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.
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