Our Personal Values Influence Our Ideas about Wisdom

Imagine that you meet someone for the first time and are deeply impressed by the wise and insightful things they say. Then you find out that this person enthusiastically supports a political party that you’d never vote for. Would you still think they were wise?

My colleagues and I live and work in Carinthia, the southernmost province of Austria. In the fall of 2008, province governor Jörg Haider, a widely known right-wing politician, died in a car crash. As it happened, we were starting our first large study of wisdom at the time. Because we wanted to include people who were regarded as wise in our sample, we put announcements in newspapers and on radio and television, asking people if they knew a wise person.

Soon, we received calls nominating people who had been close to governor Haider as exemplars of wisdom. That was a surprise: we had never considered Haider or his political sidekicks, who were as well-known for corruption as for fomenting nationalism and xenophobia, as wise in any way. We had assumed that wise individuals were tolerant, peaceful, and concerned about the world at large.

This led us to wonder: were we just projecting our own worldviews into our ideas of wisdom? To use a more recent example, does a Trump supporter consider Donald Trump as just as wise as a Biden supporter may consider Joe Biden to be wise? Or are certain values, such as caring about the well-being of all people, an inextricable part of wisdom?

To answer this question, we conducted a series of studies asking people to answer a questionnaire that measured their values twice: once for themselves, and once as they imagined a wise person would respond. Would even people who described themselves as driven mostly by money and power think that wise people are motivated by benevolence and concern for others? In another study, we measured wisdom and values to see whether wiser people actually endorsed different values than people who were less wise.  

The value questionnaires we used in our studies were designed by Shalom Schwartz, perhaps the foremost authority on values around the world. Those questionnaires tell us how important our participants consider values from four domains: openness to change (comprising the values of self-direction and stimulation), self-enhancement (how much people value power and achievement), conservation (values involving conformity, tradition, and security), and self-transcendence (the values of benevolence and universalism).

Based on our own and other researchers’ theoretical models of wisdom, we expected wisdom to be associated with self-transcendent values: benevolence (caring about the well-being of others one feels close to) and universalism (caring about humanity and the world at large). Would everybody, even people who did not particularly value benevolence and universalism themselves, agree that wisdom involved benevolence and universalism? Or were those just the typical values that psychologists associate with wisdom?

The results were somewhat in between. To some extent, people’s ideas about wise people’s values did mirror their own values. For example, conservative, right-wing participants did think that wise people cared less about universalism and more about power and tradition than liberal, left-wing participants thought they did.

At the same time, people did agree somewhat about the values that wise people hold. In fact, people’s ideas of wise persons’ values were much more similar to each other than their own values were. People who personally cared a lot about achievement, power, and security believed that wise people cared a lot less about achievement, power, and security than they did. People who cared very little about tradition, benevolence, and universalism believed that wise people cared more about tradition, benevolence, and universalism than they did. In the study in which we measured people’s wisdom and values, wiser participants indeed cared more about self-transcendence and self-direction—and less about power and security—than less wise participants did.

So do people consider someone as wise who does not share the values that are most important to them? Probably not. Our ideas of wisdom are shaped by what we personally value. But at the same time, we do think that wise people are “better” than we are.  Independent of our own values, we believe that wise people care less about themselves—less about power, fame, money, and their personal security—than we do, and that they care more about the needs of other people and the world at large. That’s what we expect from a wise leader—and what the world needs in these times.


For Further Reading

Glück, J., Gussnig, B., & Schrottenbacher, S. M. (2020). Wisdom and value orientations: just a projection of our own beliefs? Journal of Personality, 88(4), 833-855. Open-access publication; https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/jopy.12530.

Sternberg, R. J., Nusbaum, H., & Glück, J. (Eds.) (2019). Applying Wisdom to Contemporary World Problems. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
 

Judith Glück is professor of developmental psychology at University of Klagenfurt in Austria. Her main topic of research is wisdom.

 

Back from the Future: Pearls of Wisdom to Our Younger Self

We all seek out advice from other people. We ask other’s opinions about our romantic relationships, what restaurant they would recommend, and which local medical practice they think is the best. But what if we could offer advice to our younger self – the person we were at some time earlier in our life? What advice would we give ourselves if we could go back in time?

Before you think of this as an exercise in futility -- after all, you will never become your younger self -- think of the benefits of reflecting on this advice. The very act of offering advice suggests that we are now in a position of wisdom relative to the younger self to whom we are offering it. Looking back, we may realize many opportunities we passed up or poor decisions we made. We may see that we may have lost those opportunities but, even so, we have learned along the way.

For example, in our research, one individual told his younger self to “Grab the opportunities that may knock only once.” Another said “Follow your heart and don’t let Matty go.” Although these people may have missed opportunities, they seem to have learned from their mistakes moving forward. It’s unlikely that Matty will be available again, but the advice giver may very well follow his heart with Suzanne. Clearly, then, reflecting on the advice we would offer our younger selves can provide us with useful directions for the remainder of our lives.

When we asked over 400 research participants to offer advice to their younger selves, they had  a lot to say: “Don’t take yourself too seriously,” Don’t let your worries and fears control you, “Don’t waste money on things that don’t matter.” The most common types of advice centered around relationships (one man wrote “Do.Not.Marry.Her”), education (“Stay in school”), and how to treat oneself  (“Love yourself; you are valuable”). Not only did everyone have advice to offer to their younger self, but some offered many pieces of advice.

Offering advice is one thing. Following it is another. Over a third of the participants said that they spontaneously think about this advice at least once a week, and more than half said they followed their own advice, for example, by being kinder to themselves. Others, however, were either unable to follow their advice because it was too late (“Don’t have a child at 16”) or because they were unwilling to do so (“Stop smoking”). Even so, following the advice to one’s younger self was important to how people currently viewed themselves. Participants who now followed the advice they would give their younger self thought their younger self would view them more positively than people who did not follow the advice, many of whom thought their younger self would be disappointed in who they are now.

What determines the kind of advice we offer to your younger selves? In our studies, the advice was often linked to a positive or negative pivotal event that had occurred in the person’s life. For example, one individual whose pivotal event was his grandmother’s death offered advice to his younger self that “life is short, cherish every day.” Another who had been arrested subsequently offered advice to not “hang out with the wrong crowd.”

Not surprisingly, negative pivotal events were more often tinged with regret relative to positive pivotal events such as the birth of a child. And the regrets were as often about actions not taken as about actions taken. In other words, people were as likely to regret that they did not do something , such as not investing their money or failing to pursue their education, as they were to regret engaging in certain behaviors (such as smoking or having a child at 16). Regret, however, is not necessarily a bad thing. Regret indicates that the person recognizes that a behavior or course of action was ill-advised and perhaps sets in motion a more favorable path.

In thinking about the advice we would offer to our younger selves, we know ourselves better than anyone else. So, we may benefit more from our own advice than other people would. And we are often in a better position to offer advice to ourselves than others are.  With that in mind, what advice do you have for YOUR younger self?


For Further Reading:

Kowalski, R. M., & McCord, A. (2019). If I knew then what I know now: Advice to my younger self. The Journal of Social Psychology. https://doi.org/doi:10.1080/00224545.2019.1609401

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1460902-and-a-mistake-repeated-more-than-once-is-a-decision

 

Robin Kowalski is the Centennial Professor at Clemson University whose research focuses primarily on aversive interpersonal behaviors.

Why Men Are More Skeptical of the Gender Pay Gap (and What to Do About It)

Despite an abundance of evidence, the gender pay gap—the fact that women are consistently paid less than men—continues to provoke debate and remains a contentious social issue. Some people believe the pay gap is a non-issue, while others contend that it is an unmistakable modern societal dilemma. What accounts for these different viewpoints?

My colleagues Anna Dorfman, Ramona Bobocel, and I suspected that men would be more skeptical of the pay gap than women. This idea was based on a pattern that shows up repeatedly in psychological research: people interpret information in ways that align with their existing beliefs and desires. That is, being skeptical of the pay gap suits men's interests more than it suits women's, so we expected to see gender-based polarization on the issue.

We also proposed a potential solution: "wise reasoning." Practicing wise reasoning means adopting intellectual humility and considering alternative information and perspectives, even if doing so may reveal things that do not necessarily suit one's immediate preferences.

We expected that men who used wise reasoning when considering the pay gap dilemma would be more capable of change and acknowledging the gap. This aligned with our previous studies, which have shown that wise reasoning can reduce polarization and produce more cooperative mindsets on other issues. But would wise reasoning help men acknowledge the gender pay gap?

Putting Wise Reasoning to the Test

We tested our ideas about gender-based polarization in pay gap skepticism and what could be done about it. We invited over 600 North American adults to review a condensed news excerpt presenting facts about gender pay disparities in companies. After reading the excerpt, we asked the participants to articulate their thoughts about the article through open-text responses and rate their beliefs about pay disparities (this was our measure of pay gap skepticism).

Finally, all participants reported how much they used various reasoning processes when thinking about the news article and writing their personal thoughts. We know from past research that people tend to report their reasoning accurately because what they say about their reasoning matches more objective ways of assessing how they think about something.

As we suspected, men were significantly more skeptical about the gender pay gap than women in both studies. In fact, people's pay gap skepticism was apparent in the thoughts they wrote down before we ever asked them directly about their beliefs.

Most notably, however, the more men engaged in wise reasoning, the less skeptical they were about the gender pay gap. Apparently, wise reasoning helps people accept hard truths, even if the facts contradict their preferred worldview. As a result, wise reasoning corresponded to less pay gap skepticism in men and more consensus between men and women on the status and importance of the gender pay gap.

Implications for Business, Society, and Individuals

Diverging beliefs and desires create hurdles to enacting decisions that could resolve the gender pay gap. Our studies focused on these underlying beliefs and found that wise reasoning related to consensus between men and women on beliefs about the pay gap. We suspect that wise reasoning could be an important factor in helping men and women collaborate on mutually beneficial solutions rather than simply prioritizing their own group's interests.

But how can we improve our—and others'—wise reasoning? Critically, people can choose to apply wise reasoning when thinking about a particular issue. And people can get better at using wise reasoning with practice. For example, to boost wise reasoning, you could ask yourself how you came to have specific opinions on an issue and consider how different contexts or experiences may have led others to hold different opinions; you can reflect on the possibility that there may be some truth in both views, and how they could potentially be integrated to resolve an issue cooperatively. Importantly, our previous studies suggested that wise reasoning can be "nudged" and therefore can be boosted and even trained when embarking on discussions about important issues like pay gaps in workplaces.

These and our previous studies suggest that wise reasoning offers a potential route to consensus when people's vested interests are in conflict. Given that workplaces and society at large rely on social cooperation and collaboration, widespread adoption of wise reasoning could serve as a catalyst for business and societal advancement and prosperity beyond the issue of pay disparities.


For Further Reading

Brienza, J. P., Dorfman, A., & Bobocel, D. R. (in press). Mind the gap: Wise reasoning attenuates gender pay gap scepticism in men. European Journal of Social Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.3009

Brienza, J. P., Kung, F. K., & Chao, M. M. (2021). Wise reasoning, intergroup positivity, and attitude polarization across contexts. Nature Communications, 12, 3313. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-23432-1

Grossmann, I., Brienza, J. P., & Bobocel, D. R. (2017). Wise deliberation sustains cooperation, Nature Human Behaviour, 1(0061). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-017-0061


Justin P. Brienza is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Queensland Business School in Brisbane, Australia. His research and teaching focuses on building wisdom, avoiding bias, and encouraging balance at work and in leadership.

Who Is Wise?

Navigating through life is difficult and complicated. Problems often lack simple, well-defined solutions and instead require balancing myriad interests and caveats. To solve problems in real life, people call upon wisdom and seek those who are wise. Unlike someone who is just smart, a wise person is experienced in life and understands the human condition, knows how to balance multiple perspectives and interests, and is motivated to pursue truth and the common good. But who is wise? Does the proverbial "old sage" hold some truth to it? Do intelligent people have an edge in becoming wise? Most importantly, does wisdom really help people live a good life? Are wise people indeed happier?

These questions have been studied by many researchers. However, because different studies define and measure wisdom in different ways, and because any single study is limited, findings vary across studies. As a way to go beyond individual studies and to look at the big picture, we used a statistical technique called meta-analysis. It allowed us to summarize thirty years of empirical research on wisdom to answer important questions like those posed above. Here's what we found.

Must One Wait Until Old Age to Be Wise?

Old age itself does not bring wisdom. Wisdom increases very little (almost negligibly) with increasing age. On the contrary, wisdom declines in old age, which might be due to a general decline in cognitive abilities. Experts who study wisdom agree that life experiences and how one makes sense of them, rather than age itself, lead to the development of wisdom. For this reason, although some people may grow wiser with age, wisdom requires cultivation and is not an automatic benefit of advancing years.

Are Smarter People Wiser?

Intelligence is not related to how wisely people report they typically think, feel, and act in daily life. However, intelligent people tend to give wiser advice for especially challenging dilemmas (however, we don't know if they actually act as wisely when facing such dilemmas themselves). Even so, our previous work suggests that wisdom requires only average intelligence--beyond that intelligence ceases to matter. The type of intelligence also matters for wisdom. Crystallized intelligence, which relies on knowledge gained in the real world, is more strongly associated with wisdom than fluid intelligence, which is the ability to solve problems without previous knowledge.

Who Then is Wise?

If age and intelligence, two obvious candidates for characteristics of wise people, do not consistently predict wisdom, what does? The personality trait of openness is related to wisdom across studies. In other words, wisdom entails flexibility in thinking, the tendency and willingness to take on different ideas and perspectives, and an exploratory orientation in life. The association between wisdom and openness is one of the most consistent findings in the literature. Many experts think that openness fosters wisdom.

Are Wiser People Happier?

Finally, wise people lead lives that are both happy and meaningful. People who report thinking, feeling, and acting wisely in daily life feel more positive emotions, less negative emotions, and more satisfaction with their lives. In addition, they are more autonomous (that is, they rely on their personal standards and do not look to others for approval), feel more masterful of their environment, have more positive interpersonal relationships, are more self-accepting, are more oriented towards growth, and feel more purpose and meaning in life. Being growth oriented and feeling more purpose and meaning in life also predict the ability to think of wise solutions to real or hypothetical dilemmas. Contrary to the idiom 'ignorance is bliss', wisdom is its own path to happiness.


For Further Reading

Dong, M., Weststrate, N. M., & Fournier, M. A. (2023). Thirty years of psychological wisdom research: What we know about the correlates of an ancient concept. Perspectives on Psychological Science18(4), 778-811. doi: 10.1177/17456916221114096

Dong, M., & Fournier, M. A. (2022). What are the necessary conditions for wisdom? Examining intelligence, creativity, meaning-making, and the Big Five traits. Collabra: Psychology8(1), 33145. doi: 10.1525/collabra.33145


Mengxi Dong is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Psychology at Beijing Normal University. Her research focuses on wisdom and understanding the discrepancies among measurements of the same constructs.

Nic M. Weststrate is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Educational Psychology at the University of Illinois Chicago. His research focuses on the development, manifestation, and transmission of wisdom across the lifespan and between generations.

Marc A. Fournier is a Full Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Toronto Scarborough. His research focuses on personality integration, person × situation interactions, and interpersonal processes and dynamics.

Americans & Canadians Favor Practical Wisdom

Psychologists uncover a list of characteristics shared across cultures in North America that shape today’s prototypical vision of “wisdom.”

Benjamin Franklin, Socrates, Martin Luther King Jr., Mother Teresa: All well-recognized names. In a recent study from Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, researchers studying Americans and Canadians found preferences for practical wisdom when people were asked to name important figures and tell stories about their wisdom.

Psychologists Nic Weststrate and Michel Ferrari (University of Toronto) along with Sociologist Monika Ardelt (University of Florida) studied average people to determine how everyday people understand wisdom and uncovered a set of characteristics shared across North America that shape today’s prototypical vision of “wisdom.”

“In North America, wisdom is a somewhat diverse concept—there is more than one way to be wise and each manifestation of wisdom has merits from a societal perspective,” says Weststrate.

The authors examined cultural-historical exemplars, provided by 209 Canadians and Americans in open-ended responses to a series of questions, and analyzed this research by generating three wisdom prototypes based on grouping the most prevalent examples from the first study.

Over 100 different exemplars were mentioned during the study, but certain names, like Mahatma Gandhi, Jesus Christ, Abraham Lincoln, and Martin Luther King Jr., were more prevalent.

Weststrate and colleagues found that the most frequently mentioned exemplars clustered into three basic “wisdom” prototypes: practical (Lincoln, Franklin), philosophical (Socrates, King Solomon), and benevolent (MLK Jr, Mother Teresa). They completed this task by utilizing data from 202 Americans, who were presented with all possible pairings of the most commonly named exemplars and asked to rate how similar they were to each other.

While the benevolent and philosophical prototypes were often rated as wiser than the practical prototype, the researchers found 70% of the exemplars represented practical wisdom, 32% benevolent and 12% philosophical. Practical wisdom includes those who have insight into real-life issues and work strategically to deal with social problems.

“We hope this research influences our evolving understanding of the concept of wisdom as far as psychological theories are concerned,” says Weststrate. “Wisdom is a quintessentially “human” concept, so the average person should have a good sense of what it is—their perspectives are an important source of information for psychologists to consider.”

The authors remind us that no one type of wisdom is “best” and hope to conduct similar analyses across other cultures, “because the average person’s implicit theories are hugely affected by cultural factors,” says Weststrate. Further research could find other prototypes that “illuminate what people are striving for and how this differs regionally and globally.”


Nic M. Weststrate, Michel Ferrari, and Monika Ardelt. "The Many Faces of Wisdom: An Investigation of Cultural-Historical Wisdom Exemplars Reveals Practical, Philosophical, and Benevolent Prototypes", Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin online before print, April 2016. DOI: 10.1177/0146167216638075

Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (PSPB), published monthly, is an official journal of the Society of Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP). SPSP promotes scientific research that explores how people think, behave, feel, and interact. The Society is the largest organization of social and personality psychologists in the world. Follow us on Twitter, @SPSPnews and find us at facebook.com/SPSP.org.