Wicherts et al.
Willingness to Share Research Data Is Related to the Strength of the Evidence and the Quality of Reporting of Statistical Results.
PLoS ONE (2011) vol. 6 (11) pp. e26828
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0026828

from here:
http://www.quora.com/What-papers-have-been-most-interesting-in-neuroscience-for-the-past-year-2011

This one seems really important to me. The authors contacts a bunch of researchers who had recently published in one of three psychology manuscripts and asked them for their raw data. They then created two groups: those researchers who did, and those who did not, share their data (note that all researchers they contacted signed a statement upon publication agreeing to share their data upon request). The authors then examined the statistical methods used by the two groups in their manuscripts, and found that those who did not share their data had poorer statistical support for their published findings.

Criticising, disagreeing, or exposing these fiction and lies, penetrating the family’s facade, are considered to be mortal sins. The sinner is immediately subjected to severe and constant emotional harassment, guilt and blame, and to abuse, including physical abuse. This state of things is especially typical of families with sexual abuse.

[Anyone openly criticizing the narcissist is ostracized or harassed until they come back into line. Great pressure is place on them to maintain the lies than create the facade.]

Behaviour modification techniques are liberally used by the narcissist to ensure that the skeletons do stay in the family cupboards. An unexpected by-product of this atmosphere of concealment and falsity is mutiny. The narcissist’s spouse or his adolescent children are likely to exploit the narcissist’s vulnerabilities – his proneness to secrecy, self-delusion, and aversion to the truth – to rebel against him. The first thing to crumble in the narcissist’s family is this shared psychosis – the mass denial and the secretiveness so diligently cultivated by him.

[ergo, the release of the climategate emails]

Stuff inside the square brackets is mine. That was from Dr. Sam Vaknin, The author of Malignant Self Love – Narcissism Revisited. Dr. Vaknin is, by the way, a diagnosed extreme narcissist (all 9 traits, only 5 of which are required for diagnosis with a personality disorder).

Also keep in mind the nature of backups. It could be that several of these emails WERE, in fact, deleted but whoever obtained these files might have had an original full backup and then a series of incremental backups. These incrementals would include any additions/deletions since the full backup was taken. So an email that shows as deleted in a subsequent incremental backup would still exist in a preceding snapshot. One could “restore” someone’s mailbox to look as it did on any particular day that a backup was performed. The only emails that would be missing would be ones that were received AND deleted between backups. And even then, deleting email on the laptop doesn’t mean it gets immediately deleted from the mail server. In some cases it might not get actually deleted from the mail server until some number of days (5 is a common number) after it is deleted on the local user’s system.

So in looking around on documentation of narcissistic behaviors in the workplace, I happened across a video by a psychologist. The environment being described was the family unit. A rather typical sort of situation is where a controlling narcissist attempts to present an outside view of the family (or workplace) unit of perfect harmony and it presents the view that the controlling party wishes to present. Dirty laundry is not aired in public and often the public face of the unit is quite different than the internal functionality. What generally happens at some point is that a mutiny occurs and someone lets all the skeletons out of the closet. When I saw that, it struck me that this might be what has happened in this case. Someone finally got sick and tired of a dysfunctional internal organization, had enough of it, and decided to expose some of the skeletons in the closet. In the meantime, there is a veiled threat to them that there are a lot more potential skeletons where that came from in the password protected email.

Now the problem is that there is a lot more than just Jones’ and Mann’s reputations at stake here. There are a lot of powerful politicians that have come down squarely on one side of this issue and spent a lot of the people’s money on it. This could ruin their career, too. So to see the police suddenly getting excited about this now really might not be much of a surprise as politicians tend to be a little higher on the narcissism scale than the average person, too, and might experience this as a potential threat to their career. If that is the case, they will be just as over the top in attempting to find the source of the information and utterly destroy that source as The Team was in attempting to get a certain someone in New Zealand fired for publishing a certain paper.

People have to remember that we are not dealing with machines here. These are human beings. People have different personality traits and certain occupations and positions within occupations tend to attract people with a higher degree of narcissism. Top scientists in a field, politicians, senior bureaucrat, business CEOs and Chairmen tend to be, on average, more narcissistic than the general population. The behaviors exhibited in many of those emails would tend to confirm that sort of behavior. They don’t take lightly to even the slightest criticism or threat to the image they have created.

I think someone internally simply got sick of dealing with it. Someone who is clearly not a narcissist and from reading the README file, has a great deal of empathy for people who might have been better helped by these billions of dollars that we have blown on attempts to regulate the climate through CO2 policy.

At least one file in “documents” is from an attachment. From memory, the ~12Mb email contains the WG1 Sensitivity PDF when you convert the base64 data. I’ve not checked any others yet, however.

If there was an internal leak, then I have a strong suspicion about who it was – there’s one public face at CRU who certainly should have the required access to all the data, and who has seemed at times to be rather frustrated with the climate scientists. I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader because I don’t think it’s fair to name names in this context without anything even resembling proof.