An Exploration of Wisdom in Mid- to Older-Aged Adults: An Australian Context

Abstract

Wisdom is considered a multifaceted construct that has proven difficult to define, and within the psychological literature, wisdom has only been the focus of scientific study for the past 40 years, despite its long history within philosophy and society more generally. Research to date has focused on three core areas of study: defining wisdom; measuring wisdom; and developing wisdom.In this thesis, the focus is on the former two areas of study.The trend to date in terms of defining wisdom has been to delineate between Western and Eastern conceptualisations of wisdom in order to distinguish between the ways in which those two broad groups of people define wisdom. A further, more recent, development in the literature has been to begin explorations as to the potential for a culturally inclusive conceptualisation of wisdom.In terms of its assessment, theorists have measured wisdom in a variety of ways, with the two main methodologies being via performance-based measures (primarily achieved via the use of vignettes) and self-report measures. While each have proven reliability and validity, the former tends to require lengthy procedures and training, while the latter is plagued by concerns around how well an individual can rate their own 'level' of wisdom (Staudinger & Glück, 2011).The present research explored the construct of wisdom utilising Australian adult participants aged 50 years and over. Offering an interesting mix of cultures, Australia's multicultural population was seen as presenting the potential to build on the conceptualisation of wisdom research to date beyond the broad delineations of Western versus Eastern cultures. A further aim was to investigate a new measure of wisdom, drawing on the empirical literature to date as to what might make for a 'good' wisdom measure.Study 1 was a quantitative study looking at what Australians identify as the key defining qualities of a wise person. Using the Self-Construal Scale (Singelis, 1994) to distinguish between those identifying with an independent versus an interdependent value system, it was hypothesised that the former group would more closely match with Western definitions of wisdom, while the latter would more closely match with Eastern definitions. The results showed that regardless of selfidentified cultural background, participants rating highly in terms of an independent self-construal were more likely to rate wisdom descriptors associated with knowledge and intelligence highly.Those rating highly in terms of an interdependent self-construal tended to rate affective descriptors of wisdom more highly. In each case, these findings were consistent with research to date focusing on Western-and Eastern-based definitions of wisdom, respectively.Study 2 was a qualitative study that asked participants, in an open-ended way, to describe a wise person. The data was then matched to the work of Bangen, Meeks, and Jeste (2013) in order to see how well the responses of the participants aligned with the subcomponents of wisdom derived (iii) from their review ...

Measuring Wisdom: Existing Approaches, Continuing Challenges, and New Developments

“…Closed-response approaches are not available yet. Our own unsuccessful attempts at developing “wisdom tests” with predefined response alternatives suggest that many more people may pick the wisest solutions from among some alternatives than would actually be able to produce a wise solution by themselves (but see Mitchell, 2016 ; Sternberg, 2001 ). The following two approaches also measure wisdom as a competence.…”