Hmph. We could just cut to the chase and say that stupid people don't like science fiction, except that no one in this absurd little study was actually reading science fiction. What they were reading were just ordinary stories with a few space-tech words patched in.

It may well be that readers who don't grok science mentally detach from a story if they think it'll have science in it, because science makes them feel stupid. Remember what Stephen Hawking wrote in A Brief History of Time; that he'd been warned that the more equations, the fewer readers, and so e=MC² was the only equation in the book. It was nice to have that promise right up front, because I don't grok higher math, and I check out if there's too much of it on a page.

I suppose one might find the same effect among readers who don't grok French, if one used (as some writers do) a number of French words and expressions. Even if one does grok French, that's a really annoying affectation.

LOL, I wonder how many readers would look askance at this comment because it uses the word grok.