It's likely that there are differences between people who play MMOs and people who do not, and the average position on the autism spectrum might be one of them. But MMO players aren't some tiny specialised group (since millions of people play). So despite the evidence from this website, most geeks are probably close enough to being human to usefully examine what decisions they make.

Is there any reason why a computer savvy person will act so differently than someone who does not use a computer? We're talking about making decisions based on many fundamental human drives such as self-interest, reciprocity, emotions, etc. These go all the way back through evolution.

Anyway, currently economics spends most of its time making sweeping assumptions about the whole of humanity based on the most simple theories about what drives behaviour - so any attempt to study real people is a step in the right direction. The current economic crisis was all about perceptions of risk, short-term interest, misunderstanding, and eventually panic - all experienced and acted on by real people.

What does it matter how big the country is? No one drives across the entirety of Britain to work and back each day, even if you can do it on one tank of gas. And actually, considering that Britain is known for its rain, not many people enjoy cycling here either. At my workplace a good number of people cycle in, and they manage to allot time to take a shower too. Hardly anyone enjoys cycling, and hardly anyone enjoys allotting extra time to take showers - but pollution costs money, whether you pay to clean up after yourself through a carbon tax now, or whether your kids pay it instead in a few decades time when your drought gets even worse. So don't pretend that somehow America is in some kind of unique situation that excuses your laziness.

I am a Facebook developer who runs a popular quiz application (myPersonality). Firstly, I don't understand why this article is picking on quizzes, since any application that you use will have access to your profile. Secondly, Facebook has a couple of good ways of preventing spam from any application. At the start, an application has to specifically ask for an "extended permission" to send you an e-mail. That means another box pops up and the user has to choose to receive e-mails from that application. Even after a user has given permission, applications never actually have access to your e-mail address - all they have is the ability to tell Facebook to send a specific user ID an e-mail on their behalf. This means that if you remove the application, it can no longer e-mail you as Facebook simply denies the request.

Finally, although an application is given access to your profile information (age, gender, etc. but not e-mail address or phone number), the Facebook developer terms state that it is not allowed to store it for longer than 24 hours from your last use. Although this doesn't stop applications from doing it, at least if you find out then you can report the application to Facebook and they will take action.

Another way to look at the problem is to consider what you'd do if there were 99 doors, you picked one, then Monty opened 97 of the rest of the doors (leaving your door, and one other). Obviously in this case you'd switch.

The reason people don't switch may be related to regret theory. If you switch and lose, you'll feel really bad because it will feel like you just lost a car (even though you didn't technically have it to begin with). So people stick with their current choice.