Proverbs Are Never out of Season: Popular Wisdom in the Modern Age

Mayer, David; Mieder, Wolfgang

doi:10.2307/1178654

Cited by 50 publications

(27 citation statements)

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“…Most recently, we extended our inquiry concerning wisdom to the study of proverbs and their relevance in accessing wisdom-related knowledge (P. Baltes & Freund, 1999). This research follows the notion of folk psychology (Haselager, 1997;Mieder, 1993) that much of a culture's historically acquired knowledge is stored in proverbs and that accessing this body of knowledge is a major facilitator in achieving and interpreting a good life.…”

Section: Empirical Findings 6: Wisdom In Proverbsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Wisdom: A metaheuristic (pragmatic) to orchestrate mind and virtue toward excellence.

Baltes¹,

Staudinger²

2000

American Psychologist

956

845

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Section: Empirical Findings 6: Wisdom In Proverbsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Wisdom: A metaheuristic (pragmatic) to orchestrate mind and virtue toward excellence.

Baltes¹,

Staudinger²

2000

American Psychologist

956

845

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“…In research on naive theory or folk psychology, proverbs are viewed as a body of crystallized (folk) knowledge about human life (Haselager, 1997;Mieder, 1993Mieder, , 1997Peng & Nisbett, 1998;Rogers, 1990). Proverbs are short statements summarizing advice on how to deal effectively or in morally correct ways with situations of everyday life (e.g., Mieder, 1997).…”

Section: Knowledge Of Socmentioning

confidence: 99%

The intermarriage of wisdom and selective optimization with compensation: Two meta-heuristics guiding the conduct of life.

Baltes¹,

Freund²

2003

Flourishing: Positive Psychology and the Life Well-Lived.

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The notion of flourishing has a long history in the social sciences and the humanities (P. P. Baltes & Staudinger, 2000). Philosophers and humanists in particular have attempted to specify its meaning. Concepts such as eudaimonia (happiness) and a good life, for instance, were central to early Greek and other early humanist writings. To illustrate, consider a citation from the work of Amelie O. Rorty, a scholar on Greek philosophy: "Happiness is defined . . . as an activity of the soul

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“…Then, participants read a series of proverbs, some of which paralleled the notion that appearance can be a misleading reflection of reality. Proverbs are revered by many as words of wisdom (Mieder, 1993) and a methodological tool for culture-specific assumptions or values (e.g., Lee et al, 2020;Peng & Nisbett, 1999;Weng et al, 2021). For this study, we identified five proverbs from proverb dictionaries (Lin & Leonard, 2012;Mieder et al, 2012;Simpson & Speake, 2003).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Judging a book by its cover: Cultural differences in inference of the inner state based on the outward appearance.

Ji¹,

Lee²,

Zhang³

et al. 2023

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

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The world can be represented by two layers of information: How it appears on the outside (outward appearance) and what it is on the inside (inner state). To what extent an outward appearance is assumed to reflect the inner state is fundamental to social inference and judgments. Conceptualizing inference in terms of the relationship between the outward appearance and the inner state generates an integrative interpretation for a wide range of phenomena. We showed that Chinese were more likely than Euro-Canadians to make inference of inner state that deviated from outward appearance, whereas Euro-Canadians were more likely than Chinese to infer a convergence between outward appearance and inner state (Studies 1–5). We observed these cross-cultural patterns in various contexts involving people or physical structures. Individual differences in correspondence bias or response bias did not explain these patterns. The lay belief that outward appearance can be misleading mediated the cultural effects (Study 4). To probe the underlying process, two additional experiments showed that highlighting the misleading nature of appearance, but not highlighting the power of the situation, reduced Americans’ beliefs (Study 6) and inference (Study 7) that the outward appearance reflects the inner state. By focusing on the assumed relationship between the outward appearance and inner state, these findings provide a unique angle for understanding cross-cultural phenomena and have practical implications in daily life.

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Proverbs Are Never out of Season: Popular Wisdom in the Modern Age

Cited by 50 publications

References 0 publications

Wisdom: A metaheuristic (pragmatic) to orchestrate mind and virtue toward excellence.

Wisdom: A metaheuristic (pragmatic) to orchestrate mind and virtue toward excellence.

The intermarriage of wisdom and selective optimization with compensation: Two meta-heuristics guiding the conduct of life.

Judging a book by its cover: Cultural differences in inference of the inner state based on the outward appearance.

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