"Find your genius" may be intimidating but it may also be more honest and accurate. It certainly appears that some people's brains are full of passionate intellectual curiosity and most people's aren't.
It seems entirely possible that if you haven't developed a passion around any topic by the time you're an adult, you probably aren't the kind of person that does.
Maybe the goal for people that don't have passionate intellects should be to focus on the intellectual strengths they do have.
That was my problem with the OP's research. It presumed that techies differed from fuzzies because only techies like tech. Bzzzt. In fact, many techies have very broad interests, including fuzzy fare and math and science. Stratifying your population using a flawed premise is a bad start toward producing results that usefully describe more than a niche group or two.
Then to presume that an article on black holes which is complex and challenging would cause those with an interest in them to lose interest... That conclusion is just silly. The right conclusion is that these people now have less interest in reading complex and challenging articles... perhaps on any topic.
In all, I don't hold much hope that the results of this research will replicate well.
It seems entirely possible that if you haven't developed a passion around any topic by the time you're an adult, you probably aren't the kind of person that does.
Maybe the goal for people that don't have passionate intellects should be to focus on the intellectual strengths they do have.