First of all, I don't think trying to gauge something as amorphous and multi-faceted as intelligence is particularly useful. Most people aren't stupid or smart, even people in traditionally difficult or easy fields. People instead license themselves to believe narratives that justify what they believe benefits them. Everyone does this, we aren't immune to it.

Secondly, profits are not distributed to employees. Workers are paid wages based on the customary cost of labor in society, pressed downward by a capitalist's desire to pay workers as little as possible and upwards by worker organizing and necessity of sustaining themselves as workers. The capital advanced in wages usually is paid before the commodities are sold, and after the labor has been performed, meaning the capitalist already had the capital to advance initially.

Shoplifting targets profits, wages aren't impacted, at most and at scale the capitalist takes reduced profits. They can cut jobs, but that hurts profits as well, meaning in the end they must eat the reduced profits or spend more on security.

One's willingness to say, "I don't know" and a general ability to think critically.

Just today, a friend was yammering on about a situation he clearly had limited information on (Canada Post strike). We've aptly described him as confidentially incorrect. Don't be this person.

Usually when they start ranking IQ, especially across broad groups

It's 'case in point', by the way.

Kindness and empathy

Whenever I see or hear someone disregard or debase another person they don't know or understand without even trying to get to know anyone .... I immediately just think they are dumb

Whenever I see or hear someone treat someone else kindly without ever more knowing the other person .... then that person is smart in my books ..... all that can change if the receiver of kindness starts acting like an ass though.

It's the first impression .... if all I see is kindness and empathy at the beginning, I know I'm dealing with a bright person.

The store pulls its own profits in by how many people shop there and part of that profit, is distributing to those who work there.

May I ask where this incredible society is? Sounds like a dream. Here in E*rope they milk every second of your shift. Bonuses barely exist in my experience, usually being vehicles for keeping people on minimum wage and telling them to "work hard". Usually they're rigged so even if you do bite, only the company profits.

The store pulls its own profits in by how many people shop there and part of that profit, is distributing to those who work there.

No, profit by definition is what's left after all the expenses, including wages. Your wages are completely independent of profit and only dependent on the market value of your laborforce. The store could be raking in huge amounts of profits, if the competition among the laborers is fierce, wages will be minimal. Or the other way around, profit margins could already be razor thin, but if the competiton among the laborers is minimal then wages have to be high if they want to attract laborers.

Please read "wage labor & capital" where it's all spelled out if you want to learn more. (It's a short read)

Shoplifting only hurts corporate since it eats into the profits which are independent of the wage.

People who are overly concerned with their level of intelligence, especially when that concern is measured relative to other people's intelligence.

In other words, if you spend a lot of time anxious about whether or not you're the smartest person in the room, then you're not the smartest person in the room.

For me, a general lack of curiosity how things work, from human behavior, to technology, to economy, and everything else. And how you inform yourself.

Of course you can't always be interested in everything and can't know how everything works in detail, no one has time for that. Also you might be wrongly informed in certain instances. But if you're so uninterested that you don't know how almost anything works even in basic ways, or you for example only get your information from "my parents told me" or "I only believe what I have seen" or similar, I'm seriously questioning your general intelligence.

Otherwise, their reaction when their beliefs are challenged. I don't necessarily mean when they're told they're wrong, but when they do something and reality gives them an unfavourable result, idk, like a magnet not sticking to a surface, if they keep trying to stick it on instead of maybe evaluating that the surface (or "magnet") is not magnetic.

I can smell low IQ

That's not something I go out of my way to do. Some people are undereducated, and some if those are harder to educate than others, but there's rarely a reason to write someone off. Most people are willing to learn if you approach them with patience and empathy.

Generally speaking, a lack of autonomy and inquisitiveness.

If it seems like someone is just saying/doing something to fit in with their peers, I think less of their intelligence as a result.

Intelligence is a difficult thing to measure, especially merely by interacting with a person for a little while.

Many of the answers in this thread amount to privileged assumptions that fail to account for the fact that what they describe as signs of lacking intelligence could also be symptoms of exhaustion and alienation inherent to conditions such as living under a capitalist system and/or neurodiversity and/or disability and/or sickness and/or...

For example, when someone works 16 hours a day for 5/6 days a week, they are far less likely to have the energy for using their little free time away from work to ponder deep questions at the same level as someone privileged enough to have a less demanding existence. This is not correlated with their intelligence in any way.

Black white thinking without self reflection.

I was talking to my wife about how is ethical yet moral steal clothes that have the brand logo printed on them, since you are walking wearing them, you are a walking ad, even if you paid for the clothes, you still are a walking ad. You actually paid for being an ad. Then, she asked me if in the process will somebody be affected, like, the manager of a store. That is when we both got to the conclussion that the best is not buying that kind of clothes and go and buy to little business or flea markets for cheap but good clothes (with no brand logos prints over).

I have several flags:

• when people is not able to focus a discussion in the specific thema and tend to divage
• when somebody is reassuring that two things are same/not same but they can explain why they are the same or not
• when they are not able to identify a contradiction in their own arguments, and once you point on that still negates the contradiction
• when don't know how to explain difficult / advance concepts they should master in easy terms / vocabulary

And a few more, but not so strong like these ones

When they use idioms and expressions incorrectly.