The end of the article notes Frank Keil's research. Below is a link to an actually controlled study out of that lab. Naive people are inclined to believe studies with brain images, even if those images are completely unrelated to the study. Clearly editors are not immune to this effect.

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But before we jump on the neuroscience = phrenology train, the motivated reasoning approach by Drew Westen seems more legitimate in this arena (see link below). Instead of just having people watch candidates and see what happens (who knows what the hell those people are thinking about?), you can get everyone to do the same reasoning task involving candidates and their sometimes contradictory statements.

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