Ultimately they are asking individuals to make a personality association call. The effect is not huge in the association of “cynical” and of “genius” which its

Ultimately they are asking individuals to make a personality association call. The effect is not huge in the association of “cynical” and of “genius” which itself is not even defined as far as I saw. The association is essentially “People generally believe that people who have a propensity for cynicism are better at math, critical thought, and reading comprehension.” The opposite finding actually seems much stronger, which is that most people strongly believe that non-cynics would be better at important social tasks like talking someone out of suicide. People are under no illusion, as intimated by the title of the study, that cynics are geniuses, but instead they make the probably accurate assessment that someone who “scrutinizes motives behind others’ apparently selfless acts” (as opposed to someone who explicitly doesn’t) would be better at interpreting a complex diagram or ensuring they received correct change.