In November 2007, seven neuroscientists and political consultants published an opinion‐editorial (op‐ed) article in the New York Times in which they made predictions about how swing voters would react to the candidates in the Democratic and Republican Primaries for the US Presidency (Iacoboni et al , 2007). The intriguing aspect of their predictions was that the authors had used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure the response of their test subjects’ brains to videos and photographs of Hillary Clinton, Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani and the other candidates. On the basis of which areas of the brain showed increased or decreased activity, the scientists determined how each person had reacted and deduced the acceptability of the Primary candidates to undecided voters in general. But, perhaps most intriguingly, none of this research had been—or has been—published in a peer‐reviewed journal. > …neuroscience has become ‘big science’, in so far as it is now of interest to the public Three days later, the New York Times published a letter from 17 neuroscientists from the USA and Europe who were critical of both the conclusions of Marco Iacoboni, a neuroscientist at the University of California Los Angeles, USA, and his co‐authors, and the way in which the experiment was published (Aron et al , 2007). “As cognitive neuroscientists, we are very excited about the potential use of brain imaging technology to better understand the psychology of political decisions. But we are distressed by the publication of research in the press that has not undergone peer review, and that uses flawed reasoning to draw unfounded conclusions about topics as important as the presidential election,” the authors wrote. It also turned out that the predictions in the op‐ed piece were not that good: “Barack Obama and John McCain have work to do,” Iacoboni and the other authors had …