Your suspicion is confirmed. Most participants are within or closely connected to MIT. They seem to use rigorous math for hypothesis testing, but if the personality and other characteristics of the participants are not representative, their results may not apply to the general public.
I wonder why they did not cast their net wider, e.g. advertise in the Boston Globe, and statistically account for differing backgrounds, which is a pretty standard methodology in social science research.
> The participants (14 men and 10 women) had an average age of 27 ± 7 years (minimum and maximum ages were 20 and
42) and were recruited via email and fliers distributed around a university campus.
I wonder why they did not cast their net wider, e.g. advertise in the Boston Globe, and statistically account for differing backgrounds, which is a pretty standard methodology in social science research.
From the actual paper: http://interactive.mit.edu/sites/default/files/documents/Gom...
> The participants (14 men and 10 women) had an average age of 27 ± 7 years (minimum and maximum ages were 20 and 42) and were recruited via email and fliers distributed around a university campus.