Excerpts:
As an ancient concept and esteemed human value, wisdom has historically been studied in the realms of philosophy and religion.....But as a trait that might be captured by quantitative measures, it has been more like the woolly mammoth of ideas — big, shaggy and elusive. It is only in the last three decades that wisdom has received even glancing attention from social scientists.....Comment: This blog has focused on "Knowledge for Development", and sometimes expanded to discuss understanding. I suspect that it should also focus on "wisdom for development"-- the public face of wisdom.
As Gandhi (who topped the leader board a few years ago in a survey in which college students were asked to name wise people) put it, “It is unwise to be too sure of one’s own wisdom.” Indeed, a general thread running through modern wisdom research is that wise people tend to be humble and “other-centered” as opposed to self-centered.....
Certain qualities associated with wisdom recur in the academic literature: a clear-eyed view of human nature and the human predicament; emotional resiliency and the ability to cope in the face of adversity; an openness to other possibilities; forgiveness; humility; and a knack for learning from lifetime experiences. And yet as psychologists have noted, there is a yin-yang to the idea that makes it difficult to pin down. Wisdom is founded upon knowledge, but part of the physics of wisdom is shaped by uncertainty. Action is important, but so is judicious inaction. Emotion is central to wisdom, yet detachment is essential......
Vivian Clayton....identified three general aspects of human activity that were central to wisdom — the acquisition of knowledge (cognitive) and the analysis of that information (reflective) filtered through the emotions (affective). Then she assembled a battery of existing psychological tests to measure it.....
Boiled down to its essence, the “Berlin Paradigm” defined wisdom as “an expert knowledge system concerning the fundamental pragmatics of life.” Heavily influenced by life-span psychology, the Berlin version of wisdom emphasized several complementary qualities: expert knowledge of both the “facts” of human nature and the “how” of dealing with decisions and dilemmas; an appreciation of one’s historical, cultural and biological circumstances during the arc of a life span; an understanding of the “relativism” of values and priorities; and an acknowledgment, at the level of both thought and action, of uncertainty. “We picked up from the philosophical literature that wisdom is like a peak performance,” Smith says. “It’s the highest level of potential or achievement that a human mind might be able to achieve.”......
“Wisdom in action,” as the Berlin group put it, might manifest itself as good judgment, shrewd advice, psychological insight, emotional regulation and empathetic understanding; it could be found in familial interactions, in formal writing and in the relationship between a student and mentor or a doctor and patient.....
Monika Ardelt (developed).....a “three-dimensional” wisdom scale, which, according to the habit of psychological measures, is designated “3D-WS.” The cognitive aspect, for example, included the ability to understand human nature, perceive a situation clearly and make decisions despite ambiguity and uncertainty. The reflective sphere dealt with a person’s ability to examine an event from multiple perspectives — to step outside oneself and understand another point of view. And the emotional aspect primarily involved feeling compassion toward others as well as an ability to remain positive in the face of adversity......
Perhaps the most important yin-yang of wisdom may be the different shapes it takes in the public and private domains. The public face of wisdom has to do with leadership, judgment and a responsibility to the collective future, offering a kind of moral inspiration to do the greatest good for the greatest number of people; this is the face that emerges when people are asked in surveys to name people they consider to be wise (the nominees invariably include people like Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, Mother Teresa and again Gandhi). The private face of wisdom may be Vivian Clayton’s father, my parents, your Uncle Myron. By comparison, the example of their wisdom is invisible to all but the inner circle of kin and acquaintances that benefit each day, in myriad specific ways, from the exercise of wisdom.....
the implication is that people who learn, or somehow train themselves, to modulate their emotions are better able to manage stress and bounce back from adversity. Although they can register the negative, they have somehow learned not to get bogged down in it. Whether this learning is a form of “wisdom” accumulated over a lifetime of experience, as wisdom researchers see it, or can be acquired through training exercises like meditation, as Davidson’s previous research has shown, the recent message from neuroscience laboratories is that the optimal regulation of emotion can be seen in the brain.......
The “fuzziness” of wisdom studies scares many people away from the subject; as James Birren and Cheryl Svensson noted recently, the 13 chapters of Sternberg’s 1990 collection “Wisdom” offer 13 different approaches....
Much of the research to date has reflected a predominantly Western notion of wisdom, but its definition can be further muddied by cultural vagaries. In one cross-cultural study, researchers found that Americans and Australians essentially equated being wise with being experienced and knowledgeable; being old and discreet were seen as less-than-desirable qualities. People in India and Japan, by contrast, linked wisdom to being discreet, aged and experienced.
Nevertheless, the notion of wisdom is sufficiently universal that it raises other questions: Where does it come from, and how does one acquire it? Surprisingly, a good deal of evidence, both anecdotal and empirical, suggests that the seeds of wisdom are planted earlier in life — certainly earlier than old age, often earlier than middle age and possibly even earlier than young adulthood. And there are strong hints that wisdom is associated with an earlier exposure to adversity or failure.
It seems to me that wisdom is based on knowledge, or at least an appreciation for the importance of knowledge and an ability to seek out knowledgeable people and draw on their knowledge appropriately in decision making. Of course, not all knowledge would seem to contribute to wisdom. A collector might have a huge accumulation of facts about his hobby, or a professional a huge collection of facts related to his profession, and not be very wise. (Perhaps, of course, the collector would be seen by other collectors as making wise decisions about acquisitions for his collection or a professional such as a doctor or lawyer might be seen by his peers as making wise diagnoses and prescriptions without having wisdom about his personal life or much wisdom with a public face.)
It seems to me that wisdom must also depend on understanding the meanings of that knowledge, and understanding the "how" and "why" of events and processes.
The article, in brief form, suggests the importance of analysis and reflection as components of wisdom. This seems a real insight. Wisdom certainly would seem to require that the wise utilize their knowledge and understanding to make good decisions, to recommend good courses of action. I suspect that reflection is an important tool for obtaining wisdom, in the sense of pondering experience without specific application, to build a basis for future analysis and application of knowledge.
I am least able to comment on the emotional dimension of wisdom, although it seems self evident that the wise are able to obtain some emotional balance, and to act wisely when others would be too emotional to do so. The issue is not only a knowledge and understanding of emotions and an ability to analyze rationally when emotional, but an ability to achieve an emotional balance avoiding excessive negative or positive emotions. JAD
Further Comment: Could it be possible that the really wise are able to avoid the negative experiences most of us deal with? Would a wise person subject themselves to the studies devised by these psychologists? JAD
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