Defining Wisdom | A Project of the University of Chicago

Is it possible to define wisdom without saying what it is?

wattawa — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 00:21:43 GMT

In 1873, American poet John Godfrey Saxe published an English-language version of the philosophical fable about the blind men and the elephant. Touching various parts of the elephant, each of the blind men offered his own account of what the elephant was. The man near the trunk said it was like a snake; the one holding the ear likened it to a fan; one next to the leg thought it a pillar; and so on. It is an old story that, in its many versions, has appeared in Buddhist, Hindu, and Sufi sources. But Saxe, writing in the heyday of high modern antagonism toward professional theology, used the old image to comment on what he saw as the silliness inherent in theological disputation:

So oft in theologic wars,
The disputants, I ween,
Rail on in utter ignorance
Of what each other mean,
And prate about an Elephant
Not one of them has seen!

As academic wisdom-seekers, it is no doubt true that we have blindnesses of our own, or, at the very least, that we are in the habit, for good or for ill, of focusing our vision by donning disciplinary blinders. Unlike Saxe’s bickering theologians, though, I think we have shown restraint, the kind that comes from being trained to take critical account of methods and assumptions.

Take earlier postings on this blog for example. Contributors have not set out to examine wisdom per se but rather to attune us to critical frameworks relevant to wisdom inquiry. Joy Wattawa nudged us toward a more collaborative, tech-savvy pursuit of wisdom. Howard Nusbaum drew attention to the limits of our understanding of the expressive power of language. Clark Gilpin followed with a helpful brief on the role of contextual reasoning in decision-making. Most recently, Valerie Tiberius, in a theoretically explicit way, has proposed shifting the discussion about wisdom from metaphysics to epistemology.

All to the good. I, for my part, see no way to pursue our common project without adequate attention to technology, language, contextual reasoning, and the role of critical reflection. And, from the perspective of my own checkered disciplinary past (some mix of history, philology, and theology), I believe that we might say even more about meta-issues that bear on the study of wisdom. For example, it might be helpful to think about the role of text and tradition in forming communal visions of the good life (my DW project), the effects of religious belief on moral and scientific thinking (considering, for example, the ‘open’ and ‘closed’ ‘immanent frames’ of Charles Taylor), and the tension between individual fulfillment and communal flourishing over the long and rich history of the Western intellectual tradition. This small list could surely be extended.

And yet I wonder whether meta-sapiential reflection of this sort engenders too much restraint. Is it possible to define wisdom merely by analyzing the technological, psychological, philosophical, cultural, or social processes that we, for one reason or another, happen to associate with wisdom? I believe that an ‘analytics of wisdom’ is a desirable and necessary thing, but I am not sure it is all that is needed. I wonder, in other words, whether we ought to try and touch the elephant.

Valerie has offered a sound reason for not doing so. Any “uncontroversial” assumption about the specific content of wisdom, she argues, is likely to be “bland and general and therefore not very revealing about wisdom.” This is certainly true.

But why restrict ourselves to uncontroversial assumptions? In the realm of intellectual inquiry, I know of no productive assumption or consequential idea that is uncontroversial. The kinds of beliefs that command loyalty, deepen the moral imagination, and inspire bold action tend to be pointy. In Western religious, political, and intellectual history, influential “wisdom” traditions grew up around people and ideas with sharp profiles. To be sure, we ought not accept the historical legacies of such people and ideas uncritically, appropriating them merely because they were influential or, for that matter, pointy. Nor should we be ignorant of the counterproductive ways that strong, deeply held beliefs (and the people who held them) have troubled human societies throughout history.

Yet, I believe that wisdom, inasmuch as it makes claims on action and belief, engages human aspiration at its deepest levels—and not simply its technical ones. The problem for academic wisdom-seekers is that wisdom brings questions of meaning, content, and value into its compass, while modern scholarly inquiry cannot adjudicate such questions.

In his famous 1919 lecture on “science as a vocation,” Max Weber probed the nature of modern Wissenschaft. According to Weber:

Science… presupposes that what is yielded by scientific work is important in the sense that it is 'worth being known.' In this, obviously, are contained all our problems. For this presupposition cannot be proved by scientific means. It can only be interpreted with reference to its ultimate meaning, which we must reject or accept according to our ultimate position towards life.

What is “worth being known,” what is meaningful, and what is good can only be determined in light of one’s ultimate values. The critical processes associated with modern scholarship cannot generate content in its deepest sense; they can only operate on what is given (Latin: data). Because scholarship on the Weberian model cannot decide among ultimate values, it can only direct us in the pursuit of goals we have already accepted as worthy.

What it would mean to broach non-trivial questions of content in the context of this project I am not entirely sure. What are immediately obvious are the obstacles, problems, and objections: the functional relativism inherent in disciplinary boundaries, lack of experience or vocabulary for handling such questions in a way that remains fair and rigorous, fear or discomfort associated with self-disclosure, and so on. It may be best, in light of these issues, not to raise substantive questions.

Like all who hear the elephant story, I find it is easy to smile at the blind men quarreling, to pity and even to disdain them. I certainly do not want to emulate them. Yet I wonder about the true nature of their mistake. Surely it was not in being blind, which they could not help, nor in touching the elephant, which curiosity certainly warranted. Perhaps the problem was that the blind men reached their conclusions hastily—and without comparing notes.

Michael C. Legaspi
Creighton University

Photo by Matthieu

Rosewood Report, Part 5: Do People Have Wisdom Naturally, or Does it Require Effort? Continued

Anna Gomberg — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 17:19:46 GMT

At end the of July, 2010, a small group of philosophers and psychologists met at the Rosewood Inn in Hastings, Minnesota to talk about wisdom. This series of blog posts highlights key questions that emerged from that discussion.

Please join our conversation by commenting on this discussion below. Also, it should be noted that this workshop was funded by a grant from the University of Chicago’s Defining Wisdom Project and the John Templeton Foundation. Thanks are also due to the Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science for administrative assistance.

In our discussion of trial by fire we noticed that one of the important elements of such trials is that you come to realize that you don’t have control over everything. Eddy wondered about a tension between the view that wisdom requires trial by fire where you lose your sense of control and our earlier discussion of the view that wisdom involves what is under your control. This prompted some discussion about the importance of knowing the difference between what’s under your control and what isn’t. Michael observed that this capacity is highlighted in cognitive-behavior therapy and also in Stoic philosophy. It also comes up in the serenity prayer, which asks for the wisdom to know the difference between what we can change and what we can’t. We might call this kind of knowledge “agential humility”. Agential humility is analogous to epistemic humility, which is a trait that virtue epistemologists think is crucial to theoretical wisdom: it’s important to know what we don’t know, just as it’s important to know what we don’t control.

Another concern expressed about this idea that wisdom involves agential humility was that it might be culturally bounded. Simine asked whether this realism about control applies to everyone or just to people in certain cultures, since in really difficult environments it might be better not to be aware of how little control you have. What if the reality is that you have no power? Positive illusions may be healthy in such environments. Others in the group chimed in, expressing some discomfort with the Stoic and Buddhist view that the natural endpoint is to be passive or accepting of your lot.

It is possible to take a moderate position here. One could say that agential humility is a good thing because it prevents the frustration of trying to control things you can’t control, but that how much humility is required depends on your circumstances. This view sits well with the group’s way of thinking about wisdom as a set of capacities. If wisdom is made up of a variety of capacities, the relative priority of the different capacities could depend on individual and cultural differences. Thinking along these lines, the capacities that allow a person to control her actions would be balanced against the capacities that allow a person to accept what she cannot control. In an environment in which a person has highly effective agency, wisdom may demand a different balance of capacities than in an environment in which a person’s agency is curtailed. On the assumption that both agential humility and the capacities of action control are important for wisdom, we would not recommend the very extreme humility associated with Buddhism or Stoicism; rather, the view of wisdom we favor recommends a balance, though the precise nature of the balance could vary.

The idea that wisdom requires effort – that we have to try to develop wisdom – invited a challenge from Simine who thought that there’s something wrong with deciding to pursue wisdom. Judith observed the similarity to the point that a wise person would never describe herself as wise. The thought here was that there’s something narcissistic or overly pointy-headed (or perhaps arrogant) about the (stereotyped) moral philosopher who wants to find out what the right principles are and become wise. It seems that such a person wants the wrong thing: one should want to respect people, make other people happy, engage in valuable pursuits, have satisfying relationships, but not because these things are recommended by a principle or part of the quest for wisdom.

In response to this challenge, Michael drew a helpful distinction between two different questions that seem to be at issue. First, there is the matter of a person’s reasons for pursuing wisdom. Is the person’s concern just with improving herself for the sake of improving herself? This does seem narcissistic. But a person’s reasons for wanting to be more wise could have to do with making better choices so that her own life and the lives of those she cares about go better. This seems less problematic. Second, there is the matter of whether there is an end that we’re moving toward and can achieve in our pursuit of wisdom or whether it is an ongoing process that doesn’t have a stopping point. One might think that the mistake in setting out to achieve wisdom is that wisdom isn’t something that can be gotten hold of; it is, rather, a way of approaching problems that one has to engage over and over. (The group did seem to favor thinking about practical wisdom as a process, and it was noted that “quests for wisdom” are less objectionable when it comes to theoretical wisdom.)

-Next- Are there experts in wisdom? Do wise people give good advice?

Rosewood Report, Part 6: How Do You Measure Wisdom?

Anna Gomberg — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 21:15:38 GMT

By Valerie Tiberius

Given the observation made earlier (that wise people would not identify themselves as wise), it seems obvious that you can’t measure wisdom by self-report. But why is it that we think wise people wouldn’t self-identify as wise? Simine suggested that attributing wisdom to oneself might suggest egocentricism, or an inability to take someone else’s perspective, both of which would be incompatible with wisdom. We next considered the suggestion that we turn to the reports of friends or family. In Simine’s work on self-knowledge she has shown that friends and family members are more accurate judges of certain attributes; perhaps this could be true of wisdom. According to Judith, though, people are really good at faking wisdom – that is, at saying things that sound wise enough to fool other people. People might not be able to fool those closest to them, but on the other hand, the people closest to us may be more likely to know our faults and hence less likely to think we’re wise. If this is true, the attribution of wisdom by the people closest to you might set too high a standard.

Michael raised the concern that we shouldn’t use difficulties in measurement as an excuse for looser definitions. He suggested the hypothesis that you can’t get high inter-rater reliability without a deductively defined construct. Simine thought this hypothesis was unnecessarily limiting, though, because we can have a very functional idea of what a construct is without being able to verbalize it. She told us about the “Brunswick lens model” which can be used to figure out, post-hoc, what attributes people are using when they identify someone as wise, by consensus. Even if the raters (those making the ascription of wisdom) can’t themselves articulate what makes them think someone is wise, we can examine what attributes correlate with being seen as wise (by consensus) and therefore make some informed guesses about what cues people are using to judge wisdom.

Wisdom seems a very tricky thing to measure. Drawing on our previous topics, it might be that the fact that wisdom has a broad sense that includes many other virtues makes it more difficult to measure. If people have this broad sense in mind when they think about who is wise, they may be reluctant to attribute wisdom to anyone who isn’t perfect. Further, if wisdom is a set of capacities, attributions of wisdom may vary depending on which capacities are emphasized at the moment of assessment. Perhaps some of these problems could be answered by spelling out the capacities that are involved in wisdom and measuring them separately. This would miss the integrative aspect of wisdom – the fact that a wise person manages to balance the various capacities in an appropriate way – but it would help achieve more accurate measure of some aspects.

-Next- Are their experts in wisdom? Do wise people give good advice?

Rosewood Report, Part 7: Are There Experts in Wisdom? Do Wise People Give Good Advice?

Anna Gomberg — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 17:42:14 GMT

We began with a question about sources of wisdom. Eddy raised this question because of an interest in introducing students (or readers of an anthology on wisdom) to “pieces of wisdom”, the accumulated wisdom of the experts. If we’re looking for wisdom, it does seem to make sense to go to people who have done some hard thinking about it. But our brief discussion of this topic did not reveal any surprises about sources of wisdom. This may reflect a difficulty in identifying sources that everyone will agree contain wisdom. Or, it may be that the group’s inclination to think of wisdom in terms of a process that is served by a set of psychological capacities made it difficult for us to think of sources containing “nuggets of wisdom”. A psychological capacities model is not inconsistent with there being nuggets of wisdom, but it does represent an emphasis on process rather than outcome (and nuggets of wisdom are an outcome).

This question about sources led quickly to a conversation about advice-giving and the complexities involved in giving good advice. Advising requires knowing the psychology of the person you’re giving advice to, including (and perhaps especially) that person’s weaknesses. One of the complexities of advice giving has to do with the fact that the person you’re advising may not be capable of rational persuasion. Given this, it seems that sometimes an adviser needs to lie to people, or trick them, so that they can do the right thing or so that they can take the advice (or ask for it) later.

Another complexity is that, as Tori put it, “we’re struggling all the time”. So, part of what you’re doing when you practice giving advice is developing good strategies: you see what works, what doesn’t, and you try again. Judith pointed out that this is another temporal dimension of wisdom: being a wise adviser requires adopting long term strategies and giving up the illusion that you can control what other people do. Tori saw this as a contrast to Aristotle’s view that the wise person does the right thing, in the right way, at the right time (and so on). In fact, wisdom and wise advising may have more to do with learning from mistakes than with doing the right thing, in the right way at the right time.

The discussion of advice led us to a conversation about the difference between being able to live a wise life and being able to give good advice. Can there be “wisdom coaches” who aren’t themselves wise? Given experiences that most of us have had (of friends, therapists, and teachers) perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised if some people are wise advisers yet not good at living their own lives. But, as Simine observed, there’s a continuum: a reasonable position to take is that people who are good advisers but not wise in their own lives are not as wise as people who can do both.

Next- Concluding Thoughts

Rosewood Report, Part 8: Concluding Thoughts

Anna Gomberg — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 18:16:41 GMT

By Valerie Tiberius

Our last topic of conversation was the future of the group. It was remarkable, and extremely gratifying to me, the organizer of the workshop, how much enthusiasm people felt about meeting again and staying in touch. I don’t think I was alone in feeling surprised and delighted by the sense of accomplishment and intellectual excitement that the weekend produced. As the organizer, I have thought a lot about what made this weekend so successful and such a good learning experience for us all. My assessment is that it had something to do with the place – we were in pleasant surroundings, without many distractions, sharing all our meals and our free time. It had something to do with our having a sense of a shared project, yet different skills and bases of knowledge. It also had a lot to do with the people. It seemed to me (speaking for the other eight participants), that everyone possessed a lack of arrogance and a sincere willingness to listen to each other, in addition to a sense of humor and gratitude for the privilege of spending a weekend with smart people talking about interesting topics in lovely surroundings. The conversation reported here would not have been the same without these qualities.

Indeed, enthusiasm about the workshop was so heartfelt that it looks like there will be a continuation of the “Rosewood Group”. We now have an online resource for sharing papers and questions, and we hope to have another meeting in 2011. As can be seen from this report, there are many topics of mutual interest that could form the basis for future meetings. One possible topic that hasn’t been mentioned yet, which we discussed very briefly, is the relationship between wisdom and humor. Everyone seemed to think there is an interesting relationship. One suggestion was that wisdom and humor draw on the same kinds of capacities for different purposes. Others seemed to think that sometimes humor is the wisest response to a situation or that having a wise perspective on a situation could be facilitated by having a sense of humor. I am optimistic that whatever particular topics we discuss, we can build on the substantial agreement about wisdom reached during the Rosewood workshop to make real progress in the study of wisdom.

Rosewood Report, Part 4: Do People Have Wisdom Naturally, or Does It Require Effort?

Anna Gomberg — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 17:55:12 GMT

By Valerie Tiberius

Simine observed that there are people who are good by chance, but virtues have to have a certain modal robustness (that is, when we say that someone is wise, it seems to follow that they would have been wise even if their circumstances had been somewhat different). The thought here, which many of us shared, is that people become wise through an effortful process, not just by lucking into the right attitudes.

One process in particular that some think is relevant to producing wisdom is the process of dealing with trauma. You have to “go through the fire” to become wise. Is this true? Is it even true that this is what people tend to think about wisdom? According to Judith, two thirds of the folk think you have to have confronted a lot of difficulty to become wise. The third who don’t think you need trial by fire think that you can learn wisdom from books or experts. Paul Baltes and Monica Ardelt (two psychologists who work on wisdom) split with the folk: Baltes is on the side of the one third, whereas Ardelt emphasizes the need for traumatic events.

Tori observed that what difficult times do is they shake your views about your own strengths and capacities and this sheds light on yourself that you can’t get in any other way. But Tori also pointed out that reading novels can help by making you think “OK, there are good ways of going through this, there are bad ways of going through this…” Importantly, reading novels can help us with experiences we haven’t had yet. Reading about how characters deal with dying, for example, can help us think about how to deal with dying ourselves, even if we’re not yet at that stage of life. This point about literature reveals a middle ground between the two opposing views mentioned above. Learning wisdom from reflecting on our own lives and the lives of others (including fictional characters) does require an effortful process, but it does not require literally going through a traumatic experience. So, wisdom could require conscious effort without requiring traumatic events.

The view that fits best with the group’s consensus thus far is that traumatic experiences can help to encourage the development of wisdom (by giving you a perspective you would not otherwise have had), but these experiences are not necessary since the perspective can be achieved in other ways (e.g., through reading and reflection). This leaves open the question about whether there could be “natural” wisdom. Given the group’s emphasis on reflection as a component of wisdom, it seems unlikely that people who make no conscious effort (to understand themselves, other people, what matters in life) could really be wise.

-Do People Have Wisdom Naturally, or Does it Require Effort? will be continued in January 2011-

How can we measure wisdom?

wattawa — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 17:24:10 GMT

We've had several questions from readers regarding the feasibility of measuring wisdom. Below, I've included a few of these questions in the hopes of eliciting the thoughts of Wisdom Research Network members.

- Joy Wattawa (Assistant Director for Outreach and Communications)

“There is much impressive work done by Paul Baltes and his associates in Berlin measuring "degrees" of wisdom (see http://www.baltes-paul.de/Wisdom.html). Many of their empirical studies have measured wisdom-related performance based on the Berlin Wisdom Paradigm (BWP). The BWP defines wisdom as an expert knowledge system concerning the fundamental pragmatics of life, i.e. knowledge and judgment about the meaning and conduct of life, and the orchestration of human development toward excellence while attending conjointly to personal and collective well-being.

While I applaud and highly commend the effort, I admit that much reading on the subject leaves my mouth still dry. Unfortunately all empirical measurements of wisdom I analyzed remain predominantly subjective, interpretative and surveyor-dependent. If the same questionnaires, which contain case-situations about pragmatics of life, are rated by different researchers, the resulting wisdom-score can differ on account of who is scoring the responses! In these studies the methodology itself of scoring seems to allow degrees of subjective judgment.

To my quantitatively-trained mind these studies still lack the objective component that is essential for a truly viable construct, one that can claim model-reliability (i.e. measuring something consistently) and internal-validity (i.e. measuring what is supposed to be measured). Personally I am working on a more quantitatively objective construct, one based on scalar data rather than subjective scores. I would love to hear from contributors to this group if some of you have come across other empirical/objective work in wisdom-related performance scoring.”

-Max Gygax

“Many people have challenged the use of GNP as a measure of societal success and some useful attempts have been made to develop a Human Development Index (HDI) and Happiness Indices (HI), or State of the Future Index (SOFI). In a recent article (Integral Leadership Review Volume VIII, No. 5 - October 2008 <http://www.integralleadershipreview.com/archives/2008-10/2008-10-toc.php>) I suggested that the world would benefit from a Wise Society Index (WSI).

But what could go into such an index? What could we try to measure? And how could it actually be measured? How can we be sure that we are really focused on what is important, rather than on just what is easy to measure?”

-Bruce Lloyd

Photo by Freddy Fam

The Rosewood Report, Part 3: What Kind of Reflection Should We Think of as Part of Wisdom?

Anna Gomberg — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 20:12:18 GMT

By Valerie Tiberius

Michael, Eddy, Rachana and Simine all presented studies that could be taken to undermine the effectiveness of reflection. Michael showed us that people are not very good at following the principles they endorse when making judgments about punishment. Eddy reminded us (and confirmed – despite some clever experiments designed to make the folk look more principled!) that people make moral judgments on the basis of intuitions and then rationalize them after the fact. Rachana discussed studies that demonstrate our poor introspective access to the causes of our behavior. Simine told us that in all the attempts her lab has made to help people become more accurate in their self-attributions of traits, nothing has worked. After all this, Valerie worried that the psychological evidence against reflection was becoming overwhelming. If our capacities for reflection are so hopeless, how can we maintain that (1) wisdom is a trait everyone can aspire to develop and (2) that wise people make better judgments in virtue of their being more reflective?

In response, several in the group expressed some persuasive optimism about people. We do change things about ourselves after thinking and reflecting on what needs to be changed, they pointed out, and there are people who learn from advice, improve their judgments, and so on. It might be that the evidence against reflection shows that wisdom is even more difficult to achieve than we thought, but this does not mean it is impossible for people to learn and improve by conscious effort.

Tori offered a different kind of response to the problem. She pointed out that there are different tasks you might give your reflective capacities: first-order reflection on particular decisions or second-order reflection on policies for living, habits for overcoming biases. We can use our reflective capacities to self-regulate in the long term, even if we can’t use them to overcome biases in the heat of the moment. This idea that wisdom involves the adoption of long term policies of self-improvement, and that reflection should be thought of in terms of its role in such policies, is also a theme in Valerie’s work. Simine concurred, adding that what wisdom seems to demand is the ability to reflect on the kind of process you use to come to a decision. For example, we can decide ahead of time not to make an important decision quickly but to give ourselves a few days for all the variables to sink in. Adopting this policy is wise; someone who hasn’t adopted or followed the policy may not be able to make a wise decision in the time she has to do it.

-Next- Do people have wisdom naturally or does it require effort?

The Rosewood Report, Part 2: Is Wisdom Just One Thing?

Anna Gomberg — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 20:41:00 GMT

By Valerie Tiberius

The fact that wisdom does seem to involve so many capacities (empathy, self-knowledge, reflection, and so on) made some of us worry that wisdom is too amorphous. If wisdom just colonizes every useful capacity we have, it doesn’t really seem like a single virtue.

At our meeting, different answers to this worry were expressed. A first thought was that since wisdom concerns judgment and decision making in particular, it will not include every virtue. Generosity, for example, might seem unnecessary for good decision making. But this way of thinking didn’t hold up for two reasons. First, virtues that aren’t virtues of judgment can nevertheless improve judgment by changing the inputs to the process. For example, generosity can improve decision making when others’ needs are at stake by ensuring that generous actions are presented as attractive and viable options. Second, we agreed that practical wisdom involves not just good judgment but also acting consistently with that judgment. If this is the case, then many virtues are necessary for wisdom. As Tori pointed out, even courage seems like something that could be cultivated as part of the project of becoming wiser, because courage helps us to bring our actions in line with what we think is important.

Simine’s answer was to deny that there is really a problem here: why not just think that wisdom is everything good that is in our control? One reason has to do with problems that have come up for the unity of the virtues. The thesis of the unity of the virtues says that you can’t have any virtue without having practical wisdom and if you have practical wisdom, you have all the other virtues. Plato held this view, but it is not a popular position now, because there seems to be a lot of evidence that people can be virtuous in one dimension without being virtuous in all. For example, some people are very kind but not courageous, or temperate but not generous.

Our discussion led us to favor the view that there is a limited kind of unity, an asymmetrical unity such that you can’t have wisdom without having the other virtues, though you can have the other virtues (to some degree) without having wisdom. One could interpret this view in one of two ways: First, one could hold that wisdom is comprised of the other virtues such that any virtue is a part of wisdom. Or, second, one could hold that wisdom only comprises those virtues that have to do with deliberation, judgment, and decision making; virtues that have to do with producing appropriate action may contribute to the same end as wisdom but they are not a part of wisdom. It may not matter much which of these interpretations one takes. One might even think that wisdom has a narrow and a broad sense so that both views get something right. We can think of it in its narrow sense when we want to distinguish it from other virtues that we want to discuss separately, but we can also think of it in its broad sense when we are thinking about who has wisdom and we find ourselves reluctant to ascribe real wisdom to people who lack action-oriented virtues like courage.

-Next-

What kind of reflection should we think of as part of wisdom?

The Rosewood Report: Questions about Wisdom, Part 1

Anna Gomberg — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 20:32:08 GMT

By Valerie Tiberius

At end the of July, 2010, a small group of philosophers and psychologists met at the Rosewood Inn in Hastings, Minnesota to talk about wisdom. The workshop included five sessions. The first four sessions were organized around presentations by a philosopher and a psychologist on the capacities of practical wisdom. On the final session Sunday morning, six of us settled down to try to summarize what we had learned. This discussion series focuses on that conversation. In describing the proceedings, I have sometimes indicated who said what in order to give the feel of the conversation, but this report is not a transcript. I have taken some liberties with the order of things, provided some background where necessary, and added my own reflections about emerging points of consensus.

Participants in this conversation include:

Judith Glück (Alpen-Adria Universität, Psychology)

Valerie Tiberius (University of Minnesota, Philosophy)

Eddy Nahmias (Georgia State University, Philosophy and Neuroscience)

Michael Sargent (Bates College, Psychology)

Simine Vazire (Washington University, Psychology)

Rachana Kamtekar (University of Arizona, Philosophy)

Victoria McGeer (Princeton University, Philosophy)

Also participating:

Melissa Koenig, University of Minnesota, Institute for Child Development

Jason Swartwood, Graduate Assistant, University of Minnesota, Philosophy

Questions discussed in the coming weeks will include:

How do we define wisdom?

Is wisdom just one thing?

What kind of reflection should we think of as part of wisdom?

Do people have wisdom naturally, or does it require effort?

Are there experts in wisdom?

Do wise people give good advice?

How do you measure wisdom?

Part 1: How Do We Define Wisdom?

As one might expect, a variety of different characterizations of wisdom were employed throughout the weekend. Simine Vazire (Washington University, philosophy) takes wisdom to be akin to self-knowledge. Tori McGreer (Princeton University, philosophy), drawing on George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch, takes the development of wisdom to require progress along two dimensions: moral energy that sustains our drive to action and moral vision that informs us about what it’s like to be another. Michael Sargent (Bates College, psychology) liked this idea, that wisdom involves a kind of discounting of one’s selfish interests, and added that wisdom should also include a temporal discount function that mitigates our tendency to downplay future consequences of our actions. Judith Glück (Alpen-Adria Universität, psychology) favors the MORE model of wisdom, which defines wisdom in terms of Mastery (where this includes an appreciation of the lack of control that we have over much of our lives), Openness to experience, Refectiveness, and Empathy/Emotion. Eddy Nahmias (Georgia State University, philosophy and neuroscience) defines wisdom as the psychological capacities involved in decision making and action control that contribute to people living good or flourishing lives. Valerie Tiberius (University of Minnesota, philosophy) thinks of wisdom similarly, as the skills, habits and dispositions that are necessary for judging and choosing what matters.

What do we make of this apparent jumble of definitions? In discussion, we realized that we have more in common than at first appeared. First of all, some of the definitions include others. We could summarize the most abstract definition of wisdom this way: Practical wisdom consists in the capacities needed to make good judgments about what matters in life and to bring one’s actions into accordance, insofar as this is in one’s control. This general definition encompasses the MORE model, as long as the capacities listed in MORE are the ones that are needed for judging what matters and acting accordingly. Further, MORE can accommodate some of the other characterizations of wisdom. Insofar as self-knowledge is a kind of reflection, it would be accommodated by MORE. Eliot’s conception of wisdom is also compatible with MORE, since it makes empathy a central capacity of wisdom. Social and temporal discounting functions can also be seen as reflective capacities and hence would also fit into this model. What we have, then, is (1) an abstract philosophical definition, which tells us what we’re looking for without listing the particular capacities, (2) a general psychological definition, which lists the central capacities, and (3) detailed specifications of the required capacities. These different kinds of definitions no doubt reflect the different interests that researchers have.

-Next-

Is Wisdom Just One Thing?

What is the role of reflection in practical wisdom?

wattawa — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 16:27:50 GMT

For ancient philosophers, wisdom required knowing the good and a wise person could live a flourishing life, in part, because he or she possessed this knowledge. These days, we are less certain that there is a good to be known that will help us live flourishing lives. Further, if we want to measure how much wisdom different people have, we would need to operationalize “knowing the good”, which seems daunting if not impossible. These problems are reflected in the definitions of wisdom used in psychological research. Of the ones I have seen, none make explicit reference to knowledge of the good. Baltes and Staudinger (2000) do include knowledge about the “fundamental pragmatics of life” as one of the two main criteria for wisdom, but this knowledge turns out to be about

such topics as human nature, life-long development, variations in developmental processes and outcomes, interpersonal relations, social norms, critical events in life and their possible constellations, as well as knowledge about the coordination of the well-being of oneself and that of others (p. 125).

Baltes and Staudinger recognize (correctly, in my view) that wisdom must include the kind of knowledge that is necessary for living a good or meaningful life, but this knowledge, on their view, is not knowledge of values. This is entirely understandable. If you want to be able to figure out who has wisdom and who doesn’t, the criterion “must know the good” is at best unhelpful if we don’t have clear standards for what counts as such knowledge.

One way to solve the problem would be to make some uncontroversial assumptions about the good and stipulate that knowledge of the good is knowledge of these assumptions. This is problematic because truly uncontroversial assumptions are likely to be bland and general and therefore not very revealing about wisdom. Another way would be to give up on the connection between wisdom and the good. I think this would also be a mistake. If wisdom is of interest, it really should have something to do with living a good or meaningful life and this means we cannot avoid the evaluative (or “normative” as we say in philosophy) domain when we are thinking about wisdom.

A better way to solve the problem, I suggest, is to move from metaphysics to epistemology: from what is of value to the process by which we acquire knowledge of it. On this line of thought, an important component of wisdom is the set of reflective capacities that allow us to think constructively about what is good, to formulate ideal conceptions of a good life and of the kind of person we want to be, to assess how we are doing at living up to these ideals and to reevaluate our ideals in the light of new experiences. I think we need an argument to show that it is fruitful to think about what these capacities are without presupposing particular substantive assumptions about the good. Though this isn’t obvious, I do think such an argument can be made, and this is one of the subsidiary goals in my own wisdom research.

The idea that in our thinking about wisdom we could replace THE GOOD with REFLECTION ON THE GOOD invites some questions.

First, could this philosophical idea be helpful to social scientists concerned with measuring and teaching wisdom? My sense is that it could. For example, consider this passage from Baltes and Staudinger:

The second wisdom-specific metacriterion, relativism of values and life priorities, deals with the acknowledgment of and tolerance for value differences and the relativity of the values held by individuals and society. Wisdom, of course, is not meant to imply full-blown relativity of values and value-related priorities. On the contrary, it includes an explicit concern with the topic of virtue and the common good. However, aside from the recognition of certain universal values (Kekes, 1995), value-relative knowledge, judgment, and advice are part of the essence of wisdom (2000: 126).

What exactly is the distinction between universal values and relative values? What are universal values and how do we know? A focus on reflective capacities (rather than knowledge of the good) might provide sufficient answer to these questions without making prescriptive (or normative) assumptions. If reflective capacities enable us to engage in sorting out which values are universal and which are subjective or parochial, then we can look for these capacities as evidence of wisdom. Moreover, we can do this even if we don’t have a criterion for distinguishing universal and relative values.

Second, some psychological research seems to pose problems for the idea that we can improve our values by reflecting. Timothy Wilson’s work on reflecting on reasons seems to cause certain problems (see Nahmias 2007 for problems related to autonomy), as does, Jonathan Haidt’s work on the causal irrelevance of reasoning to our moral judgments. I think philosophers ought to be concerned about the psychological assumptions that underlie philosophical conceptions of normative notions such as the virtue of wisdom. If our normative notions are supposed to have, ultimately, some practical upshot, we cannot ignore the psychology. Hence I’m concerned about these studies from Wilson, Haidt, and others, and keen to discover what other research in psychology might bear on these questions about the role of reflection in wisdom. Of course, the kind of reasoning that is shown to be irrelevant or unfruitful by psychological studies is not the only kind of reasoning or reflection there is (see my 2009 and Bortolotti forthcoming for discussions that emphasize this point). What I would like to do is to use the empirical research to help shape a picture of reflection that is psychologically possible and beneficial. Toward this aim, I would be particularly interested in hearing about research on reflection (on values, on life-plans, on self-conceptions) that tells us about (1) how people might develop and improve their capacities for such reflection, or (2) how reflection on values is related to well-being indicators. For example, I am currently looking into therapies like narrative therapy and cognitive behavior therapy, because these seem to be programs that encourage a certain kind of reflection on one’s life for the purpose of improving well-being.

"The Role of Reflection in Practical Wisdom"

- Valerie Tiberius, Professor of Philosophy, University of Minnesota

REFERENCES

Baltes and Staudinger (2000) “Wisdom: A Metaheuristic (Pragmatic) to Orchestrate Mind and Virtue Toward Excellence”, American Psychologist Vol. 55, No. 1, 122-136.

Bortolotti, L. (Forthcoming). “The epistemic benefits of reason giving”. Theory & Psychology.

Nahmias, E. (2007) “Autonomous Agency and Social Psychology.” In Cartographies of the Mind: Philosophy and Psychology in Intersection, ed. by M. Marraffa, M. Caro, and F. Ferretti (Springer) 169-185.

Haidt, J. (2001). The emotional dog and its rational tail: A social intuitionist approach to moral judgment. Psychological Review. 108, 814-834.

Tiberius (2009) “The Reflective Life: Wisdom and Happiness for Real People,” forthcoming in Lisa Bortolotti (ed.) Philosophy and Happiness (Palgrave).

Wilson, T. D. & Dunn, D. S. (1986). Effects of introspection on attitude‑behavior consistency: Analyzing reasons versus focusing on feelings. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 22, 249‑263.

Wilson, T. D., Hodges, S. D., & LaFleur, S. J. (1984). Effects of Analyzing Reasons on Attitude‑Behavior Consistency. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 47(1).

Wilson, T. D., Lisle, D., Schooler, J., Hodges, S. D., Klaaren, K. J., & LaFleur, S. J. (1993). Introspecting about reasons can reduce post‑choice satisfaction. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 19, 331‑339.

Photo from Flickr by GreenNetizen.

What makes a decision wise?

wattawa — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 18:57:37 GMT

Wisdom: “It’s the Context, Stupid.”

In his recent blog “Can wisdom be taught with words?” Howard Nusbaum points to research suggesting that intelligence is context-specific, and Howard builds on this idea to propose that wisdom, too, may be “specific to particular contexts.” I think not only that wisdom is context-specific but also that research clarifying the relation of wisdom to its context would represent an important step toward answering the question of whether wisdom can be taught.

In brief, it is not sufficient to say that wisdom is context-specific unless we argue further that only particular aspects or problems within that context are able to prompt responses that could appropriately be called wise. Howard mentions an example from the Berlin Wisdom Paradigm that allows me to illustrate my point, the situation of giving advice to a pregnant teenager. One could imagine giving the young woman sensible advice about conversing with the father. One could imagine giving intelligent scientific advice about reproductive health. One could imagine giving prudent advice about all sorts of things. But what aspects of the situation might be said to call for or elicit wise advice? I tend to think that wise advice would be advice that helped the young woman resituate her immediate circumstance in a broader frame of reference than her own relatively brief life experience might afford. Beyond the immediately ensuing months, how might this pregnancy relate to her longer-term joy, remorse, meaning, aspiration, and responsibilities? Wisdom, in such cases, encourages taking a wider perspective on matters in the very moment of anxiety or crisis that tempts us to narrow the focus of our attention or the range of our choices.

This suggests that to find out whether wisdom can be taught, we probably need to ask whether and how a style or practice of contextual reasoning can be taught. Wisdom as a habit of reasoning about situations would be a sort of mental training or discipline that trained us to identify and address those aspects of a “context” that were not amenable to resolution through technical knowledge, the straightforward application of general principles, or standard operating procedures. Wisdom is the habit of reasoning required when we need fresh ideas about what to do. At the limit, wisdom is the habit of reasoning required when there is nothing we can do.

- Clark Gilpin, Margaret E. Burton Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Christianity and Theology in the Divinity School, University of Chicago

(photo taken from Idea-Listic at Flikr Creative Commons)

Wisdom: addition through subtraction?

wattawa — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 20:52:47 GMT

I just came back from our first conference of “wisdom scholars” in Chicago, and was fascinated by the topics that the wisdom grant winners are investigating. I thought I would try to blog about a topic that allowed me to mention several of them.

Wisdom commonly is thought of as something that one accumulates slowly over time. This idea is consistent with the near-universal notion that the elders in a society are the repositories of wisdom (even if they don’t know how to tweet), due to the accumulation of life lessons from experience.

But could increases in wisdom also come about via subtraction? As the Chicago architecture tour guide said about modernist metal and glass skyscrapers, sometimes less is more. To be specific, wisdom sometimes may be increased by unlearning certain behaviors, ignoring information, inhibiting impulses, or even avoiding thinking too much.

Perhaps the most time-honored approaches to wisdom involve the supernatural. Proverbs 1:7 states that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Christians and adherents of other faiths often assert that real wisdom must involve the moral and spiritual realm, and that human sinful nature is unable to discern true wisdom without divine assistance (e.g., by help from the Holy Spirit). Even without reference to a deity, wisdom may be compromised or lacking if there is no immortal soul that fears the eternal consequences of foolishness. Ryan Hanley shared a quotation by Louis de Jaucourt: “only considerations of eternity contain motives sufficient to elevate [the soul] above all weaknesses.” Therefore, wisdom in these cases involves renouncing one’s worldly motives and perhaps even one’s capacity to acquire wisdom without divine assistance.

That may stretch my point of subtraction too far. So, let me turn to a simpler and more literal type of subtraction. Sometimes considering less information helps us make wiser (e.g., more rational and effective) decisions. We live in an information-saturated age. This allows, for example, my wife and me to solve a disagreement by rapidly googling a particular topic. (It’s enormously gratifying to be proved right within seconds, and even being proved wrong is less painful relative to a ten-minute discussion that one still ultimately loses.) However, a critical part of wisdom involves knowing when to stop gathering more information and take action before it’s too late (the recent market crash comes to mind). For example, computer scientist Ankur Gupta is studying wisdom as data compression and emphasizes the importance of “wisdom in time.”

Psychologists have studied heuristics, or mental shortcuts for making judgments, that usually are useful and efficient (you get the right answer without a laborious search for and consideration of a great deal of information), though occasionally using these heuristics leads us astray (see the representativeness heuristic example below).

The recognition heuristic (Goldstein & Gigerenzer, 2002) involves using a general sense of familiarity to make a judgment; relying on this heuristic sometimes leads to a superior judgment relative to basing a judgment on additional information. In one demonstration of the recognition heuristic, American students were somewhat less accurate in judging which of two U.S. cities had a greater population than they were in making similar judgments of German cities! They had to rely on a general sense of familiarity to stand in for the information about the population of the German cities, but that turned out to be a fairly successful strategy. The additional information they had about U.S. cities apparently hindered them from rendering accurate judgments.

The representative heuristic is opposite in some respects, because it operates when additional information leads people to make a stereotypical—and inaccurate—judgment. Consider this example. Hal is short and slim and likes to write poetry. Is it more likely that he is a truck driver or a classics professor? You said classics professor, didn’t you? (Unless you, like my students often do, decided to go against your intuition, suspecting some sort of trick.) When I try this exercise with my students, 90% answer that Hal must be a classics professor rather than a truck driver. I then ask them to estimate the number of truck drivers versus classics professors in the U.S. We proceed to estimate the percentage of members of those professions who are both short and slim, and then the percentage that writes poetry. Even if it’s true that the vast majority of truck drivers is neither short nor slim, and wouldn’t be caught dead writing poetry, there are so many truck drivers and so few classics professors that Hal still is much more likely to be a truck driver. If I had simply provided the minimal information that “Hal lives in the U.S.,” everyone would have said Hal is probably a truck driver! More information led people to use their stereotype about portly, poetry-eschewing truck drivers (contrasted against the stereotype of slim, iambic pentameter-loving classics professors), which led to a poor decision. Less information in this case leads to a wiser judgment. Wise individuals tend to know when to stop gathering information and just make a decision—time to sell that stock or propose to that romantic partner before it’s too late! Even if they are exposed to some information, such as hurtful gossip about another, wise people know to discount the information.

Ignoring some information is one thing, but what about thinking less? Recent research by Tim Wilson and colleagues has highlighted that sometimes less introspection leads to better judgments. (This is related to the type of “thinking without thinking” that Malcolm Gladwell has popularized in his book Blink.) It may be that greater introspection actually reduces the effectiveness of our adaptive unconscious. Obviously, it’s not always the case that explicit consideration of a problem leads to inferior judgments, so don’t consign an important decision to your unconscious and refuse to analyze or gather information on the problem. But one particularly fascinating frontier of wisdom research involves investigating the adaptive unconscious, and, relatedly, investigating limits to overt deliberation. Melissa Ferguson and Baruch Eitam are on this frontier, investigating wisdom as intuitive problem solving.

Wisdom surely includes more than correct judgments or decisions. Judith Glück currently is investigating a model of wisdom that includes emotion regulation. I think self-regulation in general plays a pre-eminent role in whether or not wise actions take place. Social psychologists have made wonderful discoveries in recent years regarding the principles of self-regulation or self-control, and I wish that schools (elementary through college) would teach these self-control principles to foster wisdom. Self-control is critical to help us unlearn bad habits and resist temptations (sometimes regarding evolutionarily-influenced predispositions such as our desire to eat lots of fat and sugar). Self-control also is an asset when one should inhibit negative responses to threats to one’s self-view (such as negative feedback by a teacher or romantic partner that may feel bad but actually be helpful for future growth). All of these examples include some form of unlearning or inhibition as a means toward pursuing a wise path

I’m certainly not denying that wisdom involves the addition of knowledge, principles, habits, counselors, and more. But I think that the path toward wisdom is a meandering one that also involves subtraction – three steps forward followed by two steps back. Sometimes the tortuous path temporarily takes you farther away from the ultimate goal, but it is nonetheless necessary in order to make progress.

-Jeffrey Green, Professor of Psychology, Virginia Commonwealth University

Photo from Flickr Creative Commons.

Could an 'explicit wisdom perspective' advance interdisciplinary research?

wattawa — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 19:54:39 GMT

The Defining Wisdom project was born from a concern that talk of wisdom has disappeared from a wide range of academic disciplines, and to their detriment. That wisdom has departed from the conversation is certainly true in the two worlds in which I work, economics and the law.

In this post I want to think about why—or to what extent—this happened. Have these fields turned their back on wisdom, or do they discuss it in different terms? And if the latter is the case, what are the gains from adopting a wisdom-centric perspective?

I should start by defining what I mean by wisdom. My take is simple: wisdom is 1) having a good understanding of what you know (and of what you do not know) and 2) using that understanding to achieve a good outcome; I will remain agnostic for now about what that good outcome should be. It is an admittedly broad definition, a potential concern I will come back to later.

My particular focus is less concerned with how individuals use knowledge to live the good life, and more with how higher-level social institutions channel knowledge to accomplish good outcomes. Think of it as “social wisdom,” as opposed to personal. I will assume that per-sonal and social wisdom are essentially analogous—whether I am right about that may be an interesting question, but one beyond the scope of this post.

With these definitions, it should not be surprising that economics has little to say about personal wisdom. The field generally declines to evaluate people’s preferences. After all, we have only one Latin maxim: de gustibus non est disputandem—there is no disputing tastes (although that is not exactly how Becker and Stigler (1977) famously used the phrase).

But social wisdom is a different matter. Economists often make policy recommendations, and these require some sort of normative basis (1). In general, economists take a utilitarian perspective. We remain silent about the value or merit of what makes people happy, but instead try to maximize that happiness, whatever its causes (2). In other words, economic policymakers are always considering how to channel people’s knowledge to achieve a particular view of the (social) good. This is basically social wisdom.

Law’s failure to discuss wisdom should be even more startling. At every turn, the law is deeply enmeshed with questions of right and wrong, good and bad. Substantive rules allocate rights, duties, costs, and benefits, all of which reflect, shape, and define what a good life is and how it should be led. In turn, the procedural rules are designed (at least in theory) to ensure that those substantive goals are accomplished, taking into account what people know and how they can use that knowledge.

Consider evidence law. For three centuries, lawyers, judges, and academics have struggled with how to use complex scientific evidence in the courtroom (Golan 2004). These debates clearly implicate issues of what we do and do not know: can jurors understand the evidence? Can we shape our procedures to help them understand it better?

But these debates also consider what a good legal system should do. For example, do we need to abandon our commitment to adversarialism—which embodies a host of normative values besides getting to the truth—in this particular area? How do we balance, say, the value of accuracy with that of litigant autonomy?

Thus legal actors have been debating the social wisdom of the legal system—and how to make it wiser—for centuries, just without using the word or thinking about it in such terms. (As an aside, so too have economists who have asked how to make the world more utilitarian-efficient.)

It is clearly a debate that has much to offer to wisdom research. It forces us, for example, to think about how lay actors can proceed wisely at the outer edges of their epistemic competence. It also asks whether a system like the Anglo-American law, which relies on self-centered competition, can come to wise decisions, or whether some sort of “outside” guidance necessary—an instance of the more general question of whether the “marketplace of ideas” is a powerfully accurate or perni-ciously misguided metaphor. And so on. All these issue help us better understand what wisdom is and how we can achieve it.

But what does wisdom research have to offer to this legal debate?

It is clear that epistemology has much to offer the law and social sciences. It is also clear that debates about what the good should be do as well. But do we gain something more from consciously linking them together under an explicit wisdom perspective (EWP)? More precisely, does EWP offer policy fields enough to encourage them to change, or at least expand, their current and long-held traditions for how to think about wisdom-related issues?

The answer to this question may shed light the broader issue of why wisdom is not discussed in so many fields. Few interdisciplinary efforts are selfless: One field will ignore another if it cannot see much to gain from it. Statistics has much to offer the law, for example, but not vice versa. As a result, lawyers increasingly wrestle with what it means for a sample to suffer from selection bias, but statisticians rarely wring their hands over what “intermediate scrutiny” means.

I have been able to come up with at least two benefits that flow from EWP to the social sciences. But they are thin, and I am hoping to find something meatier.

First, EWP may introduce some much-needed clarity. By phrasing a question in terms of wisdom, the analyst is reminded to focus on three things: the positive question of what people know, the normative question of the goal that knowledge should be used to advance, and the “conditionally positive” policy question of how to use that knowledge to achieve the goal (3). Far too often these three distinct issues are blurred or elided. Authors fail to address the importance (or even the existence) of their normative priors, for example, or they make heroic—and unacknowledged—assumptions about how people do or can act.

Second, there may also be some normative punch to framing questions in terms of wisdom. Wisdom may not be a neutral idea of using knowledge to advance any good, but rather using knowledge to advance a particular concept of the good (one that surely varies from place to place, from culture to culture). In other words, the question “That outcome is good, but is it wise?” has meaning. Thinking in terms of wisdom may force us to reconsider normative values we may have other-wise applied reflexively or with little thought (4).

But can wisdom contribute even more? Does a deeper benefit emerge if I lift my assumption that social and individual wisdom can be treated roughly the same? Am I understating the importance of the normative reminder that a wisdom-based approach provides? If its benefit is from reminding us of a particular concept of the good, what is that concept, and does it have meaning in a pluralistic society (the question Valerie raised)?

Or, in the end, is the relationship more fruitful in one direction than the other—and if so, what does that suggest about the future of interdisciplinary work on wisdom?

These questions are by no means rhetorical. Unlike the previous posts, I come bearing only questions, and I am excited to see what thoughts people have in the comments.

by John Pfaff, Associate Professor of Law at Fordham University

(1) Not all economists do. Some recognize a science/policy divide and attempt to study only the former. For these, Frank Knight (allegedly) said it best: “As an economist, I cannot tell you whether you should adopt food price controls, but I can tell you that if you do you should expect widespread hunger” (Mashaw 1997).
(2) I have always found it ironic that economics is called the Dismal Science, given that all economists want to do is make people happy. (Or perhaps not ironic, if Levy (2002) is right that economics received its nickname by siding with the anti-slavery forces in 19th-Century England.)
(3) I say “conditionally positive” because taking the normative goal as a given, the policy recommendation is a positive statement. If you want to drive from New York City to Chicago as quickly as possible—that’s the normative goal—you should take I-80W, a positive statement conditional on the goal.
(4) If this is right, then it suggests one possible concern with a proposal Valerie made in her post—a proposal that I almost wholly agree with. Valerie suggests that instead of asking “what is the good?,” we should ask “do people have the power to reflect on the good?,” a substantially less normative question. But while that is surely a good plan for bringing other disciplines to wisdom research, it may not help bring wisdom research to other fields if “what is the good” is a major contribution of EWP to those disciplines.

Sources

Becker, Gary S., and George J. Stigler. 1977. “De Gustibus Non Est Dispu-tandem.” American Economic Review 67: 76–90.
Golan, Tal. 2004. Laws of Men and Laws of Nature. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Levy, David M. 2002. How the Dismal Science Got Its Name: Classical Economics and the Ur-Text of Racial Politics. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Mashaw, Jerry L. Greed, Chaos & Governance. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Photo by Levi

Can wisdom be taught with words?

wattawa — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 17:26:06 GMT

Is wisdom a characteristic of a person or is it a skill that anyone could acquire? The idea of the wise person like Socrates or King Solomon has figured prominently in many cultures and suggests wisdom may be viewed as an individual trait. Even when wisdom is viewed as learnable, people often think that wisdom takes a lifetime to acquire. Both of these views of wisdom suggest that it cannot really be taught. In this respect wisdom might be understood as similar to the way many people think about intelligence—you either have it or you don’t. Just as psychologists talk about “g” (Spearman, 1904) as a general measure of intelligence (although see Sternberg, 2002), there could be some property “w” that reflects the general wisdom of a person.

However, if we move beyond the folk psychology of intelligence, research has suggested that intelligence is context-specific and even mutable (Sternberg, 1987). The suggestion that wisdom may be specific to particular contexts and knowledge (e.g., Sternberg, 1998) and may represent a kind of expertise (Baltes & Staudinger, 1993), also suggests that perhaps wisdom can be learned—and thus taught (Sternberg, 2001), even without wading through decades of experience. But if wisdom can be learned, how would we teach it (see Reznitskaya & Sternberg, 2004)? For that matter, how can we know wisdom when it is manifest in an individual? In order to teach wisdom, we need some metric by which to measure learning.

If wisdom depends on knowledge, the classroom might serve as a kind of learning paradigm. Indeed, we often talk about imparting wisdom to others and the importance of words of wisdom and Socratic dialogue could be viewed in just this way. People seek wisdom through sage advice, and stories and fables are written to convey wisdom. Clearly language could play an important role in teaching wisdom and language is also important in measuring wisdom scientifically. The Berlin Wisdom Paradigm (Kunzmann & Baltes, 2005) depends entirely on the use of language. People read stories about real-life situations and must give appropriate advice. For example, you might read a story about a teenage girl’s pregnancy andbe asked about the advice to give her. Your analysis of the situation is scored for mentioning a variety of factors that should be taken into account for wise advice.

Although this might suggest some close connection between language and wisdom, for most people, language is simply a communication channel. Language plays an important role in any kind of social interaction and therefore its only function with respect to wisdom may be the medium of communication. Thinking about language as a communication channel, we think about words and sentences as a vehicle for transporting mental states and attitudes from one mind to another. The general scientific study of language accords with this view. Words are viewed as symbols that stand for concepts and sentences combine these words into logical propositions through syntax. Indeed, scientists generally think there are two channels of communication in spoken language. One is the propositional structure that symbolically conveys ideas and descriptions and is used to ask questions and issue imperatives; the second is the prosodic structure that analogically conveys attitudes and emotions and intentions. If someone says, “Hilary Clinton is our new Secretary of State,” with rising intonation, she may be conveying incredulity.

Can wisdom be conveyed by just these two channels of language? Wisdom involves the interaction of cognitive processes with emotional processes and social values. It seems difficult to imagine that this combination of meaning and feeling can be transmitted effectively if language is limited in this way. But perhaps language can do more than just send symbolic forms with an attiudinal value attached. Haidt’s (2003) research on moral dumbfounding suggests that we can use language to convey situations that directly reach into our deep affective reactions and for which we cannot respond adequately using language. Listening to some speeches such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s speech at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963 or Barbara Jordan’s 1976 keynote address to the Democratic National Convention or Mario Cuomo’s 1984 keynote address at the Democratic National Convention (see these at http://www.americanrhetoric.com/newtop100speeches.htm), there is an impact that goes beyond understanding the speaker’s intended meaning and attitude. While it may be that we can learn lessons from the propositional structure of language, perhaps imparting wisdom also depends on language impact or an effect beyond meaning.

It is interesting that this very issue has been debated during the recent Presidential Primary. Clinton argued that words can be understood and evaluated but in the end, they are just words. Obama argued that speech has the power to impel action that goes beyond simply agreeing with an argument (see video clips below). While these are not scientific arguments, they outline an interesting question about the nature of language and its potential connection to wisdom. Some models of nonverbal communication (e.g., Owren & Bachorowski, 2003) suggest that there might be a more direct route for language to affect the listener. Shintel (Shintel et al., 2006, Shintel & Nusbaum, 2007, 2008) has shown that speakers vary properties of their speech to analogically gesture acoustically descriptions of events and objects and listeners can understand these acoustic gestures. Analogical acoustic gestures in speech represent a different channel of communication from symbolic-propositional and analogic-attiudinal and suggest that we may need a different model of language to understand communication.

[Video]

Teaching wisdom may require more than conveying ideas that can be understood. The difference between a speech that is understood and a speech with impact seems clear in subjective experience, although understanding this difference scientifically will pose a challenge. Is a clear and understandable message sufficient to teach wisdom or must such instruction rise to a different level of impact on the listener? Understanding how to communicate wisdom is a fundamental scientific problem and addressing this problem may reveal shortcomings in our current conceptualizations of language.

Howard Nusbaum, Co-Director
Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience
Department of Psychology
The University of Chicago

References

Baltes, P. B., & Staudinger, U. M. (1993). The search for a psychology of wisdom. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 2, 75–80.

Haidt, J. (2003). The moral emotions. In R. J. Davidson, K. R. Scherer, & H. H. Goldsmith (Eds.), Handbook of affective sciences. Oxford: Oxford University Press.(pp. 852-870).

Kunzmann, U., & Baltes, P. B. (2005). The psychology of wisdom: Theoretical and empirical challenges. In R. J. Sternberg & J. Jordan (Eds.), Handbook of wisdom: Psychological perspectives (pp. 110–135). New York: Cambridge University Press.

Owren, M. J., & Bachorowski, J.-A. (2003). Reconsidering the evolution of nonlinguistic communication: The case of laughter. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 27, 183-200.

Reznitskaya, A., & Sternberg, R. J. (2004). Teaching students to make wise judgments: The
“teaching for wisdom” program. In P. A. Linley, & S. Joseph (Eds.) Positive psychology in
practice, (pp. 181-196). New York: Wiley.

Shintel, H., Nusbaum, H. C., & Okrent, A. (2006). Analog acoustic expression in speech communication. Journal of Memory and Language, 55, 167-177.

Shintel, H., & Nusbaum, H. C. (2007). The sound of motion in spoken language: Visual information conveyed by acoustic properties of speech. Cognition, 105, 681-690.

Shintel, H., & Nusbaum, H. C. (2008). Moving to the speed of sound: Context modulation of the effect of acoustic properties of speech. Cognitive Science, 32, 1063-1074.

Spearman, C. (1904). "General intelligence," objectively determined and measured . American Journal of Psychology, 15, 201-293.

Sternberg, R. J. (1987). Teaching intelligence: The application of cognitive psychology to the
improvement of intellectual skills. In J. B. Baron & R. J. Sternberg (Eds.), Teaching thinking
skills: Theory and practice (pp. 182–218). New York: Freeman.

Sternberg, R. J. (1998). A balance theory of wisdom. Review of General Psychology, 2, 347-365.

Sternberg, R. J. (2001). Why schools should teach for wisdom: The balance theory of wisdom in
educational settings. Educational Psychologist, 36(4), 227–245.

Sternberg, R. J. (2002). Beyond g: The theory of successful intelligence. In R. J. Sternberg, & E.
L. Grigorenko (Eds.), The general factor of intelligence: How general is it? (pp. 447–479).
Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

What is wise counsel? Part III

wattawa — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 20:58:06 GMT

by Keith Whitaker, Defining Wisdom Grantee
Wise Counsel Research—www.wisecounselresearch.org

To continue our discussion of wisdom and wise counsel in the context of comedy, on June 1 our reading group discussed Kingsley Amis’ Lucky Jim.

We began with the question, “What is Jim’s luck?” and with the humorous quotation from Aristotle’s Eudemian Ethics, “The wise are luckier than others.” This conjunction led us naturally to the further questions, “Is Jim wise? And if so, what is his wisdom?”

In contrast, Jim appears to believe himself a loser. He seems fatalistic. Perhaps part of his problem is that Jim starts the novel appearing to believe that doing the right thing is divorced from being happy; that is, he appears ascetic. But by the end he appears to see that happiness and morality can go hand-in-hand.

How does he make this development? We noted the role of counsel in the novel. It is not extensive, but Jim’s turn seems rooted in the “advice” he receives from Carol Goldsmith, another character who appears to look at herself as a sort of “loser.” Is perhaps seeing oneself as a “loser”—set apart from the rest of society—an important element of wisdom or at least insight?

Despite Jim’s fatalism, asceticism, or “loserdom,” though, we like him! We compared Jim to other famous characters such as Sydney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities, Pierre in War and Peace, and Rick in Casablanca. All three share Jim’s sarcasm and his “outsider” status, but none immediately appeal to us (at least those of us in this group!) and the other characters the way he does.

Part of the difference appeared to us to be that Jim, especially in his thinking, gets the best lines in the book. Amis poured his wit into Jim. In this respect we likened Jim to Wodehouse’s Bertie. And certainly wit—linguistically as well as in reality—appears to be a sort of wisdom. Further confirmation for our search for wisdom and wise counsel within the comic realm …

Photo from Wikipedia.

What is wise counsel? Part II.

wattawa — Wed, 26 May 2010 21:05:33 GMT

by Keith Whitaker, Defining Wisdom Grantee
Wise Counsel Research—www.wisecounselresearch.org

After our recent conversation about the Fool in King Lear, our reading group decided to pursue wisdom in a comic context, with the character of Jeeves—the seemingly omniscient “gentleman’s gentleman”—in the Bertie Wooster novels by P.G. Wodehouse. We began with two questions: What are Jeeves’ motivations? And how imaginable is Jeeves in any other setting?

We noted that Jeeves’ calls his own special knowledge “the psychology of the individual.” Jeeves observes characters and events, and with a light touch (or a toss of a cow creamer) he sets things in motion. His near-omniscience may make him seem “creepy,” distant, or hidden. It also appears that he has little or no eros, or deep longing for something beyond possibly a pleasant cruise or a successful side-bet here or there. What do you think are the motivations of the wise counselors to the great?

Could Jeeves exist elsewhere than the rarified world of the Wodehouse English aristocracy? Would he fit with Kim Jong Il’s courtiers in North Korea? Or as the executive assistant in an international corporation? Maybe he has no place in a world in which people lack confidence as masters, since they are used only to machines getting things done? Where, if anywhere, do you think the quiet but wise servant finds a home today?

We ended our call with a discussion of the question, Is comedy truer than other dramatic forms at presenting wisdom? Bertie, for example, comes across as a light and unserious character. But perhaps it is his capacity for comedy—his wisdom?—that allows him to rule and be ruled well? Would you say comedy offers a more complete picture of wisdom than other forms?

For more on Jeeves, I’d refer readers to our portrait of him at www.wisecounselresearch.org. For our next call, we’re sticking with the comic vein and discussing Jim, of Kingsley Amis’ wonderful Lucky Jim.

Image: Stephen Fry (left) as Jeeves and Hugh Laurie as Bertie Wooster in the TV series Jeeves and Wooster. Source: Wikipedia.

How are happiness and wisdom related?

wattawa — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 19:30:02 GMT

“Defining Wisdom” is an interdisciplinary research program within the Arete Initiative at The University of Chicago. Twenty groups of researchers from a wide range of disciplines have been awarded two-year grants under the program to investigate the nature and benefits of wisdom. As a group, we have been wrestling with some fundamental issues related to wisdom, including how we might understand the many different ways that the word has been used—by ancient and modern philosophers, by researchers within our network, by laypeople in everyday conversation, and by others. As a part of our ongoing effort to understand what wisdom is, we have had a number of large- and small-group conversations focused on different conceptions or aspects of wisdom. One issue that has emerged as important to the research group, for example, is a distinction that Aristotle makes between theoretical wisdom (sophia) and practical wisdom (phronesis). We recently had a small-group discussion in which we revisited Aristotle’s original definitions of sophia and phronesis and discussed how he was actually defining each type, how they relate to each other at a deeper level, and whether each of our research projects seems more aligned with one or the other (we concluded that many of us seem to be focusing more on practical wisdom). We also read a paper by a modern philosopher who discussed how conceptions of wisdom have evolved through the ages, from Aristotle to the present day. What is written below came out of my reflections on the process of reading the two papers and discussing with my colleagues from different disciplines two main questions: 1) How have the meanings of “wisdom” evolved over the ages in response to different socio-historical trends and events? and 2) What kinds of distinctions between different types of wisdom seem most useful at present, especially in understanding how our interdisciplinary research projects relate to one another? The main idea that came out of this process for me is the thought that instead of trying to figure out how to define wisdom in terms of what “ingredients” are required for it to exist, perhaps we should begin with the desired “wise outcome”—greater happiness for more people more of the time—and work backwards to figure out what factors will help us drive more reliably toward that outcome.

What if we’ve all been trying to define wisdom from the wrong end? That is, what if the critical questions don’t have to do with the relationships between science and theology/morality/values or even wisdom and practical wisdom? Rather, what if all these considerations are merely derivative of the relationship between wisdom and happiness?

Consider this hypothetical scenario: We are in ancient times. There are no video games, no Sudoku, no movies, few manuscripts to read, almost no pleasure books (and few literate people to read them), and limited travel (which is more dangerous and arduous than exciting and fun). What do people do for fun? Possibly, they hang out with friends; play games, sports, and music; have sex; or do drugs. It is worth noting that the list would have probably been much shorter than it is today.

With happiness at a relative scarcity, it would have been natural to try to understand its causes, and this would have been a useful thing to do to get more of it for more people, more of the time. However, for the ancients there was little of what we would today recognize as science, and virtually no psychology—other than data gathered through introspection and interpreted through reflection. For this reason, the ancients started with what they had—they reflected on what seemed to make people happy. They recognized that some things made people happy temporarily (games, music), but didn’t have the same sort of cumulative or sustainable character as other sources of happiness (generating new knowledge, creating policies that make life better, etc.). Finally, some things actually led to a kind of “false” happiness (drugs, any addiction). We, too, make these distinctions because some things that make people happy are clearly more noble than others, owing to properties like the degree to which they are cumulative (can be shared with others and expand the playground of ideas for everyone) and their distributive scope (better the common good as opposed to looking out for one’s own self interest).

So it turns out that we can’t define the causes of happiness entirely in terms of observable behaviors, because some things like thinking and problem-solving, which make some people happy, are not observable, while other things might make the person who invented it happy but not the person who just executes it. Einstein, for example, probably had a great deal more fun coming up with and applying the theory of relativity than most physics students have while using the equations to solve canned homework problems. The problem is that the state of being happy is itself unobservable—there are behavioral correlates, but the correlation is imperfect and contingent on latent variables.

In an effort to make sense of our experience of happiness, we elaborate a category system to try to capture the kinds of distinctions just described. When we do this we end up with a theory of the causes of happiness in terms of certain kinds of activity (e.g., thinking, acting, producing) in relation to certain other traits or characteristics of the person (e.g., knowledge, experience, intellect, values, character) and with certain conditions on the subject matter (e.g., with respect to permanence of ideas and breadth of impact). That is, among all states of happiness we identify the “best” kinds of happiness and observe that they depend upon sets of external conditions (on the type of activity and its object) and internal conditions (knowledge, capabilities, values, motivations). But we recognize that there’s something else required—a characteristic of the individual that is basically their “capacity for happiness.” Imagine two people on twin worlds, identical in every respect except one: one twin has a much greater capacity for experiencing happiness than the other. It’s hard to imagine the unhappy one spending much time exercising these gifts if exercising them does not make that person happy. And it’s hard to think of the unhappy person as being as virtuous as the person who takes joy in doing such good. The special state in which these factors come together—the capacity to engage fully in happiness-producing activity as well as the capacity to experience the happiness that results from such activity—we call that state “wisdom.”

In his Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle wrote, “wisdom produces happiness the way health produces health.” Perhaps he meant that health is a state that supports the kinds of activities (e.g., exercise) that put people in a state of health, just as wisdom is a state that supports the kinds of activities (e.g., contemplation, judgment, problem solving) that put people in a state of happiness. Even here we have recognized at least two major divisions of happiness-producing activities—happiness that comes from thinking in a certain way and happiness that comes from acting in a certain way. The two seem to derive the happiness from different sources, so we might give them different names (sophia and phronesis). The implication of my analysis is that the concept linking these distinct instances of “wisdom” is not necessarily any particular relationship between the underlying networks of causes (scientific knowledge, values, skills, etc.), but the fact that both states reliably produce happiness, which, as I hypothesized at the outset, might well have been the goal of all this philosophical analysis in the first place.

Simply put, what if the only relationship between sophia and phronesis is that they both produce different varietals of the “best” kind of happiness but through completely different behavioral-cognitive-social pathways? Wisdom, in that case, in both its forms, would be defined roughly as “the capacity for engaging expertly in certain kinds of activities associated with the most noble kinds of happiness, combined with the capacity to experience happiness while so engaged.”

The world has changed quite a bit since Aristotle wrote about wisdom. Let’s consider the example of sophia (or theoretical wisdom). I would imagine that the physics research of Thales and Anaxagoras would have been great fun—building from first principles, making unexpected discoveries about hidden relationships under conditions where there’s lots of low-hanging fruit once you find your way in to the right conceptual terrain. Today, physicists are leaving physics in droves—I spoke to one physicist recently who described it as a domain in which the low-hanging fruit has all been picked-over. Today, perhaps it simply isn’t as easy to experience happiness doing the same kinds of things Thales and Anaxagoras would likely have been doing in the domain of physics.

Additionally, one could imagine that when wisdom was present in ancient times, it had to be more localized in one person than it does today. The ancient philosopher-scientist would presumably have had to carry out such activities as 1) deciding what line of inquiry to pursue, 2) discovering the knowledge, and 3) judging its quality. In modern science, much of the “judging” function has been absorbed into disciplinary knowledge (e.g., best practices for maximizing reliability and validity) and disciplinary structure (e.g., funding policies about what science is worth doing, organization of the research activity around stable paradigms where the next step is logically defined by what has come before, peer-reviewed journals that determine what is in and what is out, etc.). In this sense the scientific domain as a system might be just as wise as ever, even if many of the individual practitioners might seem to be quite a bit less wise than their ancient counterparts. The independent constitutive factors that used to coexist in the ancient philosopher-scientist are now distributed through the scientific system in a different way. The point is, if we try to compare the wisdom of individuals in antiquity with the wisdom of individuals in the 21st century, even though it seems like the most “obvious” comparison to make, we might nonetheless be comparing apples to oranges. A more appropriate comparison might be between the wisdom of the ancient and modern scientists in the context of their respective scientific systems. It just so happens that in antiquity we end up looking at the individual philosopher-scientist anyway because there wasn’t much of a system beyond the individual. But this shift of perspective would require us to think about the wisdom of modern scientists differently in relation to the ancients.

The space of happiness-producing activities has also grown tremendously in the intervening millennia. Today we do have video games, movies, candy, novels, iPods, global political challenges, and entirely new scientific domains opening up, among other things. This will require us to expand the original analysis to accommodate these instances and categories related to happiness that did not exist in ancient times.

To summarize: Under this hypothetical analysis, if we want to define wisdom for the modern day instead of trying to map an ancient network of conceptual, referential, and normative relationships onto a very different world from the one in which they were produced, perhaps we should return to first principles the way Aristotle did and ask:

•   What activities make people happy?
•   Which of these happiness-producing activities are the “best” or “most noble” ones?
•   What are the characteristics of individuals that give them the capacity to both engage in these most noble activities at an expert level and to experience happiness while doing so?

The people who have all the necessary capacities and characteristics to engage at an expert level in these noble activities and who also experience happiness as a consequence of their activity would (applying the updated version of the original theory) be considered wise people. Such a “science of wisdom” would be fundamentally interdisciplinary—potentially drawing on any or all of ontology, philosophy of min, epistemology, education, positive psychology, affective science, cognitive science, organizational science, moral development, moral philosophy, neuroscience, cognitive neuroscience, cultural anthropology, etc. in order to map all the parts necessary to define wisdom for the modern age in this way.

I would like to stress that my collaborator, Seana Moran, and I consider the kind of analysis that centers on the individual “wise person” to be a special case of a more general analysis that focuses on the wisdom in the system, in which overall happiness at the systems level may increase or decrease as a result of collective or distributed action, even when no one wise person exists in the system. The contrast between ancient science and modern science above is a case in point. That is, it may well be true that the proportion of wise people (under Aristotle’s definition) in the world has gone down. But we would emphatically argue that that does not imply that the level of wisdom in the world has gone down. It seems obvious that there are ways in which the elements of wisdom that used to exist only in individuals in ancient times (and then only rarely all together) have been externalized and absorbed into some of our symbolic representations, institutions, etc. This “deconstruction” of the elements of wisdom at the individual level is not necessarily a bad thing, either—as long as there is a new synthesis of the constitutive factors at a higher level to compensate for it and perhaps even to provide additional benefits not available at the individual level.

-Michael Connell, Institute for Knowledge Design, Stanford University, co-PI with Seana Moran on Defining Wisdom Project "All the Wiser."

References

Aristotle; Crisp, Roger (Editor). Aristotle: Nichomachean Ethics. Port Chester, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2000, Book VI.

Harrison, Peter. " Disjoining Wisdom and Knowledge: Science, Theology and the Making of Western Modernity," Wisdom or Knowledge? Science, Theology and Cultural Dynamics, Meisinger, Hubert, Drees, Willem B., and Liana, Zbigniew (eds), T & T Clark International, Continuum Imprint, London, 2006, Chapter 4, pp. 51-73.

Photo from Flickr Creative Commons.

Wisdom and Tradition: Aristotle

wattawa — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 20:51:33 GMT

As a philosophical concept and cultural ideal, wisdom has enjoyed a long history. It has also acquired a prestige such that one cannot speak of “bad wisdom” or “undesirable wisdom.” Wisdom is good – and where it is lacking, the lack is always regretted.

Part of what makes wisdom prestigious is its elusive quality – we know it when we see it even though we cannot always make it seen. This elusiveness is also what makes wisdom difficult to define. And the challenge of defining wisdom today is made even greater by academic specialization, which raises considerable challenges to those who would wish to recover or establish a common language for discussing an already elusive concept.

Fortunately, there is a record to consult, a history from which we can take our bearings. One strategy for coming to terms with how we might define wisdom today is then to revisit this historical record. Doing so can particularly afford us a deeper, genealogical understanding of our own work as contemporary wisdom researchers, and also has the potential to offer new points of reference for articulating and coordinating our own understandings of what wisdom is and where it is found.

In this spirit, eight members of the Defining Wisdom project gathered by phone and by computer to discuss one of wisdom’s greatest spokesmen: Aristotle. Aristotle dedicated the sixth book of his Nicomachean Ethics to an inquiry into the nature of the intellectual virtues. In the course of this discussion Aristotle offers definitions of wisdom that have proven to be among the most historically influential – a significance which makes them a natural place by which to establish our bearings as wisdom researchers today.

Aristotle identified five distinct intellectual virtues in his account in Book 6, three of which have a particularly pronounced relevance for the enterprise of wisdom research: sophia, phronesis, and episteme. Aristotle’s account begins with episteme, or “scientific knowledge.” Its proper sphere is the things that are “necessary” – the sort of things that Aristotle (in Roger Crisp’s translation) says “cannot be otherwise.” Aristotle then turns to phronesis, or “practical wisdom,” which enables its possessor to deliberate well “about what is good and beneficial,” and thereby enables one to see “what conduces to living well as a whole.” Its particular sphere is politics: phronesis is indispensible not just to individuals who wish to live a good life, but also to rulers of communities charged with deliberating about what is good and bad for a city or people.

Only after defining episteme and phronesis does Aristotle come to sophia, or wisdom simply. Of Aristotle’s intellectual virtues, sophia comes closest to embodying the sort of theoretical understanding with which many of us instinctively associate wisdom. At the same time, Aristotle’s definition is by no means simple: “wisdom is scientific knowledge, combined with intellect, of what is by nature most honorable.” Aristotle of course packs an enormous amount into his pithy definition; but particularly striking are his claims first that sophia is “the most precise of the sciences” (and thus presumably even more precise than episteme alone), and second that the subjects of sophia are the “most honorable matters.” Its subject matter thus seems to be matters elevated well above the matters of practical life – “things far more divine in nature than human beings,” including especially “the things constituting the cosmos.”

Aristotle’s nuanced delineations of these three separate categories could hardly fail to provoke a response from contemporary wisdom researchers – and he didn’t disappoint! Indeed one of the most important questions that arose in our consideration of his three categories was the question of our own self-definition: which of these categories in fact best captures the subject of our own inquiries as wisdom researchers? Several members of the group reported that their own research focused principally on the subjects Aristotle associates with practical wisdom: that is, with questions concerning how we make good decisions in matters relating to our own welfare.

At the same time, wisdom research might not be wholly ready to move away from sophia quite yet! As several group members noted, their own work was deeply engaged in the analysis not simply of “good outcomes,” but also with normative questions concerning both what constitutes a good outcome, and how norms that promote such outcomes are internalized. In this sense, it was noted, the study of wisdom necessarily also involves the study of “values.” And while these values might not have been – or even be capable of being – formulated in Aristotle’s terms of what is “most honorable,” such reflections reopen for us Aristotle’s own question of whether it is in fact possible to possess (or even to study) one of the intellectual virtues without also possessing (or studying) the others.

It should also be noted that Aristotle’s distinction between episteme and sophia was every bit as provocative as his distinction between phronesis and sophia. In defining episteme as separate from sophia while also defining sophia as the “most precise of the sciences,” Aristotle may provoke modern contributors to a “science of wisdom” to wonder whether wisdom is not simply the object of such an inquiry but also a concept that poses a fundamental challenge to the way we conceive knowledge itself.

Aristotle’s discussion of the intellectual virtues concludes with a wonderful assessment of wisdom’s relationship to the end of human life, happiness: “wisdom produces happiness not as medicine produces health, but as health produces health. For by being a part of virtue as a whole, it makes a person happy through its being possessed and being exercised.” More than one group discussion would be needed to unpack what’s at stake in Aristotle’s rich metaphor! But the opportunity to reflect on it offered us a welcome opportunity to recall a tradition of thinking on the intimate relationship between wisdom and humanity’s normative ends that has largely defined the wisdom tradition on which our own work seeks to build.

--Michael Legaspi and Ryan Hanley

Photo from Flickr Creative Commons.

What is wise counsel?

wattawa — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 18:29:38 GMT

by Keith Whitaker, Defining Wisdom Grantee
Wise Counsel Research—www.wisecounselresearch.org

Wise counselors or good “seconds” appear in a bewildering variety of guises, from Wooster’s Jeeves to Lear’s Fool, the immoral Talleyrand to the saintly More. In a recently established reading group, we discussed select historical and dramatic passages to see what themes or commonality we could find among these uncommon counselors.

We kicked off our discussion group on wise counsel looking at Shakespeare’s King Lear. Counselors play a major role in the plot of Lear—think of Kent, the Fool, Edgar, and even Oswald, Goneril’s attendant.

We focused on the Fool. The questions we started with were, What do we know about the Fool? And why does Lear like him?

We also asked participants for their own sense of what wise counsel is. In response to this question we discussed the difference between seeing wisdom as embodied in counsel (wisdom “as” counsel) and wisdom as something that exists apart from counsel and gets “applied” in specific situations (wisdom “in” counsel). Do you think wisdom can exist apart from its taking shape (actually or potentially) in counsel?

Regarding Lear’s Fool, we noted some of his characteristics that seem to identify him as a wise counselor: He speaks the truth. He is brave and loyal. He alone of the characters appears to see what’s coming around the corner for Lear. He even speaks a prophecy (and likens himself to a magician, Merlin), raising the question, What’s the difference between a prophet and a wise counselor?

Also, the Fool is powerless, and by not rivaling Lear in any way appears better situated to speak the truth to him. His obvious use of jokes led us to discuss the importance of “indirection” to wisdom. Perhaps we find wisdom most readily in jokes or games or “plays”? And perhaps comedy can present wisdom more readily than tragedy?

We would love to hear our fellow Wisdom Network members’ thoughts on these questions. Is the best place to find wisdom in counsel? Or in jokes? In comedy or in tragedy?

We also talked about other possible examples of wise counselors, including Tiresias, Seneca, and Franklin. What examples would you nominate? Why? Our next discussion is going to continue to look at wisdom in comic guise. We’ll be talking about P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves in late April. Please feel free to join our online conversation!

Photo from Flickr Creative Commons.

Practical Wisdom in Medical Training: What are the Prospects?

wattawa — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 20:06:28 GMT

In a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education (1), Prof. David Hoekema considers how virtue is taught on college campuses. He suggests that the “unacknowledged” ethicists on campuses fall generally into three categories: professors (of all disciplines, by virtue of the examples they set in the way they teach and administer their courses and live their lives), student-life staff (as they help students discern their own intentions and values), and student leaders (who by their community endeavors and accomplishments serve as peer-to-peer moral exemplars).

As an “acknowledged” ethicist at a medical school, I am drawn to Prof. Hoekema’s discussion and its concrete engagement of the means by which academic communities may attempt to encourage moral growth and virtuous practice among adult learners. And as a physician-ethicist involved in the professional development of future physicians, I am particularly interested in the potential for ethics education and training to translate into ethical practice in a profession that is all about making decisions that are, at their root, moral. In medicine, this combination of morality and decision making invites a close consideration not only of virtue in general but of a particular virtue – that of practical wisdom.

Physicians are trained to solve medical problems, and these problems are often highly demanding due to the complex manifestations of disease and the multiplicity of diagnostic and therapeutic alternatives. Moreover, the presentation of disease as an experience of illness means that patients present themselves to physicians through multiple dimensions of human experience (biological, psychological, social, spiritual), and the unfolding of illness in real time means that decisions must often be made amidst uncertainty – either due to incomplete information or the unclear wishes of patients or their surrogates. These demands reflect the need for practical wisdom.

What might practical wisdom in medicine look like? To approach this very large question, we do well to consider how practical wisdom has been understood in the past, especially by thinkers whose influence has been sufficiently potent to endure into our own time. Aristotle’s phronesis (2) and Thomas Aquinas’ prudentia (3) both serve as rich and related repositories from which to gain an understanding of what practical wisdom entails and how practical wisdom is inseparable from a larger framework of virtue and ethics (at least within Aristotelian and Thomistic traditions).

My reading of these historical resources leads me to conclude that the search for practical wisdom in medicine raises a number of basic questions. What are the worthwhile goals of medicine? What vision of human flourishing should inspire these goals? How does the empirical work of medicine (gathering and organization of facts) inform its ethical judgments? Which ethical frameworks have the capacity to support practical wisdom? How can we deliberate in medicine in such a way as to integrate goals, concrete circumstances, and moral virtues and principles – and make that integration transparent? And lastly, how can education and training in medical ethics enhance the motivation that learners need to have in order to make them act on (and not only think about) their ethical judgments?

I read Prof. Hoekema’s assessment of the ethical resources available on college campuses as evidence of his vision of a college campus as a community of moral agents who share a common moral space that has the potential to encourage moral growth among students. Such a vision should resonate with medical educators, especially given the particular practice (of medicine) that is the defining professional feature of their moral enterprise. Academic medical centers are communities of practice in a very special sense, and it is in the midst of these communities that practical wisdom can be learned, if novices are sufficiently guided and supported as they struggle, through success and failure, to gain something that comes only through experience. But experience alone is no guarantee, since the cultivation of practical wisdom requires an integration of multiple domains – clinical reasoning, ethical analysis, moral motivation, and professional identity – as well as dedicated effort by both institutions and educators. Creating training environments marked by such integration is an invitation for substantial and enduring engagement. I wonder what the prospects for such engagement in medical schools may be.

by Lauris Kaldjian, M.D., Ph.D., University of Iowa

References

1. Hoekema, David. The unacknowledged ethicists on campuses. Chronicle of Higher Education, January 24, 2010 (http://chronicle.com/article/The-Unacknowledged-Ethicists/63681/).

2. Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Educational Publishing; 1962.

3. Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologica: a concise translation. Westminster, MD: Christian Classics; 1989.

Can we recognize the wise by the greater good they create?

wattawa — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 21:26:27 GMT

Recognizing the Wise in Contemporary Acts of the Greater Good

Inspired by a desire to win back public confidence and trust, values that were lost in a mudslide of financial scandals, swindles, and corporate greed, students from the 2009 graduating class of Harvard Business School wrote the MBA Oath. It opens with this paragraph:

As a manager, my purpose is to serve the greater good by bringing people and resources together to create value that no single individual can create alone. Therefore, I will seek a course that enhances the value my enterprise can create for society over the long term. I recognize my decisions can have far reaching consequences that affect the well-being of individuals inside and outside my enterprise, today and in the future.

The MBA Oath has become a controversial conversation starter in the global business and economic communities as well as in the general public. Some business people embrace the idea of a code of ethics for managers; others feel that the code unfairly implies that most or even all managers seek profit at all costs. Moreover, members of the global public may take a cynical view of the oath, suspicious (with good reason!) that it is an insincere marketing ploy or is simply too little too late.

Yet, it cannot be denied that the MBA oath expresses many of the same characteristics of wisdom as identified by scholars such as Robert Sternberg (2000), Vivien Clayton (1978), Monika Ardelt (2007), and Randall & Kenyon (2001) to name just a few. Sternberg’s “balance theory” of wisdom seems to be particularly in line with the MBA oath. Sternberg’s theory describes wisdom as existing when people use their intelligence, creativity, and knowledge for a common good by balancing their personal interest with the interests of others and even the larger context over the long term as well as the short term. The tension between interpersonal and intrapersonal interests, according to Sternberg, is mitigated by values that most people would agree are good and helpful.

To my mind, this conversation raises at least two provocative questions: Can we recognize the wise by the greater good they create? Are people who have made a difference for the greater good also wise, or do they at least possess a fair amount of wisdom?

Back in 2000 when I began interviewing people who were identified by others as being wise, I wondered if I could understand wisdom by examining what these people actually do in their lives and if what they do can be seen as serving a common good. Indeed, during my interviews, these nominated wise people ultimately tell stories of their involvement and passion for work or projects that most would see as contributing to a greater good, either for their family, local community, or on a larger societal scale. Moreover, the nominators themselves often spontaneously justify their recommendation with a story about how the person is serving a greater good. Additionally, I found that most of the people referred to me used the losses and challenges in their lives to fuel their commitment to the greater good. These insights are intriguing because they suggest that we can recognize wisdom and even, as the MBA oath strives to do, create structures and opportunities to live wisely.

If the world’s population growth continues at the current rate of 1.2 percent (U.S. Census Bureau, 2009), the number of people on the planet will double to 12 billion by 2054. These numbers suggest that we are certain to see more people taking action to serve a greater good, even as we continue to witness spectacular acts of foolishness. At the risk of appearing foolish myself or at the least a bit naive, I am optimistic that linking wisdom to actions for the greater good makes wisdom more visible, practical and attainable for all.

Elle Allison, Ph.D. elle@wisdomout.com
The mission of Wisdom Out is to teach the strategies that wise people, couples and organizations use, to face whatever challenges come their way, and transform adversity into growth. Check out our website and sign up for our newsletter with monthly wisdom stories and practical wisdom strategies at www.wisdomout.com

Has the world become more or less wise over the past 50 years?

wattawa — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 19:16:40 GMT

At the Defining Wisdom Network Meeting in June 2009, participants were asked to come up with a series of questions about wisdom that might shed light on the broad issues of our project.

One participant asked the following question: “Has the world become more or less wise in the last 50 years? Or is the total amount of wisdom constant?”

I would like to ask the Defining Wisdom Network members to reflect and share their thoughts on this topic. What do you think? Is this a good question?

-Joy Wattawa, Assistant Director for Interdisciplinary Outreach and Communications, Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience

Photo from Flickr Creative Commons.

How can we train people to become wise?

wattawa — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 13:38:43 GMT

Can we train professionals to become wise in their respective fields? Do we already do so in some professions, perhaps unwittingly?

Baltes and colleagues have conducted a body of empirical work related to wisdom, some of which focuses on wisdom within different professions. For example, Smith, Staudinger, and Baltes (1992) discovered that the “think-aloud” protocols of human service professionals contemplating wisdom dilemmas ranked higher on five criteria of wisdom than those of other professionals.

This same research group (Staudinger, Smith, & Baltes, 1994) subsequently found that clinical psychologists outperform control groups. These professionals were understood to demonstrate wisdom because they were selected into and trained in settings where wisdom-related tasks, such as life-planning and value relativism, were relevant. Later research identified that training and practice in clinical psychology was the strongest predictor of wisdom-related performance on two of these think-aloud protocols for the group of clinical psychologists (Staudinger, Maciel, Smith, & Baltes, 1998). In addition, using a structural equation analysis, Kunzmann and Baltes (2003) were able to determine that wisdom entails a value orientation focused on enhancing others’ potential – which might be expected in these professions. However, older non-psychologist adults nominated for their wisdom also gained high scores as well as older clinical psychologists . This finding suggests that there may be various paths to wisdom and that wise lay people may perform as wisely as professionals trained to deal with the kinds of problems being explored (Baltes, Staudinger, Maercker, & Smith, 1995).

Still, this body of research suggests that professional training does enhance wisdom and suggests that clinical psychologists nominated for their wisdom may be expected to perform even more highly on wisdom-related tasks than lay persons nominated for wisdom. It also raises questions about how training in other disciplines that deal with wisdom related skills, such as value-relativism, might influence the acquisition of wisdom.

In our research, we have been interviewing psychologists and judges nominated for either their clinical wisdom or their judicial wisdom, respectively. Although our data analysis is still underway, we thought we might share with you some of the preliminary findings related to the training of professionals that we have found interesting to consider. We will share them in the form of questions that have been raised in the analysis. Some quotes from the psychotherapy interviews will be used to help frame these questions.

1.   Should instilling wisdom constitute a goal of professional training or is this a quality that develops only after years of professional practice? Perhaps we should instead seek to develop some values that set professionals along a path towards the development and valuation of wisdom? One psychotherapist said, “…wisdom is somehow based on having had experiences and I think that experiential base that I have over 30 years is something that you couldn’t compress into a course or put into a 5 year graduate program…I think what you can do is you can alert people to opportunities for increasing their wisdom.”

2.   If we desire professionals capable of wisdom, what does this mean with respect to our admissions processes? Currently, most psychology programs and law programs select students by considering some combination of essays and grade point averages and test scores. Other methods could include assessment of wisdom-related traits, such as value-relativism, perspective taking, and interpersonal skills. In relation to this notion, one participant said, “Using primarily undergraduate grade point average, GRE’s and…research experience might work well for selecting PhD students, but they’re not very effective selection criteria for psychotherapists….I’m not suggest(ing) we select people with IQ’s below 80 or something, but once we get up to sufficient, then I think there are other personality characteristics of potential trainees that we should be looking at rather than standardized scores and grade point averages.”

3.   Are there ways to train students to develop a sense of cross-cultural sensitivity and appreciation – a trait that was widely thought across both professional groups to be related to wisdom? Participants have suggested mechanisms such as cultural immersion programs, directed readings of literature beyond one’s profession, the analysis of one’s own culture, and legal aid or front line therapeutic work with minority communities. In speaking about the importance of having such broad appreciations, a participant said, “…with people I’ve thought are wise…they’re reasonably well read or cultured and they have some sort of broad, rather than narrow, kind of perspective on things … I think there’s a lot to be learned from novels and films and movies and art forms that are beyond… classic psychotherapy textbooks… you gotta like something, you gotta understand what that’s about, and I don’t think that’s the…continued education that your licensure requires… I think of that as sort of the ‘one night stand’ of education … it has to be some sort of ongoing immersion.”

4.   In what ways can academic programs help students develop self-awareness? Self awareness and acceptance of one’s good and bad impulses were also traits that were thought to be relevant to the development of wisdom across professional groups. Although the participants seemed to think that engaging in personal therapy was very helpful, there were concerns about the ethics of a program requiring this activity. Other suggestions included activities that gave participants feedback from others, engagement in group processes where students had to work together, focusing on collaborative problem solving versus competition between classmates, and developing an acceptance of the “dark side” of humanity and appreciating the complexity within all people. One participant expressed, “… I’m always saying that I always see the good in people… I certainly think it involves looking for the strength in people and also recognizing the evil in myself and others… [recognizing] that there is an odorous rage and that there is spite and vengeance and hate and jealousy and all these things…and … not shying away from that either and helping people to integrate that rather than deny it and also to universalize it and to understand that, that’s what it is to be human.”

By examining responses to these questions, we can see some of the issues academic programs might need to face if wisdom were to become valued as a core trait within their graduates. Programs might wish to reevaluate both admissions and training practices, following from the degree to which wisdom could be a direct outcome of training. These questions have been helpful to us in considering the prospects for training professionals to utilize wisdom within their practices. We look forward to continuing our analysis and to further developing our understanding of these wisdom-related processes.

-Heidi Levitt, Professor of Clinical Psychology, University of Memphis & Beth Piazza-Bonin, graduate student, University of Memphis

Photo from Flickr Creative Commons.

Can the unwise recognize wisdom?

wattawa — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 16:08:30 GMT

Wisdom grantees Michael Sargent and Shabnam Mousavi examine the question.

Anchoring Judgment in Wise Principles

Michael J. Sargent, Bates College, United States

I’ve been asked to write a blog entry about a related pair of questions: “Can the unwise recognize wisdom?” and “Can one act wisely without being conscious of it?” In thinking about this pair of issues, I suspect that the answers to these questions are, respectively, “Yes, at least in principle” and “Absolutely.” In other words, even the unwise may recognize what is wise, even though they fail to make wise choices. And there may be ways of helping them make wiser choices, even without their awareness. In other words, there may be ways to help them help themselves.

Whatever one’s definition of wisdom, even the unwise probably have an in-principle understanding of wisdom in many domains. They understand that saving for retirement is probably essential if one wants to avoid poverty in one’s old age. They understand that reducing caloric intake and exercising regularly are wise if one wants to be physically healthy. They understand these things in principle, and so at least in that sense, even the unwise can recognize wisdom.

Still, as evidenced by low savings rates and high rates of obesity (at least in the U.S.), applying these principles is often difficult. What can be done to facilitate individuals’ acting upon the principles whose wisdom they explicitly endorse, even if they would be unlikely to apply those principles under normal conditions?

One answer that Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein propose is to “nudge” individuals’ behavior in directions that benefit them and others, which could be thought of as wise. By attending carefully to choice architecture, policymakers can influence individuals’ behavior, even as those individuals retain freedom of action. A well known example that Thaler and Sunstein describe is implementing opt-out policies to promote participation in retirement plans. In contrast to conventional approaches whereby the default is not to participate in a plan unless one chooses to, opt-out policies set the default so that employees are automatically enrolled in a plan unless they choose not to be. As Thaler and Sunstein note, such opt-out policies raise the level of participation in retirement plans. On the basis of such findings, they argue for an approach termed libertarian paternalism: Individuals retain their freedom to act as they choose, but policymakers structure the choice context in a way that is intended to promote individual and social welfare.

In my research, I’ve recently been exploring applications of such ideas to the study of attitudes toward punishing criminals. Obviously, criminal wrongdoing is a ubiquitous problem, one that societies often attempt to address, at least in part, through punishment. A reasonable question to ask is whether societies’ penal systems are constructed in a manner that is wise. What would a wise penal system look like? And will citizens support it?

Arguably, a wise penal system will optimize the deterrent effect of punishment. In the case of general deterrence, the goal of punishment is to use the punishment of a particular criminal as an example to deter other would-be criminals from the same sort of crime. Punishment is used to ensure that the expected value of punishment (i.e., the probability of punishment × the magnitude of punishment) is kept at a high enough level to deter potential criminals from the same crime as those who have already been punished. A key factor that ought to therefore influence sentences is the likelihood of detection. For crimes that are hard to detect, punishments should be set relatively high. Because the low likelihood of detection of the crime entails a lower likelihood of punishment for the criminal, a greater magnitude of punishment is needed to maintain the same expected value of punishment.

As I mentioned last June, research by social psychologist Kevin Carlsmith and others suggests that people often endorse deterrence in principle, but rarely apply it in practice. For example, Carlsmith and others have found that manipulations of detection-likelihood generally make little difference in recommended sentences of specific, hypothetical criminals. Crimes that are hard to detect are punished no more than harshly than crimes that are easy to detect. Similar results occur when individuals are asked to evaluate general policies intended to optimize deterrence. One group of researchers found that law students at the University of Chicago (who were well versed in deterrence) were generally opposed to policies that delivered lower penalties when crimes were easy to detect than when they were hard to detect, whether the agent meting out the different penalties was bureaucratic (the IRS) or judicial (a judge). Thus, even individuals with expertise seemed reluctant to embrace policies based on deterrence. Data such as these have led researchers to conclude that people’s intuitions are rooted in retribution and not deterrence.

These findings raise many questions that have motivated much of my work under the grant. One question is when individuals are willing and able to apply deterrence theory. Specifically, when will they recommend more severe penalties for crimes that are hard to detect? Like others (including Carlsmith), I have found it difficult to identify circumstances when this occurs.

In one of my recent studies, though, I’ve found that a familiar phenomenon known as anchoring can be used to produce differences between those individuals exposed to high detection-likelihood crimes and those exposed to low detection-likelihood crimes. Anchoring (famously described by Tversky and Kahneman) describes a way of making judgments under uncertainty where one begins with a specific starting point and adjusts from it. A classic demonstration is the Mississippi River problem. Half of a sample is asked whether the Mississippi River is longer or shorter than 500 miles (most say longer) and then to estimate its length. The remaining individuals are asked if it’s longer or shorter than 5,000 miles (most say shorter) and then asked to estimate its length. Individuals in the second group generate larger estimates (typically differing by over 1,000 miles). The assumption is that the initial value that’s mentioned acts as an anchor from which participants adjust to get to a final judgment. But, critically, different starting points lead to different outcomes.

I’ve begun applying this framework to studies of deterrence and detection-likelihood. For example, in one study participants in the low detection-likelihood condition read about a case of embezzlement in which the crime was described as hard to detect. Critically, they were also told that in such cases state governments recommended a sentence of 15 years (a high value on the sentencing scale they would ultimately use to report their recommended sentence). By contrast, other participants read about the same case of embezzlement but were told that it was easy to detect and that, as a consequence, state governments only recommended a sentence of 2 weeks (a low value). In short, each group was given an anchor, in addition to information about detection-likelihood. In this study, participants in the first group recommended higher sentences than those in the second group. This was true, even after dropping from analysis those participants whose recommended sentence was equivalent to the anchor, arguing against the possibility that the effect was driven by participants merely repeating the number that had just been presented.

Of course, anchoring effects are highly robust, as anyone who has used the Mississippi River example as a teaching demonstration can attest. Consequently, it would have been surprising not to obtain an anchoring effect. What we are more interested in is our next step, which is to recruit a new set of participants and describe to them the sentencing disparity obtained in our first anchoring study. We also plan to experimentally vary our description of the process that produced such a disparity. A key condition will be one in which we attribute the discrepancy to jurors whose starting point for deliberations on a sentence was recommendations that penalized hard-to-detect crimes more severely. (Their freedom to ignore the recommendations will be emphasized.) Will being told that a jury of their peers decided to punish hard-to-detect crimes more severely lead to more acceptance of such a discrepancy than if it is the work of a bureaucracy or an individual judge? Might it even lead to majority support for such discrepancies in penalties?

We don’t yet know what we will find in the second stage of this work, but if we did find this result, it could have implications for the issue of popular support for public policies that advance deterrence. Previous scholars have suggested that, because citizens are intuitive retributivists, they will not accept policies that optimize deterrence. In the words of the research team who studied the University of Chicago law students, “the fact that optimal deterrence policies are rejected in both the administrative and judicial domains among a group likely to be predisposed in their favor strongly suggests that any effort to move in the direction of optimal deterrence would encounter significant popular resistance” (Sunstein et al., 2000, p. 248). Perhaps this is true under many conditions. But if we find that attribution of a sentencing disparity to jury behavior legitimizes that disparity, even if the juries’ decisions were clearly rooted in numerical anchors provided to them, then it would suggest one condition under which citizens may accept optimal deterrence policies. Despite the fact that such policies are at odds with citizens’ intuitions about how punishment should be applied, if the disparity is said to be due to the free choice of their fellow citizens perhaps they will be accepted.

Again, it is yet to be determined what we will find. But the data we already have shows that, whatever individuals’ willingness or capacity to apply deterrence theory in an explicit fashion, they can be induced through anchoring effects to behave “as if” they apply it. Insofar as optimizing deterrence through penalties is wise sentencing, then this would be a case of individuals adhering to wise principles despite a lack of awareness of what they are doing. As with Sunstein and Thaler’s work, it would suggest that the choice context can be structured to nudge individuals toward wise choices, even without their awareness. Additionally, where juries play a role in setting penalties for offenders, it would suggest that optimal deterrence may be legitimized in the public’s eye by their influence, even if anchoring strategies are used to influence their decisions.

My students are just finishing the online survey that we will use to collect the data for the second part of this project, so time will soon tell what our findings are. In the interim, though, I welcome comments and questions.

References
Carlsmith, K. M., Darley, J. M., & Robinson, P. H. (2002). Why do we punish? Deterrence and just deserts as motives for punishment. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 83, 284-298.

Sunstein, C. R., Schkade, D., & Kahneman, D. (2000). Do people want optimal deterrence? Journal of Legal Studies, 29, 237-253.

Thaler, R. H., & Sunstein, C. R. (2009). Nudge: Improving decisions about health, wealth, and happiness. New York: Penguin Books.

Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1974). Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases. Science, 185, 1124-1131.

Is Wisdom Intuitive?

Shabnam Mousavi, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Germany

IS WISDOM INTUITIVE? From what I have read and heard so far, it is often at least assumed that this is the case. What is wisdom? We do not know exactly, and we do not aim to provide a universal definition. But we all agree that wisdom is good, useful, and worth exploring. Can we measure wisdom? Yes, and we do so by eliciting people’s judgments of their own wisdom (self-assessment), or their judgments of others’ wisdom (asking for nominations). Why do we want to measure wisdom? To specify this admirable human capability, unravel its secrets, and obtain more of it; to make it accessible to all; to learn from wise decisions and to develop wise strategies. We want to learn about wisdom to spread it and to expand it. In sum, we all seem to agree that everybody would be better off if we could produce more of this indefinable wisdom; if we were to increase our wisdom scores. Once again, a rational principle prevails: “more is (of course) better.”

SO, PEOPLE’S JUDGMENT is the basis for discovering and specifying wise people, whose behavior is then studied to unravel wisdom. This practice must assume that people are reliable in judging, observing, and identifying wisdom, even though they are not necessarily wise. However, some researchers would not, for instance, accept a self-nomination when seeking nominations for wise people. This takes me back to my first question in one step: How are people able to identify wisdom? Is it intuitive? If yes, why can’t they judge their own wisdom? Is it because this recognition is based on an intuition limited to outside oneself? If so, how can we rely on any kind of self-assessment? If one requires some primary level of wisdom to identify wisdom, do we then face circularity? As if these questions aren’t challenging enough, allow me to throw in another twist: We should not forget that people have been shown to suffer from persistent judgmental biases, and irrationalities. After all, many scientists have dedicated themselves to the task of finding treatments for this widespread captivity of human kind to irrationality.

Wrestling with these questions, I couldn’t help but wonder: Can I imagine a way of specifying and understanding wise actions that can avoid these difficulties? I have put my bets on one idea: A study of wisdom as heuristic processes, which rely on intuitive inference. Allow me to sketch this idea here. (And of course, I need a reference, but I’m doing my best to avoid its anchoring effect.) The RATIONAL AGENT has been a popular scientific reference for judging, modeling, and theorizing human behavior and choice. This agent is axiomatized as omniscient in overcoming epistemological uncertainty, as inferring statistically and as complying to logical truth (-tables). I define a WISE AGENT as one that is comfortable with ontological uncertainty through flexibility of intuition and robustness of simple heuristic strategies. This agent makes good decisions based on intuitive inferences and ecological reasoning. I define ACTION as a mapping between representation of information and matching/triggered heuristic strategy. I replace, (1) The information set by representation of information; and avoid the necessity of pre-specifying goals (that cause reduction of actual situation to a solvable form) by specifying a relevant/triggered heuristic strategy; (2) Statistical inference by intuitive inference and gain flexibility; (3) Logical truth with ecological reasoning to rethink habitual norms of behavior and to develop requirements (and methods) for construction of content-sensitive norms. So far I have one suspected corollary: The axiomatization of a wise agent does not necessitate the imposition of invariance. That is, replacements (1), (2), and (3) above remove invariance from the list of requirements for the study of human choice behavior framed with reference to wise actions.

Am I too ambitious in expecting this pursuit to produce a primary framework for the study of actual human behavior (including wise action)? Well, of course, time will tell…. But maybe in this case “faster is better”? In the interest of wise academic practice: Can anyone help me get wiser? Can you give me a good (or ‘good enough,’ because we are all boundedly rational) reason for stopping this imaginative inquiry?

Photo from Flickr Creative Commons.