Actually, they picked a narrowly defined behavioral model (that of convention going) to test hypotheses about a sub culture that obviously exists outside that behaviour model.<p>I&#x27;m not sure what else you expected them to do.<p>While it is far from conclusive (and the paper is <i>very</i> clear about that), the idea of testing out a hypothesis in an artificially defined context is kind of how empirical science is done. As you get more confident in the hypothesis, you make predictions about more and more varied contexts.