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McCabe and Castel (2008) investigated the effects of including a photo of a brain image in a news article on believability. Although there were no differences in how much respondents agreed that the title was a good description, presence of the brain image led to greater endorsement of the quality of the writing and the scientific reasoning, in comparison with the other conditions. That is, respondents generally thought that the article with the brain image was more credible, when compared to articles with a bar graph or no image. It is important to note that the basic reasoning in the article was flawed and consequently should not have “made sense” to any of the respondents. This should be a warning to you, the student, when you are reading about science (even in textbooks!). Unfortunately, it could allow disreputable sources to persuade naïve consumers into having more faith in supposedly factual articles than they should have. Similarly, inserting scientific formulas and trivial graphs can also increase believability (Tal & Wansink, 2014). Perhaps more important, though, is that photos of brain scans and even testimony or textual evidence that make claims based on neuroscience can sway juries toward particular verdicts (McCabe & Castel, 2008; Weisberg, Keil, Goodstein, Rawson, & Gray, 2008). We will return to the nature of source credibility in persuasion in Chapter 7.