A Common Model Is Essential for a Cumulative Science of Wisdom

The Wise Mind Balances the Abstract and the Concrete

We explored how individuals' mental representations of complex and uncertain situations impact their ability to reason wisely. To this end, we introduce situated methods to capture abstract and concrete mental representations and the switching between them when reflecting on social challenges. Using these methods, we evaluated the alignment of abstractness and concreteness with four integral facets of wisdom: intellectual humility, open-mindedness, perspective-taking, and compromise-seeking. Data from North American and UK participants (N = 1,151) revealed that both abstract and concrete construals significantly contribute to wise reasoning, even when controlling for a host of relevant covariates and potential response bias. Natural language processing of unstructured texts among high (top 25%) and low (bottom 25%) wisdom participants corroborated these results: semantic networks of the high wisdom group reveal greater use of both abstract and concrete themes compared to the low wisdom group. Finally, employing a repeated strategy-choice method as an additional measure, our findings demonstrated that individuals who showed a greater balance and switching between these construal types exhibited higher wisdom. Our findings advance understanding of individual differences in mental representations and how construals shape reasoning across contexts in everyday life.

Deconstructing wisdom through a cultural lens: Folk understandings of wisdom and its ontology in the Philippines and Sri Lanka

In many contemporary societies, misinformation, epistemic arrogance, and intergroup conflict pose serious threats to social cohesion and well-being. Wisdom may offer a potential antidote to these problems, with a recently identified Common Wisdom Model (CWM) suggesting that wisdom involves epistemic virtues such as intellectual humility, openness to change, and perspective-taking. However, it is unclear whether these virtues are central for folk concepts of wisdom in non-Western contexts. We explored this question by conducting focus group discussions with 174 participants from the Philippines and Sri Lanka, two countries facing socio-political and economic challenges. We found that epistemic themes were common in both countries, but more so when participants were asked to define wisdom in general terms rather than to describe how it is acquired or expressed in daily lives. Moreover, epistemic themes were more prevalent among Filipino than Sri Lankan participants, especially when the questions posed were abstract rather than concrete. We discuss how these findings relate to the CWM and the socio-cultural contexts of the two countries, and suggest that a question format should be considered in cross-cultural research on wisdom.

The Wisdom Researchers and the Elephant: An Integrative Model of Wise Behavior

This article proposes an integrative model of wise behavior in real life. While current research findings depend considerably on how wisdom is conceptualized and measured, there are strong conceptual commonalities across psychological wisdom models. The proposed model integrates the components of several existing models into a dynamic framework explaining wise behavior. The article first specifies which real-life situations require wisdom and discusses characteristics of wise behavior. The core proposition of the model is that in challenging real-life situations, noncognitive wisdom components (an exploratory orientation, concern for others, and emotion regulation) moderate the effect of cognitive components (knowledge, metacognitive capacities, and self-reflection) on wise behavior. The model can explain the situation specificity of wisdom and the commonalities and differences between personal and general wisdom. Empirically, it accounts for the considerable variation in correlations among wisdom measures and between wisdom measures and other variables. The model has implications for the design of wisdom-fostering interventions and new wisdom measures.

Gender Effect on Views of Wisdom and Wisdom Levels

Gender differences in wisdom are an important theme in mythology, philosophy, psychology, and daily life. Based on the existing psychological research, consensus and dispute exist between the two genders on the views of wisdom and in the levels of wisdom. In terms of the views of wisdom, the way men and women view wisdom is highly similar, and from the perspectives of both ordinary people and professional researchers of wisdom psychology, wise men and women are extremely similar. Regarding wisdom level, research has revealed that, although significant gender effects exist in the level of overall wisdom, reflective and affective dimension, and interpersonal conflict coping styles, the effect sizes were small, which indicated that these gender differences were not obvious. It would be desirable for future research to combine multiple wisdom measurements, strengthen research on the psychological gender effect of wisdom, and focus on the moderating role of age on the relationship between wisdom and gender.

Study of loneliness and wisdom in 482 middle-aged and oldest-old adults: a comparison between people in Cilento, Italy and San Diego, USA

OBJECTIVES

There has been growing research interest in loneliness and wisdom in recent decades, but no cross-cultural comparisons of these constructs using standardized rating measures in older adults, especially the oldest-old. This was a cross-sectional study of loneliness and wisdom comparing middle-aged and oldest-old adults in Cilento, Italy and San Diego, United States.

METHOD

We examined loneliness and wisdom, using the UCLA Loneliness Scale Version 3 (UCLA-3) and San Diego Wisdom Scale (SD-WISE), respectively, in four subject groups: adults aged 50-65 and those ≥90 years from Cilento, Italy (N = 212 and 47, respectively) and San Diego, California, USA (N = 138 and 85, respectively).

RESULTS

After controlling for education, there were no significant group differences in levels of loneliness, while on SD-WISE the Cilento ≥90 group had lower scores compared to the other three groups. There was a strong inverse correlation between loneliness and wisdom in each of the four subject groups. Loneliness was negatively associated while wisdom was positively associated with general health, sleep quality, and happiness in most groups, with varying levels of significance.

CONCLUSION

These results largely support cross-cultural validity of the constructs of loneliness and wisdom, and extend previous findings of strong inverse correlations between these two entities. Loneliness has become a growing public health problem, and the results of our study suggest that wisdom could be a protective factor against loneliness, although alternative explanations are also possible. Research on interventions to reduce loneliness by enhancing wisdom in older adults is needed.

What do people mean when they talk about mindfulness?

Psychological theories cast mindfulness as a form of awareness in which accepting the presence of stressful thoughts and feelings facilitates engaged exploration and identification of adaptive responses. Critics of mindfulness' popularization suggest that lay people misconstrue acceptance as a passive endorsement of experience, undermining engaged problem-solving. To evaluate this criticism, we traced the contemporary semantic meaning of mindfulness in three of the most extensive linguistic corpora of English language and found that general public's depictions of mindfulness highlight engagement-related processes. We further analyzed the nomological network of mindfulness. While mindfulness theories suggest a general convergence of facets representing awareness and acceptance, in a meta-analysis (k = 145; N = 41,966) of the Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire only expert- and clinical samples reported convergence, whereas lay people showed absent or even antagonistic associations. Further, contrary to the synergistic model of awareness and acceptance contributing to greater engagement, empirical probes of two lay samples (N_total = 406) show that acceptance is either unrelated or inversely related to markers of engagement. To overcome resulting conceptual and methodological challenges, we highlight the need for a contextualized mindfulness framework whereby acceptance enables the process of engaging with life's challenges rather than avoiding them.

Phronesis (Practical Wisdom) as a Type of Contextual Integrative Thinking

Coinciding with the recent psychological attention paid to the broad topic of wisdom, interest in the intellectual virtue of phronesis or practical wisdom has been burgeoning within pockets of psychology, philosophy, professional ethics, and education. However, these discourses are undercut by frequently unrecognized tensions, lacunae, ambivalences, misapplications, and paradoxes. While a recent attempt at conceptualizing the phronesis construct for the purpose of psychological measurement offers promise, little is known about how phronesis develops psychologically, what motivates it, or how it can be cultivated. Many psychologists aspire to make sense of wise thinking without the contextual, affective, and holistic/integrative resources of phronesis. This article explores some such attempts, in particular, a new “common model” of wisdom. We argue for the incremental value of the phronesis construct beyond available wisdom accounts because phronesis explains how mature decision-making is motivated and shaped by substantive moral aspirations and cognitively guided moral emotions. We go on to argue that, in the context of bridging the gap between moral knowledge and action, phronesis carries more motivational potency than wisdom in the “common model.” The phronesis construct, thus, embodies some unique features that psychologists studying wise decision-making ignore at their peril.