We’ll never know whether that greentext poster actually was a grad student studying intelligence in San Quentin inmates. Even so, I’m convinced that the conclusion that people are taking as gospel - that people below 90 IQ literally cannot grasp conditional hypotheticals, and this can be diagnosed with a question as simple as, “How would you have felt yesterday evening if you hadn’t eaten breakfast?” - isn’t actually implicated by the results.
Remember Luria’s famous 1930s research with Uzbek peasants? He would ask them something like, “In the far north where there is snow, all bears are white. So-and-so is in the far north. What color are the bears there?” They didn’t respond “white,” the way Westerners taking an IQ test would. He received responses like, “I don’t know. I’ve never been there. You should ask someone who has.” These weren’t simpletons; they were engaged in plenty of cognitively complex tasks in their lives, such as for crops and social obligations, and clearly had to make condition-dependent decisions. Decontextualized syllogistic reasoning was just foreign to them, and it was a matter of epistemic norm to refuse to make claims about things they had no experiential warrant to claim. There’s a difference between pragmatically rejecting the conversational implicature and literally not being able to grasp what is asked.
So when an authority figure you don’t necessarily trust suddenly asks you an odd hypothetical about your own recent concrete experience (“How would you have felt if you hadn’t eaten breakfast?”), the natural pragmatic response is to first establish shared factual ground. Normal people don’t ask you to entertain counterfactuals about your own specific recent meals without some reason. It sounds like a trick, a challenge to one’s honesty about having eaten. “I did eat breakfast” is a reasonable attempt to clarify what’s going on before committing to an imaginative exercise that may have stakes they don’t understand. No research finding is without background assumptions (Duhem-Quine problem), and here, “they literally can’t understand counterfactuals” requires respondents to have been maximally cooperative and fully comfortable with the task demands, with no barrier to answering “hungry” or whatever but a cognitive one, which we cannot assume.
Harken back to Lil Wayne’s deposition:
Interrogator: “How would you describe your image in the media?”
Lil Wayne: “How would I describe my image in the media? …I wouldn’t describe it.”
Interrogator: “Well, how would you describe it if you had to?…