In a way yes, it says that when you get a group of people together who volunteered and are thus predisposed to be up for a bit of role play they will (surprise surprise) role play. Using a self-selecting group for a study of human behaviour that involved choice is a waste of time, always has been always will be. It's akin to trying to study human interactions by looking at the responses to a thread on here (GC) about breaking up with your wife. People come here largely because of the type of ridiculous baiting and humour that this site provides and thus we are all pre-disposed to continue that. We come here because it gives us the opportunity to do something we already want to do, the site gives us the medium, it does not make us that way. Those people were frustrated actors who would be applying to be on big brother and other trash TV for the attention today, a very small sub-set of society as a whole and ere given absolutely no reason to behave in a moderate fashion, indeed they were rewarded for being extreme when the experiment was allowed to continue past it's own boundaries, making the whole thing a self-fulfilling waste of time and research dollars.
Yes we are pre-disposed to change our fears and worries as we mature, we learn to rationalise. Unless an experience really is stupefyingly traumatic (rape, seeing a death, listening to the Spice Girls live etc.) then the only phobias that stick are either those that make sense (fear of falling from height) or those people seem to be born with.
Interesting Hacker. Basically, you reckon that forced involvement would produce different (less extreme) results? It would be interesting to see if conscripts into the Nazi Wermacht behaved in a more civilised manner to the volunteers... Also, conscripts subjected to bathing in whalespunk probably act in a less extreme fashion as the magic whalish wrigglers have a sedating effect on non-whaley mammals <true>
Forced involvement brings it's own issues obviously, though there is something to be said if you watch kids role playing in school, during a class like drama you will always be able to tell the kids who want to be doing it (volunteers) from those who don't (forced involvement) by the way that they throw themselves into the role or not. Anyway the was the fact that it was an experiment that was the problem in this case. Pretty much everyone involved knew they could do whatever they liked with no real comeback from it, which lead them to be able to express their "show off" tendencies in a more extreme way.
