A study in 2006 found that a paltry 26 per cent of psychologists were willing to send their data to other researchers upon an email request, and similarly dismal figures come from other fields. You’re also much less likely to be able to access the data the older a study gets.22 This reluctance to share data is a block on the vital processes of self-scrutiny – those Mertonian norms of communalism and organised scepticism again – that lie at the heart of science.
