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[–] 0 pt

Below average people can read a story with a moderate level of recursion. The levels are introduced gradually. In your example, if Snape is a character that the reader is familiar with, the reader should be able to imagine Snape talking about a story. OP's example involves the idiot having to create a story that suddenly gets recursive in a complicated way.

Overall, OP's findings are correct, but biased towards the population that he was studying (black criminals). White non-criminals of similarly low intelligence would definitely perform better on his first subject (conditional hypotheticals) and his fourth (empathy).

[–] 0 pt

Empathy's a special case. The others just require a high enough IQ. Empathy can only develop in young children (circa age 5 or younger) and requires a complex collection of multiple areas of the brain. After that it cant be developed no matter how high someone's IQ. That's where sociopaths and psychopaths come from - people who never developed empathy by the age cutoff.

Some very high IQ sociopaths and psychopaths can superficially imitate empathy as an abstract concept, but even then they still cant develop it. At best it's like an English speaking actor trying to feign a Chinese accent. Even if they learned fluent Mandarin at the age of 50, their Chinese accent will be an abstract imitation and never stand up to more than cursory scrutiny.

This is a huge issue in the black community where pervasive child abuse and single parenting kneecaps the ability of children to develop empathy. Low IQ is one challenge. e.g. I have a friend whose IQ is 80 at best. He's a line cook who will perpetually struggle to pay bills on time and will never rise out of poverty due to a sheer lack of intelligence. However, he did develop empathy as a child so he's not dangerous to anyone. Just dumb as a box of rocks.

Lack of empathy combined with low IQ is a major problem because that's where you get common criminals who mug you in an alleyway or decide the knockout game is hilarious. When you combine low IQ, not teaching children empathy, and beating the hell out of children, you pretty much guarantee yourself an incurable lifelong felon.