10.1017@9781108568272.016 Wisdom Leer para Podcast

15 The Development of Wisdom
during Adulthood
Judith Glück
How does wisdom develop? Why do some people become wiser over the course
of their lives, while most of us do not, or, at least, not by much? Researchers
largely agree that wisdom develops through life experience – but that not every-
one who accumulates experience becomes wiser, so it either has to be something
about the experiences or about the way people deal with them that leads to wis-
dom. In this chapter, I first describe the empirical evidence on the relationship
between wisdom and chronological age. As I am going to show, the findings
are quite inconsistent and seem to depend on how wisdom was measured in
each study. I try to make sense of these divergent findings by discussing which
components of wisdom might be driving the relationships. The second part of
the chapter goes beyond description, as I attempt to integrate and explain the
findings by relating them to conceptual models of the development of wisdom
over adulthood.
Empirical Evidence on the Relationship between

Wisdom and Age
After 30 years of empirical wisdom research, one would think that we
should know how wisdom is related to age. However, it seems that this relation-
ship depends quite crucially on which measure of wisdom is used. Scores in the
“classical” open-ended measure of wisdom, the Berlin Wisdom Paradigm (BWP,
Baltes & Staudinger, 2000), neither increase nor decrease with age after 25 years
(while between 15 and 25 there is a marked increase; see Pasupathi, Staudinger, &
Baltes, 2001), and there might even be a slight decrease in very old age (Staudinger,
1999). The most popular self- report scale, the Three- Dimensional Wisdom
Scale (3D-WS, Ardelt, 2003), is negatively correlated with age, owing largely to
lower scores in very old participants. A more recent study (Ardelt, Pridgen, &
Nutter-Pridgen, 2018) found an inverse U-shaped relationship with the highest
scores in middle age. This type of curve was also found for the Self-Assessed
Wisdom Scale (SAWS; Webster, 2007), another often-used self-report measure
(Webster, Westerhof, & Bohlmeijer, 2013), while a zero correlation was found
for another self-report measure, the Adult Self-Transcendence Inventory (ASTI;
Levenson, Jennings, Aldwin, & Shiraishi, 2005). Thus, one might conclude that
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324 judith glück
wisdom increases early in adulthood and then stays largely stable until it may
decline very late in life. However, Grossmann et al. (2010) found a linear pos-
itive relationship of an open-ended measure of wise reasoning with age well
into participants’ nineties, and Brienza, Kung, Santos, Bobocel, & Grossmann
(2017) found a U-shaped relationship for the Situated Wise Reasoning Scale.
In sum, wisdom increases, stays stable, increases then decreases, decreases then
increases, or just decreases with age, depending on which measure you look at.
This is clearly not a very satisfactory result if we want to understand how and
why wisdom develops. Before trying to explain these findings, I want to make a
few conceptual and methodological remarks.
First, an important question: What kind of relationship would we actually
expect for a measure of wisdom? How “should” wisdom be related to age? As
mentioned earlier, laypeople (Glück & Bluck, 2011) and wisdom researchers
(Jeste et al., 2008) agree that wisdom does not automatically come with aging. At
the same time, when laypeople are asked to nominate a wise person, most name
someone older than, say, 60 (overviews in Bluck & Glück, 2005; Weststrate,
Bluck, & Glück, this volume). How does that fit together? Most wisdom
researchers believe that wisdom is a rare phenomenon – something that only
a few people develop (Jeste et al., 2010). They also believe that wisdom takes
time and life experience to develop, so those who do attain wisdom are likely
to reach their highest levels only in late middle age or old age. (As I will show
in the last section of this chapter, there are good theoretical reasons to think
so.) Thus, in terms of our psychological methodologies, we would not actually
expect to find a positive linear correlation with age. In fact, wisdom might even
decrease somewhat in the general population, as many people tend to become
more rigid and less open with age (e.g., Specht, Egloff, & Schmukle, 2011).
However, there should be a few exceptional individuals whose wisdom has
increased as they have accumulated life experiences over time. Thus, looking at
correlations might be misleading to begin with. What we should do is look at
the age distribution of the, say, 20% wisest participants in a study and compare
it to the rest of the sample.
However, even when we ran such an analysis for four different measures of
wisdom, we did not find any age difference – in fact, in the 3D-WS, the top 25%
were actually significantly younger than the rest of the sample (Glück et al.,
2013). What does that mean? Of course, one explanation is that laypeople and
wisdom researchers just have it all wrong. Maybe wisdom does not increase in
a few select individuals with age – perhaps we all reach our maximum levels
as early as age 30 or 40 and then lose our wisdom as we grow older. But there
are at least two other, more plausible explanations. The first is cohort effects.
Virtually all existing data on wisdom and age are cross-sectional, that is, based
on comparisons between different age groups. Such data do not necessarily tell
us much about longitudinal trajectories: Perhaps the oldest participants in a
study were even less wise when they were younger, simply because they grew up
in very different times. In fact, most relevant data were collected between 1990
and 2010. Thus, the oldest participants in those studies were born between 1920
The Development of Wisdom during Adulthood 325
and 1940 – people who were adults already in the late 1960s, when the norms
and values of the Western world were massively changed by a young generation
of hippies and flower children. In our own interview studies, we often notice the
differences both in value systems and in actual behavior between these genera-
tions: people who came of age in the late 1960s or later are far more willing and
able to talk about themselves, including their outer and inner experiences, and
more open to different perspectives. These aspects probably influence measures
of wisdom (although the most recent developments in the West seriously call
into question the idea that people have really become any wiser!). Unfortunately,
longitudinal data sets measuring wisdom over longer periods of the lifespan
are not available yet, nor are cohort comparisons over a longer period of time.
While we know from large-scale studies that the average level of intelligence has
risen by about three IQ points every decade over much of the twentieth century
(Flynn, 1987), wisdom does not seem to have kept pace with that development
(Sternberg, 2008). We can only speculate on how wisdom has changed with the
societal changes of the past century.
Second, we need to look carefully at what our wisdom measures actually
measure (Koller, Levenson, & Glück, 2017). Wisdom is a complex, multifaceted
construct, and its different facets may have different age trajectories of their
own. In this case, the relationship of a measure with age would depend on the
extent to which it represents particular facets.
Different Age Relations for Different Facets of Wisdom

I like to look at such questions by playing around with data, so I used a data set
of 170 participants, including 47 wisdom nominees, who were presented with
four different self-report measures of wisdom: the BWP, the SAWS, the 3D-WS,
and the ASTI. Detailed descriptions of all four measures are given in Glück
et al. (2013); for the current purpose, it is most important to mention that the
sample we studied spanned an age range from 26 to 92 years, with 59% of the
participants older than 50 and only 5% younger than 30 years. In this sample, the
total scores of the ASTI and the BWP were unrelated to age, whereas there was
a low positive correlation for the SAWS (r = 0.15, p = 0.052) and a low negative
correlation for the 3D-WS (r = –0.17, p = 0.025; Glück et al., 2013).
Trying to understand which aspects of wisdom may drive these relationships,
I simply correlated every single item with age. Note that this is a purely descrip-
tive endeavor – with so many correlations, significance tests run the risk of alpha
error accumulation, but I just wanted to see whether there would be any discern-
ible pattern. Table 15.1 shows all items that had correlations above 0.20.
The first obvious pattern in these data is more indicative of “non-wisdom”
than of wisdom: The most consistent relations with age were found for items
from the 3D-WS that represent the cognitive dimension of wisdom and are
reverse-coded – items like “In this complicated world of ours, the only way we
can know what’s going on is to rely on leaders or experts who can be trusted,”
“Simply knowing the answer rather than understanding the reasons for the
326 judith glück
Table 15.1 Single-item Spearman correlations of three wisdom self-report scales with age
(only correlations above 0.20 or below −0.20 are listed)
Item Text r
3DWS 1a In this complicated world of ours, the only way we can know what’s 0.37
going on is to rely on leaders or experts who can be trusted. [R]
ASTI 10 I feel part of something greater than myself. 0.29
3DWS 23b Simply knowing the answer rather than understanding the reasons for 0.27
the answer to a problem is fine with me. [R]
3DWS 15a People are either good or bad. [R] 0.27
3DWS 7b I try to anticipate and avoid situations where there is a likely chance I 0.27
will have to think in depth about something. [R]
SAWS 7 Emotions do not overwhelm me when I make personal decisions. 0.25
3DWS 10b A problem has little attraction for me if I don’t think it has a solution. 0.24
[R]
ASTI 22 I often have a sense of oneness with nature. 0.24
3DWS 7a There is only one right way to do anything. [R] 0.23
3DWS 6b Sometimes I feel a real compassion for everyone. 0.23
3DWS 5a You can classify almost all people as either honest or crooked. [R] 0.22
3DWS 2b If I see people in need, I try to help them one way or another. 0.22
ASTI 2 I feel that my individual life is a part of a greater whole. 0.22
3DWS 13a A person either knows the answer to a question or he/she doesn’t. [R] 0.21
ASTI 6 I feel a sense of belonging with both earlier and future generations. 0.21
3DWS 16b I prefer just to let things happen rather than try to understand why they 0.20
turned out that way. [R]
SAWS 13 I reminisce quite frequently. 0.20
SAWS 35 I’m very curious about other religious and/or philosophical belief 0.20
systems.
SAWS 23 I often recall earlier times in my life to see how I’ve changed since then. 0.20
ASTI 26 I feel that I know myself. –0.25
SAWS 30 I do not like being around other persons whose views are strongly dif- –0.28
ferent from mine. [R]
answer to a problem is fine with me,” or “People are either good or bad” repre-
sent a kind of voluntary simple-mindedness, an unwillingness to think deeply
about complicated and ambiguous issues. The cognitive dimension of the 3D-
WS is defined as an inherent motivation to look at things in depth, a desire
for knowledge and truth even if it is complex and unpleasant (Ardelt, 2003).
It seems that in the general population, this motivation is negatively related to
age. In the current data, the correlation of age with the cognitive dimension of
5 Control
participants
Wisdom nominees
4
Simple-mindedness
0 20 40 60 80 100
Age
Figure 15.1 Age and the reversed cognitive dimension of the 3D-WS.
N = 170; for details, see Glück et al. (2013)
wisdom (which was essentially the mean across the simple-mindedness items in
the table and a few more) was r = –0.39 (p < 0.001), and this correlation was
actually driving the negative correlation between the total 3D-WS score and age.
Figure 15.1 depicts the relationship of age and simple-mindedness (i.e., the
reversed cognitive dimension of the 3D-WS) in our data. As the figure shows,
in addition to the general linear trend, there were a few participants, mostly
wisdom nominees, in the bottom right corner, indicating that even though
they were in their sixties and seventies, they were still not willing to adopt a
simple-minded perspective on complex issues. However, somewhere around
age 80, simple-mindedness may more generally take over. This is probably due
to the well-established fact that fluid intelligence, the ability to mentally rep-
resent and manipulate new information effectively, declines with age (e.g., Li,
Lindenberger, & Hommel, 2004).
Table 15.1 also shows aspects of wisdom that are positively related with age.
Most obviously, there is a group of items from the ASTI that describes a sense
of connectedness and transcendence, such as “I feel part of something greater
than myself,” “I often have a sense of oneness with nature,” or “I feel that my
individual life is a part of a greater whole.” Levenson et al. (2005) argued that
wisdom is closely related to self-transcendence – becoming less ego-focused and
feeling more connected to others and the world at large. As researchers like
Erikson (1959) or Tornstam (1994) have proposed, such a broader, less self-
centered perspective may develop as individuals become aware of the finality of
their own life (see also Takahashi, this volume). Becoming more aware of death
may lead us to reevaluate what is really important in life and to find external
sources of self-esteem, such as fame or money, less rewarding than an inward
328 judith glück
focus on reexamining our lived life, improving our relationships with others, and
coming to peace with ourselves. This new perspective may also increase com-
passion with others, as manifested in items from the affective dimension of the
3D-WS such as “If I see people in need, I try to help them one way or another”
or “Sometimes I feel a real compassion for everyone.” (Not everyone becomes
more compassionate with age, however – some people may indeed become more
selfish. Developmental trajectories in adulthood tend to be heterogeneous and
messy, and it is important to acknowledge interindividual variability around
general trends; see, e.g., Baltes, Lindenberger, & Staudinger, 1998.)
What can we conclude from these findings? Wisdom is a complex interplay
of several factors. Some of them, such as self-transcendence, seem to increase
with age in most people. Others, such as complex thinking, actually decrease
with age in most people. Some individuals, however, seem to be able to maintain
relatively high levels of complex thinking way into old age – perhaps because
they have acquired expert knowledge about the important questions of human
existence that enables them to understand complex issues in this domain in a
more intuitive way, just like an expert chess player can remember all the figures
on a chessboard without much effort (see, e.g., Vaci, Gula, & Bilalić, 2015).
How a measure of wisdom is correlated with age probably depends on the facets
that the measure emphasizes: In the 3D-WS, non-simple-mindedness essentially
makes up one third of a participant’s score; therefore, 3D-WS scores decline in
old age. The ASTI includes only a few self-transcendence items; therefore, its
total score is unrelated to age.
The same logic – that the aspects of wisdom that a measure emphasizes influ-
ence its relationship to wisdom – can also be applied to the different relation-
ships with age found for open-ended measures of wisdom. In the Berlin wisdom
paradigm (BWP; Baltes & Staudinger, 2000), participants are presented with
brief descriptions of difficult life problems and asked what “one could consider
and do” in such a situation. Response transcripts are evaluated with respect to
five wisdom criteria: factual knowledge, procedural knowledge, value relativism,
lifespan contextualism, and recognition and management of uncertainty. Across
several studies, all five of these criteria were unrelated to age in participants older
than 25 (overview in Staudinger, 1999), while scores increased markedly between
age 15 and 25 (Pasupathi et al., 2001). On the other hand, Grossmann et al.
(2010) found a linear increase of wise-reasoning scores in a sample ranging from
age 25 to 90. They measured wise reasoning using vignettes describing either
conflicts between societal groups (e.g., concerning immigration) or interpersonal
problems (letters to a newspaper advice column) and asked participants what
they thought would happen next, why they thought this would happen and, for
the interpersonal problems, what should be done in this situation. Responses
were analyzed with respect to six criteria: perspective shifting, recognition of the
likelihood of change, prediction flexibility, search for conflict resolution, recog-
nition of uncertainty and the limits of knowledge, and search for a compromise.
The format of the problems presented to the participants and the criteria
used to evaluate their responses sound rather similar between the two methods,
so why does one of them produce no age differences while performance in the
other is positively related to age? There are several possible explanations. First,
the vignettes used by Grossmann et al. are longer and provide more contex-
tual information than the BWP vignettes, which consist of just one sentence
and leave it to the respondent to consider possible contextual factors. Second,
Grossmann et al. ask for predictions, which may invite participants to consider a
broad range of possible outcomes, while the BWP question focuses on what one
could do in the respective situation. Third, there are relevant differences in the
operationalization of the criteria (see also Kunzmann, this volume). While, for
example, the BWP defines “value relativism” as a self-distanced perspective that
explicitly discusses different possible perspectives on the problem, Grossmann’s
approach defines “recognition of different perspectives” largely by whether the
participant immerses him- or herself into the problem and imagines being in the
protagonist’s situation.
Thus, the BWP vignettes may be more likely to tap aspects of fluid intelli-
gence, whereas the Grossmann et al. vignettes may measure participants’ ability
to relate the respective problems to their own experiences (Kunzmann, Nowak,
Thomas, & Nestler, 2018; see also Kunzmann, this volume). Consistent with
this explanation, older participants profited particularly from discussing BWP
problems with someone else and then having some time to reflect on the discus-
sion before giving their response (Staudinger & Baltes, 1996). Another relevant
variable is the actual content of the problem vignettes: participants score high-
est in the BWP if they are presented with problems that are salient for their age
group (Smith, Staudinger, & Baltes, 1994; Staudinger, Smith, & Baltes, 1992;
Thomas & Kunzmann, 2013).
In sum, empirical findings about the relationship of wisdom to age are
strongly dependent on the conceptualization and operationalization of wisdom
used in a study. In the general population, some wisdom-related capacities, such
as self-transcendence or the ability to consider different perspectives of a prob-
lem, seem to increase way into old age, whereas others, such as the willingness
and ability to consider many facets of a complex problem, may decline with
age. Some individuals may, however, show developmental trajectories that differ
from these general patterns and enable them to reach and maintain those levels
that we refer to when we describe someone as wise.
Understanding Age-Related Differences in Wisdom

Up to this point, this chapter has probably raised more questions than
it has answered. How measures of wisdom are related to age seems to have a lot
to do with how wisdom is measured, but this insight does not provide a conclu-
sive answer to the question how wisdom develops. Why do some people grow so
wise over time while others “lose” their wisdom or settle for happy adjustment
rather than difficult growth (Staudinger & Kunzmann, 2005)? There are several
developmental theories of wisdom or wisdom-like qualities such as ego integrity
330 judith glück
that have approached this question from different perspectives. Some research-
ers primarily focused on identity development, while others focused on the
acquisition of knowledge. As I want to show in the following, these different
conceptualizations may be more complementary than contradictory. I first
describe two models of identity development. Neither Erik Erikson nor Jane
Loevinger referred to their theories as being about wisdom development, but
they both referred to individuals in the latest stages of their models as wise, and
there are indeed strong similarities between the characteristics of those stages
and wisdom (see also Staudinger & Glück, 2011).
Erikson’s Theory of Lifespan Development

Perhaps the most “classical” psychological source on the development of wis-
dom is Erik H. Erikson’s account of identity development over the lifespan
(Erikson, 1959). He argued that each life phase typically confronts the indi-
vidual with a specific crisis. These crises can be resolved more or less success-
fully depending on the person’s internal and external resources, which are, in
turn, influenced by the positive resolution of earlier crises. Wisdom is mostly
associated with the crises of middle and old age. In middle age, when people
have largely succeeded in building their own life, many struggle with questions
along the line of “Is that all that there is?” According to Erikson, the best way
of resolving this crisis of meaning is the attainment of generativity: becoming
a source of support, knowledge, or advice to younger generations, as opposed
to remaining focused on one’s own needs, which Erikson labeled stagnation or
self-absorption. The increase of self-transcendence shown in Table 15.1 reflects
people’s attainment of a broader, less self-centered perspective with age.
Later in life, the last crisis comes as individuals become more and more aware
of the finality of their life. Integrity, which Erikson has equated with wisdom,
means being able to accept one’s own life as it was lived, with all the mistakes
and sadnesses as well as the accomplishments and joys. Wise individuals may
certainly regret things that they did in their life, but they are also able to for-
give themselves and to take a longer-term perspective on how they have grown
through and learned from those experiences. According to Erikson, people who
have achieved integrity are not afraid of dying because they are at peace with
themselves, their life, and the world around them. Despair, the opposite pole,
results from feeling that one cannot accept the life one has led and would want
to live it all over again to make right what one did wrong. Note, however, that
Erikson himself wrote very late in his life that “[t]he demand to develop Integrity
and Wisdom in old age seems to be somewhat unfair, especially when made by
middle-aged theorists – as, indeed, we then were” (Erikson, 1984, p. 160). Many
people may actually avoid facing the finality of their own life; in fact, most older
people tend to ignore negative information in general and focus on the positive
aspects of life (e.g., Mather & Carstensen, 2005).
Why would some people be able to accept the finality of their own life, while
so many others avoid even thinking about it? According to Erikson, having
positively resolved the earlier crises of the life cycle should enable people to
master this ultimate crisis. That is, individuals who had sufficient care and sup-
port from their caregivers as children to develop a strong, self-defined identity in
adolescence, established intimate but autonomous relationships in young adult-
hood, and were able to become sources of strength and knowledge to others in
middle adulthood should be more likely to take an integrative, accepting stance
toward their own life as they approach its end. This idea is consistent with the
notion that wisdom develops through mastery of crises – an idea that I will
come back to.
Loevinger’s Theory of Ego Development

Building upon Erikson’s work, Jane Loevinger (Loevinger, 1966) assumed that
character development proceeds across the lifespan in typical stages similar to
Piaget’s or Kohlberg’s stages of cognitive and moral development. Ego develop-
ment occurs as individuals negotiate the demands of their inner self with those
of the world around them and develop a more and more differentiated under-
standing of themselves and the world. She described nine increasingly mature
stages: pre-social, impulsive, self-protective, conformist, self-aware, conscien-
tious, individualistic, autonomous, and integrated. As in moral development,
not everyone proceeds through all of the stages. In fact, most people do not get
beyond the sixth (conscientious) stage, and the latest stages are very rare.
People at the conscientious stage have internalized moral rules and feel respon-
sible for others; they generally view people as accountable for their own choices.
Those who move on to the seventh, “individualistic” stage become more aware
of differences between people and the complex contextual and experiential fac-
tors that influence life stories and worldviews. Thus, they are more tolerant and
respectful of differences in perspectives and experiences and more aware of the
subjectivity of their own views. The eighth, “autonomous” stage is characterized
by increasing independence of external sources of self-esteem such as achieve-
ment or admiration, acceptance of the limitations of one’s abilities, and a focus
on self-fulfillment paired with close relations to others. Autonomous individuals
accept the complexity and ambiguity of human experience and try to integrate
conflicting facets into a broader picture. People in the final, integrated stage
of ego development are characterized as wise – empathetic and caring toward
others, but also themselves, and able to reconcile inner conflicts and make peace
with themselves.
In sum, both Erikson and Loevinger described ways in which individuals grow
and mature through life experience, but according to both models, few individ-
uals reach high levels of maturity. One important aspect that implicitly charac-
terizes both Erikson’s and Loevinger’s higher developmental stages is a certain
dynamic between “thinking” and “feeling” (Labouvie-Vief, 1990; Labouvie-
Vief, Grühn, & Studer, 2010): to integrate one’s inner conflicts, one needs to
be clearly aware of one’s own emotions, intuitions, and even bodily reactions,
but also able to reflect upon these feelings, to understand, accept, and integrate
332 judith glück
them. To accept one’s life as lived, one needs to be able to reflect back upon the
story of one’s own life and make meaning from the good and bad experiences
it brought. To act wisely in a complex situation requires an awareness of one’s
own and others’ feelings and needs, but also the ability to take a step back and
think clearly about the complexity of the situation and how it can be resolved.
In this vein, Baltes & Staudinger (2000) described wisdom as an “integration of
mind and virtue,” implying that wise individuals are able to reflect consciously
and rationally on emotions, intuitions, and desires and to take ethical and moral
aspects into account even in complex, emotionally challenging situations. For
example, most of us are able to take the perspective of a close friend who is hav-
ing a conflict with someone else. But taking the perspective of the opponent in
that conflict is much more difficult and requires us to be aware of the fact that
our intuitive, affect-based interpretation of the situation is probably biased in
favor of our friend – and taking the perspective of the opponent in a conflict of
our own is even harder. A wise person would be able to consider both perspec-
tives as well as the general ethical issues underlying the conflict (Sternberg &
Glück, this volume) and arrive at a solution that balances the gains and losses
of everyone involved (Sternberg, 1998, 2005).
Becoming an Expert on Life: The Berlin Wisdom Model

How do people learn to do integrate cognition and emotion – to attend to but
also reflect upon their feelings, so as to be guided but not be biased or over-
whelmed by them? One important part of the answer comes from Baltes and
colleagues’ understanding of how wisdom develops. As mentioned earlier,
these researchers (Smith & Baltes, 1990; Baltes & Staudinger, 2000; see also
Staudinger, this volume) argued that wisdom is a special kind of expertise: expert
knowledge about the fundamental pragmatics of human life, that is, the big and
difficult aspects of our existence such as our awareness of our own mortality,
the balance between intimacy and autonomy in our relationships, the complex
ethical questions that modern societies face, or the reasons of unresolvable con-
flicts among individuals. The psychological term “expert knowledge” generally
refers to extraordinary levels of implicit and explicit knowledge about a subject
domain acquired through long-term intense, goal-oriented practice. A view of
wisdom as expert knowledge implies that some individuals decide early on that
they want to pursue wisdom in their life, and then intentionally engage in activ-
ities that can help them learn more about the fundamental issues of human life.
Smith & Baltes (1990) detailed their developmental account by distinguishing
three different kinds of factors that facilitate the development of wisdom: (1)
general person factors, such as fluid intelligence, mental health, creativity, or
openness to experience, (2) expertise-specific factors, such as life experiences,
having relevant mentors, or a motivation to “strive for excellence,” and (3) facil-
itative experiential contexts, such as certain professions, being a mentor, having
children, or advanced age. Individuals developing wisdom are expected to first
acquire factual and procedural knowledge about the fundamental pragmatics
of life, from which the three “meta-criteria” – essentially an awareness of the

relativity and context-dependence of human experiences, value orientations,
and behaviors and of the uncertainty and unpredictability of life – develop. For
example, as people learn about other cultures and religions, they first acquire
knowledge about differences in life conditions, rituals, and world views. If they
are willing to reflect upon these differences in depth, they can obtain more gen-
eral insights about how important it is to take context into account in interpret-
ing people’s behavior.
According to the Berlin group, there is not one optimal path toward wisdom –
individual developmental trajectories can be very different. Baltes & Staudinger
(2000) argued that Erikson’s life-course theory describes only one such path,
which focuses on individuals’ self-insight and downplays the role of external
influences such as other persons or specific learning contexts. In my own and
others’ view, however, the Berlin group’s approach could also be considered as
somewhat limited, as it puts a strong focus on the “cognitive side” of wisdom.
Monika Ardelt, for example, argued that wisdom requires more than just the
acquisition of theoretical knowledge: “Intellectual or theoretical knowledge is
knowledge that is understood only at the intellectual level, whereas wisdom is
understood at the experiential level. It is only when an individual realizes (i.e.,
experiences) the truth of this preserved knowledge that the knowledge is re-
transformed into wisdom and makes the person wise(r)” (Ardelt, 2004, p. 260).
In several of our own studies, we asked people about the most important insights
they have gained from their life. Most of these insights can indeed easily be
related to proverbs or adages such as “No man is an island” or “You can’t always
get what you want”1 – things that basically everybody knows. But it makes a
crucial difference to experience the importance of being close to others for the
first time in one’s life as one struggles with a serious illness, or to experience
the difficulty of letting go of a goal to which one dedicated most of one’s time
over years. Insights gained in this way, from experience, have the potential to
change one’s life and worldviews, even if they were part of one’s theoretical
knowledge since childhood. Such insights may be what makes us wiser, and they
probably include, just as Baltes and Staudinger proposed, insights about the
essential unpredictability of life (“Don’t put all your eggs in one basket”) or the
relativity of value judgments (“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder”).
The Role of Motivation for the Development of Wisdom

However, there are also insights that may be useful for goals such as success or
victory, but not for wisdom, such as “When the going gets tough, the tough get
going” or “Fortune favors the bold.” Thus, people’s insight-creating experiences
may differ, and more importantly, people may differ in the kind of insights they
draw from an experience. The reasons why some people draw wisdom-related
1 All proverbs in this section are from an online list of the “50 most important proverbs” (www
.phrasemix.com/collections/the-50-most-important-english-proverbs).
334 judith glück
insights from experiences cannot only be intellectual; they have something to

do with motivations or value orientations. I would argue that people on the
developmental path toward wisdom are driven by two main motivations: (1) a
deep desire to understand what the human condition is all about, or, as Ardelt
has put it, “a desire to know the truth, i.e., to comprehend the significance and
deeper meaning of phenomena and events, particularly with regard to intrap-
ersonal and interpersonal matters” (Ardelt, 2004, p. 275), and (2) a motivation
to achieve a common good, rather than optimizing outcomes for oneself and
those close to oneself (Sternberg, 1998, 2005; see also Sternberg & Glück, this
volume). As Sternberg has argued,
A person could be practically intelligent, but use his or her practical intelligence
toward bad or selfish ends. In wisdom, one certainly may seek good ends
for oneself, but one also seeks common good outcomes for others. If one’s
motivations are to maximize certain people’s interests and minimize other people’s,
wisdom is not involved. In wisdom, one seeks a common good, realizing that this
common good may be better for some than for others. (Sternberg, 2005, p. 242)
In sum, the main motivation underlying the development of wisdom is proba-

bly not to “strive for excellence” (Baltes & Staudinger, 2000, p. 127) but rather
to gain a deeper understanding of life and to improve other people’s lives.
Acquiring this kind of knowledge is not always pleasant, as it involves becoming
aware of one’s own blind spots and defense mechanisms and seeing one’s own
role in conflicts or other problems (Ardelt, 2003; Kramer, 2003; Weststrate &
Glück, 2017a,b). But learning something important about oneself and, in turn,
about humanity in general, can be deeply satisfactory to a person who considers
understanding life as an important goal.
In sum, wisdom seems to be the result of a rare developmental process that
involves a complex interaction of cognitive, emotional, and affective com-
ponents. The idea of wisdom as a kind of expertise is not inconsistent with
Erikson’s or Loevinger’s ideas of wisdom as an ideal outcome of personality
development – if wisdom indeed involves an integration of “mind and virtue”
(Baltes & Staudinger, 2000) or of affect and cognition (Labouvie-Vief, 1990),
both views may describe a relevant part of the developmental process. Through
reflecting consciously about the experiences of different life phases, including an
awareness of one’s own and others’ feelings and intuitions, pursuing the goals of
an ever-deeper understanding and of balancing one’s own good with that of the
rest of the world, some people may develop extraordinary levels of knowledge
and insight about what matters in life and what it means to live a good life.
A Resource-Oriented Model of the Development

of Wisdom Catalyzed by Life Challenges
In the MORE Life Experience model, Susan Bluck and I have tried to pro-
pose a somewhat more detailed account of how wisdom may develop from
life experiences, bringing together insights from wisdom psychology, lifespan
psychology, research on critical life events, and autobiographical memory research

(Glück & Bluck, 2013; for a new, revised version of the model see Glück,
Bluck, & Weststrate, in press). Our main assumption was that life challenges
are important catalysts of the development of wisdom. By life challenges, we
mean experiences that deeply change a person’s beliefs about him- or herself or
about the world. Such experiences are often negative – traumatic experiences,
for example, shatter people’s beliefs about their security and the predictability
of events (e.g., Janoff-Bulman, 2004) – but they can also be positive, as when
the birth of a couple’s first child completely changes their priorities in life. We
believe that in addition to changing people’s worldviews, such experiences can
also foster insights about the relativity of worldviews in general: about how
experiences and life contexts shape people’s beliefs and values, how priorities
can change over time, and how life is characterized by change more than sta-
bility. In particular, experiences of uncontrollability may be important for the
development of wisdom, as they show individuals the limitations of their own
powers and the uncertainty and unpredictability of human life.
Thus, life challenges have the potential to foster wisdom – but not everyone
becomes wiser through such challenges. In our research, we have seen many
instances of people who deal with experiences such as serious illness by striving
to return to a state of relative security and satisfaction, rather than by explor-
ing the deeper meaning of what happened (Weststrate & Glück, 2017a). We
believe that certain psychological resources are underlying these individual dif-
ferences in the willingness and ability to explore. We identified the following five
resources from the literature on wisdom and/or growth from negative experi-
ences that we assume to be the main predictors of the development of wisdom
(Glück & Bluck, 2013).
Openness is a broad personality disposition that shapes people’s perspectives
on new views and experiences. The kind of openness that is most relevant to
wisdom is an inherent interest in multiple perspectives in general. People on
the way toward wisdom are nonjudgmental about, and actually interested in,
the ways other people’s worldviews, goals, and values differ from their own.
Their openness to new perspectives enables them to seek out advice and learn
from others. They are also more willing to accept and adapt to, or even to seek
out, changes in their life, which provides them with more opportunities to gain
new insights. Openness as a personality trait has been shown to predict wisdom
across various measurement approaches (e.g., Glück et al., 2013; Staudinger,
Lopez, & Baltes, 1997); some authors even argue that openness is a component
of wisdom itself (Webster, 2003, 2007). In our view, however, while openness
may be typical for wise individuals, it is actually an early precursor that fosters
the development of wisdom (see also Ardelt, 2011).
Empathic concern. Individuals developing wisdom are not only open to the
perspectives of others, they are also compassionate with others and deeply
motivated to alleviate their suffering. Empathy is an important precondition
for the development of wisdom in several ways. First, as empathetic individuals
are more attentive to the feelings and reactions of others and more able to
336 judith glück
perceive them accurately, they learn how they can influence or regulate others’
feelings by providing support or giving advice. Wise empathy is not simply tak-
ing on others’ pain as one’s own; it also involves being able to distance oneself
sufficiently to be able to help. Second, compassion is likely to shape people’s
motivations and value systems: Individuals who care deeply about others will
strive for achieving a common good rather than optimizing their own gain in
complex situations (Sternberg, 2005). Ardelt (2003) proposed compassion as
the core of the affective dimension of wisdom. Concern for others is also a
component of laypeople’s (Bluck & Glück, 2005; Weststrate, Bluck, & Glück,
this volume) as well as experts’ conceptions of wisdom (Jeste et al., 2010). In
fact, popular wisdom exemplars have often effected positive change in the world
(Paulhus, Wehr, Harms, & Strasser, 2002; Weststrate et al., 2016). Thus, for wise
individuals, the “others” they care for are not limited to personal friends or
ingroup members, but rather include all of humanity.
Emotional sensitivity and emotion regulation. People developing wisdom are
not only attentive to the emotions of others. They are also sensitive to their
own feelings and tolerant of contradictory, ambivalent, or unwanted emotions.
As they do not aim at maximizing well-being but at a fuller understanding
of life, they neither suppress negative feelings nor dwell extensively on them
(Kunzmann, 2004), and they very much appreciate the positive things in life
(König & Glück, 2014). Over time, paying attention to emotions enables them
to learn to manage them appropriately in a given situation, which often means
to recognize but not necessarily show one’s feelings. Laypeople’s conceptions of
wisdom include equanimity even in emotionally challenging situations (Bluck &
Glück, 2005; Weststrate et al., in press). Again, Webster’s model of wisdom
(2003, 2007) includes emotion regulation as a component, while we and Ardelt
(2011) view it as a developmental predecessor.
Reflectivity is the wisdom resource that enables noncognitive qualities such
as openness, empathy, and emotional sensitivity to result in wisdom-related
knowledge. Very broadly, we understand reflectivity as the motivation to think
about complex issues in a complex way with the ultimate goal of gaining a
deeper understanding. Highly reflective individuals are willing and able to ques-
tion their own views and behavior, as they aim to learn from experiences and not
to guarantee self-enhancement or self-protection (Weststrate & Glück, 2017a).
Reflection is a key ingredient of wisdom in laypeople’s understanding (Bluck &
Glück, 2005) and a component of Ardelt’s (2003, 2004) and Webster’s (2003,
2007) definitions of wisdom. The MORE Life Experience model focuses on
reflectivity, i.e., the willingness and ability to reflect, rather than on the process
of reflection. We assume that reflectivity, like openness, is a predictor of growth
toward wisdom (Staudinger, 2001).
Sense of mastery. The fifth resource, which we have recently suggested to
relabel into “Managing uncertainty and uncontrollability” (Glück et al., in
press) describes a realistic appraisal of one’s own amount of control over what
happens in one’s life. Most people have a certain amount of control illusions
that supports their sense of security and well-being. Highly wise individuals,
however, have learned from experience how instable, uncertain, and uncontrol-
lable life can be (McKee & Barber, 1999; Baltes & Staudinger, 2000). They know
that none of the lessons they learn from life will protect them from negative
things that can happen simply by chance or by uncontrollable factors, which
is in itself a lesson they have learned. Such experiences, however, have not ren-
dered them anxious and afraid of change. Rather, they have learned to appreci-
ate the good things in life at any time (König & Glück, 2014) and to trust in their
own, experience-based ability to deal with whatever may happen (Ardelt, 2005).
The MORE Life Experience model proposes that individuals higher in these
five resources are
(a) more likely to encounter life challenges that have the potential to foster wis-
dom, because they are less afraid of new experiences and more willing to
attend to the complexities and layers of meaning of situations that they
encounter,
(b) better able to deal with such challenges in wisdom-fostering ways, because
they are able to be open and empathetic to the perspectives of others as well
as attentive to their own feelings, reflect upon their own role in the unfolding
of events, and regulate their own emotions, and
(c) more likely to gain new insights as they reflect upon the life challenge in
the aftermath, because they are motivated to learn from the experience and
explore its meanings rather than to convince themselves that they did every-
thing right.
Importantly, we do not consider the resources as stable personality traits.
Rather, they probably evolve over the lifespan in a dynamic interaction. For
example, children with higher levels of innate openness and empathy may profit
particularly from parents who model reflectivity, which may contribute to their
emotion-regulation abilities, which in turn enables them to explore the mean-
ings and causes of negative events more deeply without getting emotionally
overwhelmed.
To illustrate the MORE resources, here are two examples of narratives from
a study in which we interviewed participants about difficult life experiences
(Glück, 2016; Glück et al., in press; Weststrate & Glück, 2017a2). The first par-
ticipant is a woman, now in her late forties, whose first child was born with a
mental disability. In the interview, she said:
I often say that my oldest daughter is my greatest teacher. It’s really about
everyday things, about what’s important in life, how we go through life. [For
example, s]he takes her time, takes time for many things. That makes me think
about how we rush through life, how we find things important that really are
not. As I’m going through life alongside her, I’m in a permanent learning
process. Because I’m constantly made to reflect about what’s important in life,
to relativize the things that seem important to me. This experience has just
changed a lot in me, in my relationships, my family, everything.
2 Details of the two participants’ stories have been changed so that they cannot be identified.
338 judith glück
She is 16 now, which brings new issues into our life, of course, and I can
still feel how this whole experience is smoothing me, sanding me, like a pebble
in a river. More and more the edges get rounded. The beginning was really
hard, and things still happen that are just very difficult. The most important
thing certainly was accepting: this is what it is. Because we didn’t expect
anything like that, it was just something that came into my life.
I’ve grown up, I really think so. I lost lots of fears and really began to trust
in life. That’s strange because I often see the opposite happen: that people lose
their trust in life when they are confronted with an impaired child. But I just
know that nothing can happen to us. Everything has already happened. And
I’m constantly learning.
I definitely don’t want to evaluate the way other people deal with having a
disabled child. I know what an extreme challenge that is and everyone deals
with it in a different way. Trying to do the best, the best way they can.
This participant is showing impressive levels of openness, in the way she sees the
experience as a learning process that has made her grow in many ways as well
as in how she acknowledges that people differ in their ways of coping with such
experiences. She is reflective in the way she questions her own worldviews and
constantly reconsiders what is important in life. She has learned from experi-
ence that unexpected things can happen in life and overthrow any plans one has
had, but she has also learned to trust in her own strength to deal with whatever
happens.
Another example is a participant in his seventies who talked about how
he moved back from Canada to Austria with his family many years ago. His
16-year-old daughter was having a very hard time with the transition. She did
not like her new school and ended up spending almost a year at home. Finally,
her parents allowed her to go stay with relatives in France; at the time, they had
no idea what would become of her. But everything turned out well, the daughter
is now living a happy life and has a good relationship with her parents.
We were quite a bit desperate at the time. We could not understand that after
a really good childhood, where we were so close, suddenly a child doesn’t want
to know you anymore, rejects all the values that you considered important –
that everything you do is wrong. Looking back now, we understand it
perfectly well, that to become a person of her own, she needed to cut all those
lines, that we were too close to really see her as she was, but that was what she
would have needed – but at the time I had no idea what was going on. Now
I’m glad that that happened, we have such a good relationship now, we don’t
see her as a child but as a person of her own, a responsible adult.
I’ve learned so many things from that experience. First, how a person
develops, an individual. Learning to accept that your child is not your
property, not what you think she is. That she is a fully independent being in
a different generation and that this new generation is different from mine. So
many people, especially those who don’t have kids, have zero understanding
for the new generation, they think what we did was right and what they are
doing is wrong. We grew up in a different time, a different situation, there is
no use in looking at that as a model for how they should live.
Rather than drawing any specific conclusions about how adolescents should
be treated, this participant learned from his experience how different people’s
viewpoints can be – how a child’s needs differ from those of her parents, how
different generations grow up in different worlds that shape their needs and
worldviews. He is able to retrospectively empathize with his daughter’s perspec-
tive, and he has used his experience to develop a new relationship with her.
Both examples show how wise individuals are able to make meaning and gain
important insights about life from what happens to them. As mentioned ear-
lier, not everyone is even interested in such insights – many participants in our
studies mostly focused on leaving their negative experiences behind. As one par-
ticipant said about his experience with cancer, “I have a very positive attitude.
A positive attitude. I thank my organs that they are working well. Yes, you have
to be grateful. It is not a matter of course. But in retrospect I am glad that I
had cancer. I am thankful. I do not think about cancer itself anymore. That is
done. It is in the past. It doesn’t make sense to give in to the fear it could come
back.” (Weststrate & Glück, 2017a, p.807). We labeled this way of reflecting
upon experiences as “redemptive processing”: focusing on positive reframing
and event resolution. Redemptive processing can be very useful; in our study, it
was positively related to well-being.
Becoming wiser is not always pleasant (Weststrate & Glück, 2017b). Those
people who are motivated by a desire to learn more about the fundamental ques-
tions of life, open to different perspectives and new ideas, able to make sense
of their own feelings and empathize with others, and willing and able to think
deeply about their experiences may sometimes learn difficult and painful lessons.
But they are likely to acquire more and more wisdom as they navigate the chal-
lenges of their life. Thus, wisdom may not fit neatly into positive-psychological
catalogues of resources that foster people’s well-being. In the short run, it may
make people happier to not question their own views, ignore unwanted feelings,
empathize only with people they feel close to, and overestimate their control
over their life (Staudinger & Glück, 2011; Weststrate & Glück, 2017b). Wisdom
comes at a cost, and the path toward its benefits – both for the individual and,
presumably, for those around him or her and the world at large – require a will-
ingness to face the darker side of the human existence.
The Role of External Resources and Contexts for Wisdom

While the MORE Life Experience Model focuses on internal psychological
resources, external resources may be at least equally important. For a long time,
wisdom psychology tended to focus on wisdom as a characteristic of individuals,
although Staudinger & Baltes (1996) had already demonstrated the importance
of others: Participants who had the opportunity to talk to a friend about a life
problem and then think about the conversation for five minutes showed higher
levels of wisdom in their responses to the problem than participants who either
did not talk to a friend or did not have time to think about the conversation.
340 judith glück
Remarkably, participants who only imagined talking to a friend also showed

higher levels of wisdom. Thus, this study suggested that wisdom is to a large
extent the result of our interactions with others: How would we ever learn to
take different perspectives on an issue if not by seeing others’ reactions and
listening to their views? Baltes & Staudinger (2000) also emphasized the role
of mentors in their developmental model of wisdom, an aspect that is reflected
in the wisdom conceptions of both laypeople (Weststrate et al., this volume)
and wisdom researchers (Jeste et al., 2010). The role of other people in both
the short-term manifestation and the long-term development of wisdom is an
important topic for future research.
Recent wisdom research has generally begun to conceptualize wisdom less
as a trait of individuals than as a state – most of us have done something very
wise in our lives, but at other times we have been terribly unwise (Glück, Bluck,
Baron, & McAdams, 2005). Why people are able to access all their wisdom-
related knowledge in some situations but not others is not yet completely
understood, but one important aspect seems to be whether they are focused
on themselves or taking a broader perspective (Grossmann, 2017; Grossmann,
Kung, & Santos, this volume). Thus, situational contexts may have a crucial
influence on the extent to which people can express their wisdom-related knowl-
edge in actual actions.
Life phases as contexts for wisdom. A contextualized view of wisdom also sug-
gests that different life phases may present individuals with different opportu-
nities to gain wisdom, much as Erikson (1959) and Loevinger (1966) suggested.
Lifespan developmental psychology suggests that at different ages, different
mindsets are adaptive, that is, most likely to lead to positive outcomes such
as well-being (e.g., Heckhausen, Wrosch, & Schulz, 2010). From such a per-
spective, the typical goals of young adulthood – building a career, establishing
close relationships, getting one’s life on track – may be best conquered with a
healthy amount of optimism and control illusions. Young adults have strong
cognitive and physical resources and usually focus on shaping their life so as to
fit their goals and needs. In the context of intimate relationships, for example,
this focus on designing their future may lead them to take conflicts very seri-
ously and spend more time than other age groups engaging in them (Thomas &
Kunzmann, 2013) – after all, their underlying goal is to decide whether their
current relationship can be shaped so that they want to stay in it for a long time
or whether it would be better to look for someone else. Once people have made
some fundamental decisions that put their life on certain educational, profes-
sional, and relational tracks, they work on “building their life” with a focus on
optimizing outcomes across these domains.
As middle age approaches, things tend to get more complex. The relationship
one settled for may turn out to be highly conflictual. Having children tends to
teach people how limited their control over their own and others’ lives actually
is, and as children grow, being a parent becomes a process of letting go. As peo-
ple’s own parents age, they may become dependent and difficult decisions may
become inevitable. In sum, the main theme of one’s life may no longer be growth
and optimization but something more like depth and a balance between action
and acceptance, and the insights that life provides may become more complex.
As described earlier, Erikson (1959) argued that this life phase can best be dealt
with by developing goals that lie outside oneself: Generativity, handing on one’s
insights to younger generations, may enable the individual to gain joy and pride
from the successes of others rather than looking at them with envy.
With old age, the end of one’s own life becomes more and more visible on
the horizon. Friends, siblings, and partners may pass away, and when people
encounter a serious illness, complete recovery may no longer be a realistic goal.
As discussed earlier, Erikson (1959) believed that life reflection – integrating
both the good and the bad experiences in one’s life story and finding meaning
in them – is key to positive resolution of the crisis of confronting one’s own
finality. However, research shows that most people tend to avoid this area and
to focus on the good things in life, such as long-term relationships and activities
characterized by positive emotions (Carstensen, Fung, & Charles, 2003). At the
same time, cognitive limitations caused by losses in fluid intelligence – affecting,
for example, working memory capacity and processing speed – limit people’s
ability to mentally represent and deal with complex issues.
Thus, the recent findings discussed at the outset of this chapter, which suggest
that wisdom may peak in late middle and early old age rather than in very old age,
seem to make sense from a lifespan psychological perspective. At an age of, say, 60,
people’s cognitive capacities are still at a high level, as losses in fluid intelligence can
well be compensated by knowledge and expertise, and at the same time emotional
complexity is still high (Labouvie-Vief, Diehl, Jain, & Zhang, 2007). With older
age, the desire to avoid negative affect and cognitive complexity may become more
predominant, as reflected in the “simple-mindedness” associated with older age in
Table 15.1. It is important, however, to emphasize that developmental trajectories
in old age are very heterogeneous and curves representing averages hardly describe
any individual perfectly. It seems likely that people who have developed a lot of
expertise in the realm of wisdom are able to maintain their broad and compre-
hensive view on difficult matters and the emotional and cognitive competencies
that go along with it way into old age. It is an interesting question for future
research how predictors of wisdom change across the lifespan – while in young
people, openness, empathy, and fluid intelligence may be important to set peo-
ple off on the path toward wisdom, acquired social and emotional capacities
may play a more important role later in life (see also Kunzmann & Glück, this
volume).
Conclusions
What do we know about the development of wisdom? It seems quite
obvious that not everyone grows wise with age. Wisdom requires a combination
of motivational, affective, and cognitive capacities, as well as challenging experi-
ences and profound interactions with others. Some people are deeply motivated
342 judith glück
to gain a deep understanding about the essential questions of human life, the
ways in which we are all the same and yet so different from one another, and the
possibilities to improve not just their own life but those of many. If they also
have the emotional and cognitive capacities required to deal with the complexi-
ties of these issues, they may acquire rich and deep knowledge about life and use
it to improve our world at large.
Is there anything we can do to foster the development of wisdom? The
research reviewed in this chapter suggests that there definitely is. Predecessors
of wisdom such as empathy, emotion regulation, or reflectivity can be both
modeled and explicitly taught by parents, teachers, and other mentors from an
early age (Sternberg, 2001). Research on the influence of contextual factors on
the manifestation of wisdom (see Grossmann, this volume) suggests that we
can also foster wisdom by changing the conditions under which, for example,
societal decisions are made. If politics involved a culture of discussing difficult
issues with heterogeneous groups of representatives of all relevant stakehold-
ers, rather than a culture of playing to the media and simplifying each issue as
much as possible, the world might become a better place. Thus, gaining a better
understanding of how and under which conditions wisdom develops may be a
very important goal for future research.
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15 The Development of Wisdom

Empirical Evidence on the Relationship between

Different Age Relations for Different Facets of Wisdom

Understanding Age-Related Differences in Wisdom

Erikson’s Theory of Lifespan Development

Loevinger’s Theory of Ego Development

Becoming an Expert on Life: The Berlin Wisdom Model

of life, from which the three “meta-criteria” – essentially an awareness of the

The Role of Motivation for the Development of Wisdom

insights from experiences cannot only be intellectual; they have something to

In sum, the main motivation underlying the development of wisdom is proba-

A Resource-Oriented Model of the Development

psychology, research on critical life events, and autobiographical memory research

The Role of External Resources and Contexts for Wisdom

Remarkably, participants who only imagined talking to a friend also showed

Kunzmann, U. (2004). Approaches to a good life: The emotional-motivational side to

philosophical, and benevolent prototypes. Personality and Social Psychology

You might also like

10.1017@9781108568272.016 Wisdom Leer para Podcast

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

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Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

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10.1017@9781108568272.016 Wisdom Leer para Podcast

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

15 The Development of Wisdom

Empirical Evidence on the Relationship between

Different Age Relations for Different Facets of Wisdom

Understanding Age-­Related Differences in Wisdom

Erikson’s Theory of Lifespan Development

Loevinger’s Theory of Ego Development

Becoming an Expert on Life: The Berlin Wisdom Model

of life, from which the three “meta-­criteria” – essentially an awareness of the

The Role of Motivation for the Development of Wisdom

insights from experiences cannot only be intellectual; they have something to

In sum, the main motivation underlying the development of wisdom is proba-

A Resource-­Oriented Model of the Development

psychology, research on critical life events, and autobiographical memory research

The Role of External Resources and Contexts for Wisdom

Remarkably, participants who only imagined talking to a friend also showed

Kunzmann, U. (2004). Approaches to a good life: The emotional-­motivational side to

philosophical, and benevolent prototypes. Personality and Social Psychology

You might also like

Understanding Age-Related Differences in Wisdom

of life, from which the three “meta-criteria” – essentially an awareness of the

A Resource-Oriented Model of the Development

Kunzmann, U. (2004). Approaches to a good life: The emotional-motivational side to