The authors might even agree with that summary, the paper talks more or less about picking people that give the strongest competitive signal. But the point wasn’t to check whether people enjoy competition, the point was to understand more about how the brain works, right? That does seem like useful research - even when we know we behave a certain way, we don’t always know exactly why, and we certainly have a long way to go toward understanding the brain, no?
Personally I think it’s interesting that the “aggressive task” was to push a computer button faster than the opponent. This isn’t “aggressive” in the way most people would imagine when you describe this study as “simulating” a competitive sports program. It’s more of a clinical/scientific concept of aggression and quite dissimilar from actually playing hockey or lacrosse, for example. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor_Aggression_Paradigm) The participants were sitting alone inside a brain scanner playing an extremely basic video game, and being primed with some pure narrative about who their opponents and team mates were. Physical safety was not in question, and there was no interpersonal interaction (all other players were computer simulation). This says a lot about the power of narrative, and how much we operate on things we’re told and don’t have first hand knowledge of.
Also interesting: left-handed people were excluded. The paper doesn’t appear to say why, but I wonder if that was due to the design of the game UI (seems most likely), or if it was done for statistical reasons and/or known behavioral differences of left vs right handed people (this seems less likely, but possible?).