What predicts wisdom-related performance? A first look at personality, intelligence, and facilitative experiential contexts

Abstract

Wisdom has long been suggested as a desired goal of development (see e.g. Clayton and Birren, 1980; Erikson, 1959; Hall, 1922; Staudinger and Baltes, 1994). Questions concerning the empirical investigation of wisdom and its ontogeny, however, are largely still open. It is suggested that besides person characteristics, certain types of experience may facilitate wisdom‐related performance. A sample of clinical psychologists (n=36) and highly educated control professionals (n=54) ranging in age from 25 to 82 years responded verbally to two wisdom‐related tasks involving life planning and completed a psychometric battery of intelligence and personality measures. Three primary findings were obtained. First, training and practice in clinical psychology was the strongest predictor of wisdom‐related performance (26%) and, in addition, showed some overlap with personality variables in this predictive relationship. Second, 14% of the variance in wisdom‐related performance was accounted for by standard psychometric measures of personality and intelligence. Personality variables were stronger predictors than variables of intelligence. Important personality predictors were Openness to Experience and a middle‐range location on the Introversion–Extraversion dimension. Third, wisdom‐related performance maintained a sizable degree of measurement independence (uniqueness). Predictive relationships were consistent with research on naive conceptions of wisdom and our own theoretical account of the ontogenesis of wisdom‐related performance. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

How to measure wisdom: content, reliability, and validity of five measures

“…The only performance measure in this study, the Berlin wisdom paradigm, was correlated only to openness to experience and emotional competence among the self-report correlates; unexpectedly and in contrast to other studies (Staudinger et al, 1998), it was also uncorrelated to measures of intelligence. These differences may to some degree be due to the limited reliability of the BWP in this study.…”

Age and Experience Influences on the Complexity of Social Inferences.

“…The somewhat variable pattern of results across trustworthiness and competence ratings may reflect the higher level of salience associated with the inherent interpersonal nature of the former type of judgment. The general pattern of results is also consistent with other expertise-based accounts of social reasoning, such as that associated with wisdom, in demonstrating that age is correlated with the development of expertise and that specific types of experience can promote its development earlier in adulthood (e.g., Staudinger, Maciel, Smith, & Baltes, 1998).…”

A Qualitative Inquiry of Wisdom Development: Educators' Perspectives

“…We will discuss the results of this study in the context of other research on wisdom to fill in the gaps in knowledge left by the previous research projects and to contribute new knowledge to the domain of wisdom studies. Most of the facilitative factors mentioned in this research have been supported by other studies, which repeatedly mentioned factors including experiences (Brown, 2002;Kunzmann & Baltes, 2005), social interactions (Brown, 2002;Kramer, 1990;Levitt, 1999;Staudinger & Baltes, 1996), reading (Csikszentmihalyi & Nakamura, 2005;Levitt, 1999), religion (Achenbaum & Orwell, 1991;Levitt, 1999), and professional development (Smith et al, 1994;Staudinger et al, 1998).…”