To understand what a person’s “utility function” for votes is, we conducted an Amazon Mechanical Turk experiment that asked users how they would perceive receiving a given number of up- and down-votes.

I don't even... Amazon Turk? What are the odds of an experiment like that among one self-selected group to yield any insight on a completely different self-selected group?

Many questions they asked are pretty interesting, though. Not sure how much one can trust their answers.