Tom Coates (Everything in Moderation) pointed to a psychological study done in 1959. The bottom line of the study is that people who go through more "harsh" group initiation process are more likely to have a positive perception of the group.
Aronson, E. & Mills, J. (1959). The effect of severity of initiation on liking for a group. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 59, 177-181
As Tom points out, this could have implications in the online community world. In this case, a community builder may consider the effect of their registration process on the perceptions of members. From the conclusion reached in the study, you'd think that an easy way to increase member satisfaction would be to make the registration process more "harsh".
I could see how members would feel more vested in the process and may, therefore, feel more connected to the group. I'd call this the fraternity hazing effect.
My first thought is how hard it would be to design a registration process that balances the harshness of the process with good 'ole usability. I would think that members would endure a more "harsh" process as long as the process was usable.
However, harshness through complex/confusing navigation could easily backfire. A registration process that seeks to be harsh, but does so through navigation or unneeded complexity may have the opposite effect.
Regardless, I think the study (from what I know of it anyway) does provide an interesting way to look at the process of becoming a community member.
Here is the abstract:
Participants were undergraduate women who volunteered to participate in a study on the psychology of sex. The study testing their hypotheses was an experiment. The conceptual independent variable was the degree of severity of initiation into a group discussion. Participants were either in a severe initiation condition where they had to read 12 obscene words to an experimenter, a mild initiation condition where they read five words related to sex but were not obscene, or a control condition where no initiation was required.
After undergoing either the severe, mild, or no initiation, participants listened to a discussion by the group that they anticipated that they would be joining. After listening to the group the dependent variable of liking for the group was assessed. The experimental dependent variable was their rating of the discussion group and their rating of the participants in the group on 14 different evaluative scales (e.g., dull-interesting, intelligent-unintelligent, etc.) on scales ranging from 0 to 15.
The results for the study indicated a general pattern such that people in the severe condition liked the group and participants more than those in either the mild initiation and no initiation condition.