To explain the comment about “putting words in my mouth”: my comment relating the activities of the CRU to the subject of Konkvistador’s post was to the effect that the CRU is unwilling to share data, even when it is legally obliged to do so; there is debate regarding whether this is acceptable scientific practice; and that here we have concrete evidence that failure to share data is related to bad science; therefore, in light of this finding everyone (AGW-credulist or skeptic) should take a dimmer view of the CRU’s opacity.

From the credulist point of view, it might appear that the CRU has problems with quality control, which they are trying to shield from view – perhaps their work on paleoclimatology should be handed over to the Met office, for example. This is compatible with the idea that they are right about AGW in general but CRUTEM is a mess, or even that the problems with CRUTEM are not too severe but they should be doing better.

From the skeptic (or fence-sitting) view, this is more evidence that the CRU are pseudo-scientists in general. The fact that NASA agree in general with the CRU on AGW, and NASA happen to share data, doesn’t exonerate the CRU; there are plenty of ways to lie and mislead that do not involve failing to share data, so the fact that NASA is more transparent is no guarantee that their and the University of East Anglia’s conclusions on AGW are sound in general.

Your comment implied that I had claimed that the CRU’s conclusions were necessarily wrong, because they don’t share their data; and that NASA’s conclusions in general are necessarily right, because they do share data.

This is a non-sequitur on both counts. What makes this objectionable is that you supplied no reasoning beyond a mere statement, as though these conclusions followed trivially from what I had said. This is a rhetorical technique designed to score points, rather than something I would expect from a valuable debating partner – a suitable description of this style of commenting is “putting words into someone’s mouth”, and I think that the best way of dealing with it is to refer to it directly, so as to dissociate oneself from the non-sequitur.

By whom? is the important question

By the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee, the Independent Climate Change Review, the International Science Assessment Panel, Pennsylvania State University, the United States Environmental Protection Agency, and the United States Department of Commerce, as stated in the article I already linked to.

If this is the case, I wonder why legitimate scientists never caught on to that idea in the past – defeat the skeptics by hiding data and the details of scientific practices from them. This seems 180 degrees from reality.

Science is rarely so closely connected to social policy; whether public officials accept that evolution is true mainly determines whether kids get taught about evolution. Whether public officials accept anthropogenic climate change determines whether we attempt to do anything about it.

I doubt that legitimate scientists in any field have ever systematically refused transparency in order to protect their favored theories, and it's certainly not the case with climate change research, but it's not as if there's been a historical shortage of scientists who don't play their cards straight. I'm simply saying that this is a case where there's a particularly obvious motive.

Point taken; that particular criticism of stereotype threat is absent from the papers available on his site.

Blip's comment may shed light on reasons why the paper is yet unpublished, although YMMV.

And the abstract, though critical of stereotype threat research, doesn't actually claim that stereotype threat does not exist.

I'll quote the abstract to clarify matters:

Numerous laboratory experiments have been conducted to show that African Americans’ cognitive test performance suffers under stereotype threat, i.e., the fear of confirming negative stereotypes concerning one’s group. A meta-analysis of 55 published and unpublished studies of this effect shows clear signs of publication bias. The effect varies widely across studies, and is generally small. Although elite university undergraduates may underperform on cognitive tests due to stereotype threat, this effect does not generalize to non-adapted standardized tests, high-stakes settings, and less academically gifted test-takers. Stereotype threat cannot explain the difference in mean cognitive test performance between African Americans and European Americans.

Edit: in the absence of the most helpful Wicherts paper, here is another paper, referred to in a longer Steve Sailer article, discussing the misinterpretation of findings in stereotype threat (particularly in pop science and the media, e.g. Malcolm Gladwell).

Quote:

C. M. Steele and J. Aronson (1995) showed that making race salient when taking a difficult test affected the performance of high-ability African American students, a phenomenon they termed stereotype threat. The authors document that this research is widely misinterpreted in both popular and scholarly publications as showing that eliminating stereotype threat eliminates the African American–White difference in test performance. In fact, scores were statistically adjusted for differences in students’ prior SAT performance, and thus, Steele and Aronson’s findings actually showed that absent stereotype threat, the two groups differ to the degree that would be expected based on differences in prior SAT scores. The authors caution against interpreting the Steele and Aronson experiment as evidence that stereotype threat is the primary cause of African American–White differences in test performance.

The reference to "high-stakes settings" in the Wicherts abstract concerns the obvious problem that stereotype threat is rarely if ever tested in real settings (e.g. college admissions) because this would be unethical. But if the test is meaningless and the subject is smart enough to figure out what the experimenter is hoping to prove, the potential source of bias is obvious.