Case Study: a leading Ivy League university builds the most extensive public digital twin dataset with Prolific

a leading Ivy League university achieves 82% retention across 4 waves with Prolific

A research team at a leading Ivy League university needed to recruit over 2,000 US participants for a multi-wave study to test the accuracy of AI-generated demographic 'digital twins'. The challenge was to maintain high participant engagement across four separate waves and 19 follow-up studies to create a reliable benchmark, a task traditional panel providers could not meet. They turned to Prolific to find a solution.

Using the Prolific platform, the team achieved an exceptional 82% retention rate, retaining 2,058 participants through all four waves. This allowed them to collect over 180,000 responses and create the most extensive public dataset for digital twin research. The results showed digital twins achieved approximately 75% accuracy overall but exhibited significant biases, leading to the conclusion that they are not yet ready to replace real human participants for most research applications.