There are a couple caveats on the study:

1. It was written to evaluate if women are better 'mind readers' than men, because of this there will be a finding one way or the other.

2. The 'game' used was not WoW PvP, in fact it was a very simple series.

3. In general all participants had marked excitation in the medial frontal gyrus, so all participants that thought they were playing against a human reacted in approximately the same way. The main difference if one of degree.

4. The sample size was somewhat small, well over 2 standard deviations.

5. Possibly most important is that the subjects' brains were not not benchmarked... meaning none of them were asked to perform other tasks to evaluate their own inherent biases, which could have easily polluted the study. The IQs and general executive functions were checked, but not profiled. For such a targeted study on such a small group, I would have expected much more careful parameterization.


Bottom line.. this study almost kind of says something useful, but not quite.