The Science of Wisdom

There is no “best” way to access wisdom; people and their circumstances differ. Plus, research on accessing wisdom is still in its infancy. This caveat aside, one strategy that has been remarkably consistent in its effects of accessing wisdom and helping to work through depression is via self-distancing. Self-distancing (https://psyarxiv.com/a5fgu/) refers to a mental strategy of taking a step back and considering oneself through a lens of a “fly on the wall.” How to enact it? Consider reflecting on your challenges and troubling experiences by talking to yourself in a third-person voice. Instead of saying, “what did I do? How did I end up here?” say or write, “what did he/she do? How did Igor [replace with your name] end up here.”

When people say that wisdom comes with age, they often use “wisdom” to mean life experience. It’s a truism – the longer you live, the more experiences you have (all other things being equal). However, is what we mean by wisdom when we describe a person showing expert judgment in complex life matters? Here, your experience may help, or it may hurt. And you also must realize which past experience helps to successfully navigate a momentary challenge. Not an easy task, and there are reasons to believe older adults may have a slight disadvantage here due to reduced ability to match the context of past experience with the present moment. After all, experiences are culturally grounded, and cultures change. Turning to empirical evidence, despite the common adage that “with age comes wisdom,” there is little empirical support to this claim in a consistent fashion. My colleagues and I have recently examined this question in a comprehensive overview of studies in a paper (https://psyarxiv.com/w9ygc/) published in 2020 in Psychological Inquiry. In short, the evidence is inconclusive.

In a recently established common framework (https://psyarxiv.com/w9ygc/) to get a shared understanding among most wisdom scientists, wisdom scholars focus on two pillars. First, any wisdom-related decisions are morally grounded in a sense that the situations that call for wisdom require a certain moral aspiration by which we refer to prosocial orientation toward shared humanity, avoidance of excessive self-interest, but also the pursuit of truth.

Second, central to a common wisdom model are perspectival meta-cognitive abilities such as recognition of limits of knowledge, awareness of context and change, perspective-taking, and consideration of how to balance or integrate different viewpoints/interests. The meta-cognitive features are perspectival because they allow one to take a broader perspective on one’s decisions than one habitually would entertain. They share a family resemblance in a sense that they allow to broaden one’s cognitive and emotional horizon. Because perspectival meta-cognition is a mouthful, in my own research, I refer to them as features of “wise reasoning (see attached PDF).”

As you can see, the common wisdom model does not allow for clear types: most people likely have a capacity to exercise some form of moral aspirations or wise reasoning. Instead of types, one can talk about contexts under which these features are more likely to show up (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/307588216_Wisdom_in_Context). Each person may have a unique profile of circumstances that may trigger exercising such wisdom and other contexts that may dampen it. Of course, other definitions of wisdom exist, including using the term “wisdom” to refer to past life lessons, some critical historical decisions by remarkable leaders, or some spiritual enlightenment. In my opinion, these definitions are either not amendable to scientific pursuit via empirical science or rely on post-hoc rationalization (https://psyarxiv.com/qkm6v) (which historical figure to ascribe wisdom versus foolishness lies in the eye of the beholder).

Possibly. Aristotle, Confucius, and many other philosophers believed wisdom can be learned via cultivation of certain habits. But empirical research on this topic is still in its infancy (https://psyarxiv.com/qkm6v). Many scholars don’t believe wisdom can be learned didactically, and that it requires an experiential component. If such experiential components can be integrated in school curricula, including exercises for handling complex, ill-defined challenges with multiple interests at stake, or situations without clear right or wrong answers, we may be able to instill wisdom in the school context. Notably, school curricula right now mostly shy away from such discursive approaches to teaching, where there are no clear right or wrong answers.

This is because when advising others people are often habitually taking a third-person vantage point into account, reaping benefits of this mental strategy of self-distancing (https://psyarxiv.com/a5fgu/). See my answer to the first question above, where I discuss it at greater length.

That’s a 1-million-dollar question! It is possible that self-distancing strategy can help here, as my research group (https://psyarxiv.com/jy5em/), as well as others, have shown in the last couple of years. But clearly, more work is needed to understand the role of emotional contexts.

It depends on how you define each! If intelligence is defined via mainstream approaches aiming to assess IQ, the chief difference would concern the function. IQ is well suited to solve well-defined (optimization) problems, in which there are right and wrong answers and all interests are known. Wisdom is better suited to navigate ill-defined problems (https://www.mdpi.com/2079-3200/6/2/22) not amendable to rational-analytic or algorithmic solutions.

Try to take the bigger picture into account, including how the big issues of the moment may be minor hassles of tomorrow. Try to figure out the “priority of the particular,” as famous philosopher Martha Nussbaum called it: different challenges of daily life may benefit from different strategies; there is no basic template that can apply in all situations.

Gut feelings can be part of wisdom among experts who have spent a long time working on specific issues. For these issues, over time they would not need to react with a long period of deliberation and can rely on “gut feeling’ – they have internalized the strategies by developing the habits. But for most of us, who are not experts in specific challenges, it may not be advisable to solely rely on gut feelings. They may help, but they can also hurt. Ultimately, as I have described in this paper on complex emotions, it is not about whether you rely on gut feelings but rather how complex your gut feelings are. If your affective experiences (aka gut feelings) are rich and diverse, they would often be associated with wise reasoning (https://psyarxiv.com/jy5em/), allowing you to pay more attention to the broader context. But the mere presence of gut feelings may not be sufficient unless you are an “expert” dealing with a particular challenge you have faced in the past.

You can find more on the project website: www.WorldafterCovid.info, as well as more nuanced visualizations on my homepage (https://igorgrossmann.com/projects/world-after-covid/). You can also listen to reflections about the World after COVID project on the free OnWisdomPostcast.com (https://onwisdompodcast.fireside.fm/). Finally, the scientific report summarizing additional insights is in print in American Psychologist, with a preprint copy (https://psyarxiv.com/yma8f/) available on PsyArXiv.