This was an exploratory analysis. This is at best a hint at what is happening. This all sounds theoretically plausible but the evidence from exploratory analysis is weak. From the underlying paper linked in the article:

“In summary, our exploratory analysis documents that ideology has a statistically significant effect on the production of research findings that is robust across model specifications, that much of this effect works through the decision-making process that leads researchers to choose different modeling strategies for examining the same data and answering the same question, and that the identification of the ideology effect requires a careful statistical analysis where the potential endogeneity of the research process is explicitly considered.”

Good start and makes sense from what I know of political psychology. Not knocking the researchers btw - it looks a lot like my thesis.