Wise Reasoning in the Face of Everyday Life Challenges

Abstract

How stable vs. dynamic is wisdom in daily life? We conducted a daily diary study of wise reasoning (WR) by recording people's reflections on daily challenges in terms of three facets: intellectual humility, self-transcendence, and consideration of others' perspectives/compromise. We observed substantial and systematic intraindividual variability in WR, with wiser reasoning in the social versus nonsocial contexts. State-level WR variability was potent in predicting a bigger-picture construal of the event, more positive (vs. negative) emotions, greater emotional complexity, lower emotional reactivity, less thought suppression, and more reappraisal and forgiveness. In contrast, on the trait level, we observed only a few associations to emotional complexity and reappraisal. We discuss implications for conceptualization and measurement of wisdom-related thought.

Wisdom, bias, and balance: Toward a process-sensitive measurement of wisdom-related cognition.

“…Similar to past research (Grossmann et al, 2016), we found moderate positive associations between Wave 1 and Wave 2, rSWIS (n = 290) = .48, rPerspectives (n = 290) =…”

“…Reliability and internal structure of wise reasoning were nearly identical to those from our initial tests. Study 7 showed a small-moderate degree of stability in wise reasoning across two distinct conflicts, indicating substantial intra-personal variation in wise reasoning across situations (as in Grossmann et al, 2016, and Study 2 in the current research).…”

“…The present observation of separate trait-and state-level effects of wise reasoning suggest that through paying attention to state-vs. trait-level effects and measuring wisdom-related characteristics several times, one can obtain a more precise estimate. Indeed, using this approach, recent work began to advocate that wise reasoning is a more potent correlate of well-being on a state-as compared to trait-levels of analysis (Grossmann et al, 2016).…”

“…close friends), enabling researchers to differentiate situational contingencies from the trait-level tendencies by averaging responses across situations (Fleeson & Jayawickreme, 2015;Grossmann, Gerlach, & Denissen, 2016;Mischel et al, 2002). Indeed, the simultaneous analyses of trait-and state-level components of wise reasoning on markers of balance indicated a unique contribution of each component, suggesting that both trait and state-specific factors contribute to balancing of interests and inferences that people make about the world around them.…”

“…Given that desirable psychological tendencies and processes may be harmful in some situations (McNulty & Fincham, 2012), the current method also makes it possible to determine conditions under which engaging in wise reasoning may, in fact, be maladaptive. with emerging evidence on day-to-day variability in wise reasoning (Grossmann et al, 2016 …”