Bit surprised that empathy makes no difference in this. People with high empathy tend to be good at reading others in general so would have thought that at least partially translates here
high empathy means you feel what you think the other person is feeling,
Highly empathetic people have horrible theory of mind issues a lot of the time.
I guess you're surprised that empathy is not more important than intelligence? My thought there is that perceptiveness is a large part of intelligence, and if you lack that, you won't recognize the signs of intelligence no matter how empathetic you are.
In other words, smarter people are better able to gauge people's emotions as well.
Pseudoscience.