“Cigarette smokers have lower IQs than non-smokers, and the more a person smokes, the lower their IQ,”
Or, maybe, the lower the IQ, the more they smoked?
When causality **might** be bi-directional, it is a classic error in formal logic to conclude, absent other evidence, that one or the other direction of causality is correct. If anyone cares, this fallacy is an instance of what is known technically as 'violation of disjunction'.
Then, of course, this article is also subject to the well-known objection that 'correlation is not causality', aka post hoc ergo propter hoc.
In short, I think people would be well-advised to simply take the correlation data at face value, and avoid drawing these sorts of conclusions. Assuming of course (which might be dangerous, these days) that the study was conducted scrupulously by individuals without a sociopolitical agenda.