Eight characteristics of low IQ adults

Lack of curiosity

Intelligent people crave information. They want to know how things work. We use that information anticipate the future and make preparations to mitigate possible negative events and exploit positive ones.

People with limited cognitive capacity cannot "crunch" information outside of their swim-lane and continue to function. Trying to do that makes them uncomfortable, and frankly, they cannot envision how knowing more might help them in the future. They just cannot see it.

No desire to improve themselves

They flat-lined because they ran out of brain-cells to assign to learning new tasks. They lack confidence and are deathly afraid of being uncomfortable or looking stupid.

Binary thinking

I see this in stupid people who love to argue. It is beyond their ability to see that the other party can also be (partially) right. They cannot grasp that a synthesis of various viewpoints can be more robust than the first thing that popped into their alleged brain. That intense fear of being perceived as "stupid" also gets in their way.

What they fail to realize is that a person who can concede at least some of the other party's points is much more likable. The person who can concede parts of the argument is also perceived as having more intellectual agility than the dope who clings to his original position(s) like a barnacle clings to a rock. 

Lack of critical thinking

"They assume they are thinking when, in fact, they are merely rearranging their biases like a pensioner rearranging her furniture in a musty room."

Absence of creativity

Creativity is a combination of curiosity and being able to imagine how various components or sequences of events might interact BEFORE building a model.

Combine those cognitive challenges with the fear of failure and you get very little creativity from a low-intelligence person. 

Poor decision making 

We do not choose how fast life happens. It comes at us at whatever speed it wants. 

The low intelligence person has very little ability to take external cues and make reasonable inferences about what might happen next. The speed of life does not need to speed up very much before it is inside of their O-O-D-A loop and they flail away with wildly inappropriate, desperate choices in a desperate attempt to get ahead of the O-O-D-A loop. 

Not able to see beyond this immediate moment

Time is a complex concept. So is "discounting" the probabilities and value or cost of future events. People with low intelligence cannot process potential consequences that are very far into the future. Hence, prisons are full of low intelligence people. 

Poor interpersonal skills

• Lack of self-awareness 
• Lack of humility (Dunning-Kruger effect) 
• Lack of being able to consider consequences
• Severe compartmentalization to break "problems" into bits small enough to process 

How COULD they have great interpersonal skills 

Note: Material borrowed from HERE and modified.