for participating” screen. It’s built to be reused across studies — any survey or scale can be dropped in behind the same feedback-delivery scaffolding.
Its flagship deployment is the Machiavellianism self-test, a public implementation of the Two-Dimensional Machiavellianism Scale (TDMS — full documentation, items, and scoring guide are in the lab’s Scales repository). Visitors complete the 12 items and instantly see their scores on both the cynical Views and amoral Tactics subscales. It has become a genuine success story for the approach: more than 40,000 participants have completed it, and chosen to share their data for research.
That scale reflects a broader lesson the lab has taken seriously: giving participants something back — an immediate, personal result, rather than silence — measurably increases engagement, completion, and people’s willingness to share their data. It turns a one-way data collection exercise into something closer to a collaboration between researcher and participant.