When thinking about how wisdom develops, some people believe that wisdom comes with age. This idea may be due to examples that come readily to mind either from personal experience or from popular culture. But before considering how wisdom develops, it is probably helpful to spell out what we mean by the term wisdom. The press sometimes confuses wisdom with intelligence, as if they are synonyms. But not all smart decisions are necessarily wise ones. Of course, many decisions that are smart are neither wise nor unwise. Such smart decisions are well informed, made in the context of deliberate and thoughtful consideration but they are typically the result of an intelligent process rather than wisdom. We might define wisdom most simply as prudent judgment, or as is often attributed to Aristotle, wisdom can be defined as practical decisions that lead to human flourishing. One way of understanding wisdom is to look to specific examples of wisdom, and perhaps this is one reason that people think that aging leads to wisdom.
We have few celebrated examples of young wise folks, whereas the image of the aged sage seems to be almost universal across cultures. The belief is that to be thought wise, one needs to reach a certain advanced age. Of course this does not mean that everyone who is older is wise, but rather to be wise, one needs to be older. This reflected in popular icons such as Yoda from Star Wars or Biblical figures like King Solomon or historical figures such as Confucius, but they are just well-known examples of the pervasiveness of this belief. A recent article in the New York Times on aging and wisdom demonstrates that this entrenched belief is very much alive. In fact this view about wisdom and aging served as the impetus for some of the foundational scientific research on wisdom by Vivian Clayton and Paul Baltes. The idea that wisdom comes with age is a model for a kind of successful aging, especially considering that much scientific research on the psychological effects of aging delivers bad news about declining abilities in systems such as working memory. The idea of becoming wiser holds out a certain kind of hope for our personal futures. For example, Laura Carstensen’s research on aging supports some aspects of the relationship between aging and wisdom. Her work shows that older people make practical choices about how they spend their time that increase positive mood and sense of well-being. This seems like Aristotle’s notion that practical wisdom should increase human flourishing.
But human flourishing is not simply an increase in our personal well-being, happiness, or welfare. Aristotle connected human flourishing to a more prosocial notion of human well-being in terms of seeking the highest human good. Wisdom reflected in decisions should not just increase personal happiness but should also increase societal good. It is interesting that research has documented that older people do tend to be more prosocial in decision making as well. Richard Nisbett and colleagues reported some evidence that social conflict resolution improves with age. Robert Levenson and colleagues have argued that there is increased empathy and prosociality in later life, and Angela Gutchess and colleagues report increased monetary giving with age. These findings accord with the notion that age is related to some elements of wisdom. But if it is true that wisdom comes with age, this does not identify the specific factors that lead to the development of wisdom with age.
Furthermore, even if cultural beliefs associate wisdom and aging, science should go beyond this to ask some basic questions about wisdom that could lead to a deeper scientific understanding of this human capacity. By what mechanisms does aging cause wisdom, if it does? Why should aging increase wisdom? Not everyone who is older is wiser so perhaps it is not aging, defined as time passing or as biological change, that causes wisdom. It is possible that we have confused aging and experience. If certain experiences lead to being wiser, some older people should be wiser because older people have more experiences than younger people. But this also suggests that young people who have similar experiences might also become wiser without waiting for time to pass. If wisdom is a consequence of experience, it makes sense to talk about becoming a little wiser after certain experiences. Each experience might lead to a small movement along the path to wisdom.
At the University of Chicago, in the Chicago Wisdom Research Project we are working to investigate how certain experiences can increase wisdom, even for younger adults. Previous research by other investigators has addressed the idea of understanding what wisdom is. We have been addressing a slightly different question of understanding the kinds of experiences that lead to wisdom. There are several kinds of experiences that have been examined so far in this research. Work by Patrick Williams and Berthold Hoeckner and collaborators is investigating whether the practice of meditation is related to wisdom as measured using Monika Ardelt’s measures of cognitive, reflective, and affective wisdom. Does increasing experience in meditation relate to increased wisdom? Given that meditation is a mental activity one could imagine that the practice of meditation relates to wisdom. One might also think that experience in practicing ballet should not relate to wisdom. After all, dance experience can be understood increase physical prowess but there is no reason to expect it to affect judgment or decision making. It is interesting that the preliminary results in this study suggest that age is not related to wisdom, but increased experience in meditation is related to increased cognitive, affective, and reflective wisdom. Moreover, although it seems surprising, it also appears that increased ballet experience is related to increased cognitive, affective, and reflective wisdom. One conclusion that could be drawn from this work is that self regulation and self control, which are important in maintaining such practices over long periods of time may be important for the development of wisdom. This suggests that the idea of grit, as studied by Angela Duckworth, which is related to academic achievement, may also be important for developing wisdom
Another study at the University of Chicago has examined how experience in trading goods on eBay and financial trading affects economic decisions. Daniel Kahneman and his colleagues have demonstrated that there are a number of decision biases that distort some aspects of rational economic decision-making. For example, in one such bias called the endowment effect, simply owning an object raises its subjective value beyond the object’s worth in the marketplace. Ali Hortacsu and John List and their collaborators have shown that experience in trading reduces this kind of bias and appears to do so by reducing neural activity in one part of the brain associated with loss aversion. One conclusion that could be inferred is that more experience in market transactions increases the ability to make more rational decisions resulting in fairer, more reasonable transactions.
In fact, becoming more rational in decisions does not take years of trading experience to accomplish. Sayuri Hayakawa and Boaz Keysar have shown that thinking in a second language reduces economic biases in decision-making, and it also appears to increase creativity and insight in problem solving. One interpretation is that thinking in a foreign language may provide a little bit of emotional distance from a situation and thus could make self regulation easier leading to more rational decisions, and more divergent and creative thinking.
Although previous wisdom research has focused on describing and defining wisdom, the field of wisdom research may now be sufficiently advanced to consider the antecedents of wisdom. What needs to be true about a person in order to develop wisdom or to take advantage of experiences that can lead to the development of wisdom? What must develop in a person in order for wisdom to follow? Wisdom seems to depend on epistemic humility. Sir John Templeton discussed the importance of humility in terms of recognizing how much there is to know and to learn about people. And wisdom depends in part on understanding that the values and perspectives of other people are important in solving human problems — we all must be open to learning more.
Wisdom also seems to be grounded in a kind of virtue motivation, such that other virtues may serve as guidance in the use and development of wisdom. In addition, wisdom appears to depend on a willingness to engage in intellectual struggle, so as not to be deterred from working on tough problems that may require reflection, and even self reflection. Wisdom may also depend on a propensity to engage in divergent thinking, creativity, and the insight that comes from a diversity of experiences, and from forming new concepts and associations among concepts.
The scientific study of wisdom is still a very young field but using modern research methods of psychology, economics, and neuroscience together with scholarship and analytical thinking from other fields such as philosophy and classics, researchers can move beyond the folk psychology of cultural belief to study the mechanisms underlying wise thought and decision. One goal of this work is to elucidate the way in which wisdom can increase with experiences and to understand the kinds of experiences that can lead to wisdom. If we understand how experience increases wisdom, perhaps we do not have to wait to become older in order to become wiser.
Discussion Questions:
1. Is wisdom something that anyone can acquire or is it something that is only possible for a select few individuals to develop?
2. Can anyone become just a little wiser with certain experiences or is there an absolute distinction between people who are wise and people who are not?
3. Does making wiser decisions in one area (such as financial decisions) imply wisdom in other areas (such as human relationships) as well?
4. Does becoming wiser depend on having survived a tragedy or terrible experience?
5. How do humility and self-control contribute to the development of wisdom?
Discussion Summary
Does a person become wise through a mysterious force of nature—just something that happens to a rare few individuals, and is therefore beyond the intervention of human intention and control? This is the impression one gets in thinking about various examples of wisdom from stories and the media. The wise person is an aged person who, as some consequence of life experiences, has achieved wisdom which is rare and valuable. Clearly not everyone who becomes older is wiser, nor does everyone who experiences and survives serious life challenges become wise. People can benefit from life challenges and learn from them in a positive way or become disaffected or bitter. In writing my essay on the psychological and social factors that contribute to the development of wisdom, my goal was to look beyond the typical way in which society stereotypes the development of wisdom. As a scientist, there is a natural question that arises in thinking about wisdom and its development, and that is to ask by what mechanisms wisdom arises? Even if the answer were that wisdom comes with age, we would have counterexamples (not all older folks are wise) and that would lead us back to ask about mechanisms that operate as a function of time.
The discussion of this essay in the comments however raised several questions about the meaning of the term wisdom. The focus of the comments was less on the antecedent causes of wisdom or on mechanism than on the nature of wisdom. As was pointed out in the comments, in order to measure wisdom, which is a prerequisite to investigating its causes, it is necessary to have a definition of wisdom. Defining wisdom is not simple and as can be seen in the comments, there are different aspects to wisdom that one can focus on as part of a definition. When people use the word wisdom in common speech (albeit somewhat infrequently), I think it is generally with a kind of tacit definition in mind that is probably derived from the exemplars of wisdom in literature and culture. Such definitions are too vague to lead to the identification of measurable properties. In focusing on the examples of wise decisions or wise advice or wise people that come to mind, whether from a friend or family member or King Solomon, people use the examples that easily come to mind. This means that discussions of wisdom often focus on different aspects of wisdom and these aspects may sometimes seem a bit disjoint and perhaps even idiosyncratic.
One comment asked about the role of emotional detachment in wisdom, correctly pointing out this as a common element among several points in the essay. The conjecture was that as people get older they have more emotional distance from events and consequences. This ties in with the idea from work by Keysar, Hayakawa, and Costa that thinking in a second language may increase emotional detachment leading to more rational decisions or the work of Hortacsu and List on people with market experience trading goods who appear to be more detached from goods and thus less biased in economic decisions. But is the wiser person simply more detached as this suggests? An alternative interpretation is that wise decisions are not overly biased by emotional implications but the emotional information is still available. The latter interpretation is more consistent with Robert Sternberg’s notion of wisdom as a balance of influences, whereas many daily decisions we make that are not particularly wise show the influence of biases that overshadow more rational evaluations of evidence.
However this seems disjoint from comments that were raised about the importance of wisdom having positive social consequences or being grounded in knowledge of human nature. From the perspective of the concerns I raised in the essay, this suggests the importance of experiences that are grounded in the virtues to the development of wisdom, as well as the importance of experiences in social interaction. But the comments also point to the fact that judgments of wisdom—is this person wise or is this advice wise etc.—are social judgments set in a particular culture and social context. While one comment suggested that wisdom is deeply rooted in aspects of human nature, suggesting a kind of universal quality to it, it seems almost certain that the manifestations of wisdom through choice, decision, action or advice must be grounded in a particular culture.
This raises the question of whether there are different kinds of wisdom. Are the different perspectives on wisdom simply different faces of the same thing or are these entirely different kinds of wisdom. Walter Canon, a famous physiologist, coined the term “homeostasis” in his 1932 book The Wisdom of the Body. In essence this term meant that bodies regulate their physiology to maintain successful functioning. This mechanism of self-regulation does not arise by chance but is a consequence of a well-organized system. In talking about the wisdom of the body, Canon was arguing that the body acts to maintain a balance of internal physiological states. Is this idea of wisdom different from the notion of the wisdom of King Solomon and Confucius? Perhaps as a metaphor it is not a bad place to start, because the wisdom probably cannot be manifest in a disordered mind, and is similar to Sternberg’s balance theory of wisdom. Moreover, wisdom ought not wait for order to fall naturally on the mind but it seems plausible that the wise mind must have a kind of homeostasis or self-regulation just as the body does so that impulsiveness, immediacy, and salience do not overpower the importance of other factors in making a decision. If there are different kinds of wisdom, in different domains of experience and expertise, perhaps there are common mechanisms underlying them that allow us to call all of them wisdom. This poses a basic challenge to the science of understanding wisdom and to the development of wisdom research.
New Big Questions
1. What is the role of emotion in wisdom? Is wisdom just “colder” cognition or does wisdom depend on self-regulation so as to use emotional information and emotional responses as an aid when appropriate without being overwhelmed by emotion?
2. Are there different kinds of wisdom such as bodily wisdom or mental wisdom, or depending on different cultures or professions or eras? If so, are the commonalities among the different kinds of wisdom based on common psychological and neural mechanisms?
This is an interesting article, but I wish it provided more clarity around the definition of “wisdom”. Specifically, I see a vast gulf between prudence (the ability to make good choices) or intelligence (the ability to see clearly and deeply) and wisdom. Wisdom has a transcendent universality to it – it is not for the self, even thought it requires self-control and self-awareness. Wisdom also bridges the rational and emotional – reflecting the best that the mind has to offer and the deepest empathy and compassion of the human heart.
Several aspects of the aging process may also contribute to the correlation (if not causation) of age with wisdom. As you noted, age brings experience – and a corresponding shrinkage of time. One day in the life of someone who is 80 is arguably half as long in a relative sense as the same day in the life of someone who is 40 – and one fourth as long a day in the life of a 20 year old. A very different perspective. Then there are the physiological aspects of aging. Loss of short term memory may increase the value placed on longer term thinking – and the slowing down of the body (and potentially changes in the brain) may improve impulse control, increase humility and patience and reduce the focus on goal achievement – all contributors to wisdom. This last point may be one of the most important – being motivated by goal achievement is an attribute of younger people, but it may not give the mental or emotional space for the depth and breadth essential for wisdom.
The question of the definition of wisdom is an important question in its own right. I could easily have written an essay on this topic alone. One aspect of this question is whether wisdom is a property of human nature universally, or a culturally constituted and socially judged property of human psychology. Many people have their own view and definition of wisdom and it became clear during an earlier project called Defining Wisdom, supported by the John Templeton Foundaton, that there is no clear consesus in spite of definitions ranging from Aristotle to Augustine to Sternberg, Baltes, and Ardelt. One definition, courtesy of the OED is closely related to prudent judgment and that is the shorthand I used in my essay. But I am not convinced that wisdom is necessarily universal. It is appealing to think that wisdom is the same across eons and cultures but it seems unlikely, unless divorced from the way that culture shapes humanity that it is absolute and universal. That is not to say there are not commonalities across cultures in what wisdom is–there are certain to be many. But there will be differences as well.
It is true that time takes on different subject qualities–at least in general reflection on its passage–with age. But I think for everyone whether 60 or 30 (the ages I have more familiarity with) days can fly by as quickly or drag as slowly. I do not really feel that each day takes much less time to go past on average than it did 30 years ago. But that might suggest each experience would have less subjective impact and I am pretty sure that is not the case. With aging we do not really lose short term memory but it seems to be less effective in use which is somewhat different. However research shows that older and younger adults can acheive similar results with long term memory just by slightly different means. I do think that many of our experiences in aging can have the effect of increasing epistemic humility and possibly increasing patience and self control but those are not exclusively available to aolder adults. There are many impatient older adults with reduced self control (I have know a few personally) and I have known a number of younger adults with patience and humility. The questions for science might be which of the expriences one has leads to aid in the development of these qualities and how do they work to do so?
Hmm. If we can’t define it, then how can it be measured – and how can we do science on it? The subtleties are deep and the language profound. For example, by referring to the “transcendent universality” of wisdom, I did not mean to imply that the same conclusion would be wise across all space and time. Rather, wisdom considers all interests (self – other – all people – the world – the universe) and extends beyond local and specific facts.
I would agree, however, that science can and should address specific empirical questions about human decision-making and behavior. But I believe both the inquiry and the conclusions should be cautious in using terms like “wisdom” that may have extremely diverse and complex meanings to different people.
To be clear, we cannot definie intelligence as we would prime numbers, either. As wtih many aspects of human capacities, the various definitions employed, as Wittgenstein pointed out in consideration of the definition of “game” share a kind of family resemblance amongst our intutions. The inability to provide a complete technical definition does not prevent ours studying–measuring and manipulating conditions of measurement–those aspects that are clear. But the question perhaps remains whether there is one absolute “true” universal wisdom, or whether there are different forms and kinds across situations and cultures. That is a question that can be investigated systematically and science is one, but not the only, way of doing so. In terms of a transcendent wisdom, one that considers all interests and extends beyond local and specific facts, I think that we can agree that in some circumstances there are some cases of decisions that might be called wise that need not consider all poeple, just ithose that have some bearing on the decision at hand. One hallmark of wisdom might well be to not consider everything but everything relevant to a decision and the process by which that determination occurs.
It is interesting to consider how definitions of human abilities like wisdom or intellegience shape the future use and understanding of such concepts. Consdier that although Binet (the father of the intelligence test) referred to intelligence as judgment, intelligence tests do not typically actually test judgment. Were we in an earlier time, we would be discussing the definition of intelligence in respect of how to determine its measurement. The choices made then have shaped the debates and discussion that occur now in terms of intelligence, for such debate continues: Is intelligence domanin general or specific (as in visual intelligence vs. verbal intelligence)? Is intelligence different across cultures?
Such questions are not resolved by a single person’s belief or argument nor a single experiement. So I agree completely that we must all be cautious in regard to definiing wisdom although explorations of the diversity of definition through analysis, debate, and study may yield a consensus ultimately.
Thanks for the excellent reply! You make an important point – definitions and dialogue “shape the future use and understanding.” If we are not careful and become too prescriptive in our approach to certain concepts, like wisdom or intelligence, then we can close off valuable perspectives. I am reminded of Wittgenstein’s famous and final line from the Tractatus “Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must remain silent”. This remarkable statement was intended to clarify the limits of what can be known, but it also represents a rhtetorical device to silence opposing viewpoints. The resulting positivism pushed philosophy out of the traditional inquiries – metaphysics, epistemology, ontology, teleology – into the tightly cirumscribed fields of logic and linguistics for nearly a century. The Wittgenteinian logic is still used today by physicalists and determinists to bludgeon those who inquire about spirituality or free will, respectively. Wittgenstein himself moved beyond his own prescription in his later work – and contributed something in the nature of “wisdom” to many who have studied him. But the appeal of hard (and narrow) definitions as a means of closing off debate is often hard to resist and the technique appears often in academic circles as well as online debates.
True wisdom transcends this human foible!
It would seem to me that the link between wisdom and aging, wisdom and experience, and wisdom and a second language are all indicative of states of detachment, less egotistical, more balanced. Older people have a greater propensity for detachment, having gone through ‘all this ado’ and experience contributes the same without the necessity for time. A second language detaches the speaker/thinker from their habitual automatic modes of relating, as does meditation.
Detached (or perhaps detachable), lowered egotism, and greater balance (a theory of Rober Sternberg to define wisdom in fact) are all important aspects of wisdom certainly. The kinds of experiences that lead to these might be better viewed as paths to better control of these. Consider that to be too detached is to veer to the psychopathic perhaps. To be too balanced might be to overlook the truly important. And while less egotism is certainly a good thing, to undervalue one’s self and one’s needs can be disastrous in the long term. The purely selfless may not flourish sufficiently to help those in need. So while it is often easy to see the reduction of certain things (as I emphasized in my essay perhaps) as important to wisdom, perhaps it is most important to retain and employ judgment and control. Somtimes it is good and important to feel the value and be less detacted and then one would want to think in a first language. If we do not feel the pain of someone else, we may not act sufficiently quickly and vigoously to help. Meditation does appear to lead to increased wisdom, as does ballet, much to our surprise, but perhaps because both require a measure of self control and judgment rather than just selflessness.
Hello;
I suggest that wisdom is a matter of two things. 1) Wisdom must be taken up by others than the wise person and, 2) wisdom must be on the behalf of others than those who take it up. Thus, wisdom gets one out of one’s own skin and into the lives of others in a selfless way. Further, since wisdom is taken up by others than the wise one, it forms a gainful and expanding community of wise ones.
Thinking of Solomon’s famously wise decision, of 1 Kings 3, the people who heard of it spoke of his wisdom by it. They thus were taking up his decision as their own sort of good thing, good for all people whoever they may be. Further, a nation so bestowed would then form a basis of such strength and compassion within them. So that is a story from antiquity about wisdom, and it strikes me as directly relevant today.
I agree that there is much in our understanding of antiqtuity that is germane to contemporary insights about wisdom. In this respect both points you make are important ones that are core to what we must remember about wisdom. The first I tend to think of in the following way: The determination of a wise choice or decision or act as wise is in the culturally shaped eyes of the observing society. In our previsou Defining Wisdom project, it appeared that people who were nominated by their professional peers as wise did not recognize that aspect of themselves. Perhaps it is inherent in the nature of epistemic humility so important in wisdom that those who are wise do not assume the mantle of wisdom upon themselves but find it placed there by those around them. It is for our societies to judge the wisdom of something and prehaps more often society through the lens of history must judge. The second point is critical as well. I think that as important as epistemic humility is, the grounding in virtue motivation and proscociality is critical as well. While there may be a smaller form of wisdom in one’s daily life in choices and decisions that are not just smart but lead to human flourishing, the more typically recognized manifestation of Wisdom is that which benefits society either in the form of other indviduals or the collective that society best recognizes and most often typifies our view of wisdom.
What is wisdom? This article by H. Nusbaum is an excellent attempt to expose, in a concise manner, most of the intellectual notions and challenges of what wisdom could mean at this time and how it develops as far as we can discern. Several pertinent views have been put forward by both the author and in the comments. Clearly I agree we are dealing with a very important topic, insufficiently understood, but one which is vitally important for mankind to elucidate as far as possible. I should quote from this article a paragraph which I believe gives the gist of what we ought to focus on:
In addition, wisdom appears to depend on a willingness to engage in intellectual struggle, so as not to be deterred from working on tough problems that may require reflection, and even self reflection. Wisdom may also depend on a propensity to engage in divergent thinking, creativity, and the insight that comes from a diversity of experiences, and from forming new concepts and associations among concepts.
As I happen to be working on what could constitute our ultimate realities and what could be behind them, I must congratulate those who decided that wisdom is a subject of immense importance. Consequently to my mind what we can see in terms of cosmological evolution is basically some kind of ultimate cosmological wisdom. The same applies to chemical and biological evolution, wisdom which permeates the whole universe. It all started somewhere in the mind of God, so He represents the Ultimate Wisdom. We humans have to toil our life forward and attempt to reach as much perfection as we possibly can and profuse wisdom is what we need to develop so as to eventually produce a superior human race. In our daily life and in our lifetimes some of us make as much use as we can in many years of experience from our complex environment to become knowledgeable in matters which lead to humans capable of exerting greater and greater positive social improvements through our acts, advice and deeds. In an intriguing way a basically comparable progressive realization and consciousness occurred during organic evolution, originating from the a divine but cosmological masterminding at time 0 of our cosmological history. Humans are just at the beginning of appreciating our incredibly unique fortune to exist and to realize our position in the vastness of the universe, which was abruptly set in motion though an empirical concept of creation which will give us a lot satisfaction to gradually unravel.
What is wisdom? This article by Howard Nusbaum is an excellent attempt to expose, in a concise manner, most of the intellectual notions and challenges of what wisdom could mean at this time and how it develops as far as we can discern. Several pertinent views have been put forward by both the author and in the comments. Clearly I agree we are dealing with a very important topic, insufficiently understood, but one which is vitally important for mankind to elucidate as far as possible. I should quote from this article a paragraph which I believe gives the gist of what we ought to focus on:
In addition, wisdom appears to depend on a willingness to engage in intellectual struggle, so as not to be deterred from working on tough problems that may require reflection, and even self reflection. Wisdom may also depend on a propensity to engage in divergent thinking, creativity, and the insight that comes from a diversity of experiences, and from forming new concepts and associations among concepts.
As I happen to be working on what could constitute our ultimate realities and what could be behind them, I must congratulate those who decided that wisdom is a subject of immense importance. Consequently to my mind what we can see in terms of cosmological evolution is basically some kind of ultimate cosmological wisdom. The same applies to chemical and biological evolution, wisdom which permeates the whole universe. It all started somewhere in the mind of God, so He represents the Ultimate Wisdom. We humans have to toil our life forward and attempt to reach as much perfection as we possibly can and profuse wisdom is what we need to develop so as to eventually produce a superior human race. In our daily life and in our lifetimes some of us make as much use as we can in many years of experience from our complex environment to become knowledgeable in matters which lead to humans capable of exerting greater and greater positive social improvements through our acts, advice and deeds. In an intriguing way a basically comparable progressive realization and consciousness occurred during organic evolution, originating from the a divine but cosmological masterminding at time 0 of our cosmological history. Humans are just at the beginning of appreciating our incredibly unique fortune to exist and to realize our position in the vastness of the universe, which was abruptly set in motion though an empirical concept of creation which will give us a lot satisfaction to gradually unravel.
I am always mindful of Sir John Templeton saying, “How little we know, how eager to learn,” as an appropriate guide to the importance of wisdom and to two very crtical foundations for wisdom. The first being the importance of epistemic humility and the second being the willingness to engage intellectual struggle to know and understand. It is important to be mindful of the vastness of knowledge beyond our current grasp and that others have glimpses of that knowledge that we should be ready to learn from. But it is important also to struggle to reflect on what we know, what we don’t know, and how we can learn from others and the universe around us.
I understand wisdom is based on practical reason and compassion and fairness.
Rational decisions even on any single issue could be many,
as they differ from individual to individual depending on
their tradition, bias or natural conditioning.In a wise
decision we see an understanding & a balancing of all of
them in order to avoid extreme consequential fall outs on
individuals.
IMO wise decisions are not person centric;but to be successful
at it one may take the help from meditative practices.
So a wise person is knowledgeable and having abilities to understand fellow humans.
This is a nice way to distinguish the rational and the wise. A smart person presumably (when not biased overly by aspects of some human tendencies) will be rational or as rational as possible. And within the range of possible rational decisions and advice, there may be many avenues and options. Robert Sternberg has proposed a balance theory of wisdom that says as you do, that the wise decision is one that balances interests and possible outcomes, a middle path if you will. Indeed, we tend to think of wisdom as taking the broader perspective, considering others as well as self, considering the long term as well as the short term. A wise person certainly must have deep knowledge of others but also often knowledge about society and the greater good. In this respect then it is interesting to consider that we can conceive of institutions being wise. On the one hand, an institution can have wise policies and actiosn even if no individual within the insititution is wise–a collective wisdom if you will. On the other hand, whether a wise hand is at the helm or not, an insitution may put in place polcies that lead to wiser choices, decisions, and actions for its constituents along the lines that Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein have advocated.