I have the opposite feeling, because I implemented authorship on my blog and for that authorship picture to happen the URLs have to have high ranking, otherwise they won't get shown. That's why I have come to associate authorship with popularity.
On my blog only the 6 most popular articles have authorship info in the search results, generating about 300 visits from organic search per day. And my blog is a highly technical blog that targets developers and I haven't seen any drops in traffic due to authorship.
Also, people here make the assumption that regular folks behave like us. They don't.
According to wikipedia: "Organic search results are listings on search engine results pages that appear because of their relevance to the search terms, as opposed to their being advertisements".
To me there's not much organic left in google results, due to the filter bubble, tracking and lack of transparency on the ranking algorithm. I wouldn't be surprised to learn google boost ranking of results linked to google + accounts, which makes it self-promotion of their services and unnatural ranking.
Anyways I stay away from any result which doesn't look like a result I'm used to, so no click for those google sponsored results.
On my blog only the 6 most popular articles have authorship info in the search results, generating about 300 visits from organic search per day. And my blog is a highly technical blog that targets developers and I haven't seen any drops in traffic due to authorship.
Also, people here make the assumption that regular folks behave like us. They don't.