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

Abstract

Wisdom is a field of growing interest both inside and outside academic psychology, and researchers are increasingly interested in using measures of wisdom in their work. However, wisdom is a highly complex construct, and its various operationalizations are based on quite different definitions. Which measure a researcher chooses for a particular research project may have a strong influence on the results. This study compares four well-established measures of wisdom—the Self-Assessed Wisdom Scale (Webster, 2003, 2007), the Three-Dimensional Wisdom Scale (Ardelt, 2003), the Adult Self-Transcendence Inventory (Levenson et al., 2005), and the Berlin Wisdom Paradigm (Baltes and Smith, 1990; Baltes and Staudinger, 2000)—with respect to content, reliability, factorial structure, and construct validity (relationships to wisdom nomination, interview-based wisdom ratings, and correlates of wisdom). The sample consisted of 47 wisdom nominees and 123 control participants. While none of the measures performed “better” than the others by absolute standards, recommendations are given for researchers to select the most suitable measure for their substantive interests. In addition, a “Brief Wisdom Screening Scale” is introduced that contains those 20 items from the three self-report scales that were most highly correlated with the common factor across the scales.

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

“…Recording of stream-of-thought reflections is not viable in the context of acute social challenges, limiting the utility of observer-based evaluations for ecological assessment of wise reasoning across a range of situations. Further, it can be impractical due to the costs and high levels of researcher burden when evaluating respondents' narratives (Glück et al, 2013), with a substantial time investment into the training of raters to establish inter-rater reliability and to score the narratives. Indeed, observer-based evaluations of narratives are typically constrained to small-moderate sample sizes (N < 150).…”

“…Given the methodological difficulties in conducting observer-based evaluations of wisdom, some scholars have proposed to assess wisdom by using global self-report questionnaires (e.g., Ardelt, 2003;Glück et al, 2013;Levenson et al, 2005;Webster, 2003), similar to those used when assessing personality. In these global evaluations, participants respond to items capturing personal wisdom (Glück et al, 2013).…”

“…Given the methodological difficulties in conducting observer-based evaluations of wisdom, some scholars have proposed to assess wisdom by using global self-report questionnaires (e.g., Ardelt, 2003;Glück et al, 2013;Levenson et al, 2005;Webster, 2003), similar to those used when assessing personality. In these global evaluations, participants respond to items capturing personal wisdom (Glück et al, 2013). Depending on the scale, participants indicate their overall ability to reflect, to see different perspectives, to tolerate ambiguity, to be concerned with amicable conflict resolution, to be accepting of contradictions and irony of life, or ability to (self-) transcend immediate concerns and recognize that the world is in flux (Ardelt, 2003;Glück et al, 2013;Levenson et al, 2005;Webster, 2003).…”

“…In these global evaluations, participants respond to items capturing personal wisdom (Glück et al, 2013). Depending on the scale, participants indicate their overall ability to reflect, to see different perspectives, to tolerate ambiguity, to be concerned with amicable conflict resolution, to be accepting of contradictions and irony of life, or ability to (self-) transcend immediate concerns and recognize that the world is in flux (Ardelt, 2003;Glück et al, 2013;Levenson et al, 2005;Webster, 2003).…”

“…Indeed, when self-assessing highly desirable qualities such as wisdom (Assmann, 1994) in a de-contextualized fashion, participants may be more tempted to respond in a socially desirable fashion by exaggerating, faking, and lying, in part driven by involuntary self-deception (Paulhus & Vazire, 2007;Vazire & Carlson, 2010). Self-biased responding and memory distortions are of particular relevance when measuring wisdom, because the central pillars of wisdom concern intellectual humility and the absence of bias (Glück et al, 2013;Staudinger & Glück, 2011). Ironically, it appears that the global self-report approach to wisdom is most likely to be contaminated by psychological biases (Taylor, Bates, & Webster, 2011;Zacher, McKenna, & Rooney, 2013), the absence of which the scales aim to explore (Glück et al, 2013;Staudinger & Glück, 2011).…”