Reasoning about social conflicts improves into old age

Abstract

It is well documented that aging is associated with cognitive declines in many domains. Yet it is a common lay belief that some aspects of thinking improve into old age. Specifically, older people are believed to show better competencies for reasoning about social dilemmas and conflicts. Moreover, the idea of aging-related gains in wisdom is consistent with views of the aging mind in developmental psychology. However, to date research has provided little evidence corroborating this assumption. We addressed this question in two studies, using a representative community sample. We asked participants to read stories about intergroup conflicts and interpersonal conflicts and predict how these conflicts would unfold. We show that relative to young and middle-aged people, older people make more use of higher-order reasoning schemes that emphasize the need for multiple perspectives, allow for compromise, and recognize the limits of knowledge. Our coding scheme was validated by a group of professional counselors and wisdom researchers. Social reasoning improves with age despite a decline in fluid intelligence. The results suggest that it might be advisable to assign older individuals to key social roles involving legal decisions, counseling, and intergroup negotiations. Furthermore, given the abundance of research on negative effects of aging, this study may help to encourage clinicians to emphasize the inherent strengths associated with aging.aging | wisdom | intelligence | problem-solving | reasoning F olk psychology holds that people become wiser as they get older (1-3), even in the face of significant age-related declines in many (but not all) forms of cognitive processing (4). A sufficient reason for assuming that older people are wiser is that they have more life experience (especially experience of social life) (3, 5, 6). Moreover, the idea of aging-related gains in wisdom is consistent with views of the aging mind in developmental psychology (7).There are many different views of the nature of wisdom (8). However, there is some consensus that wisdom involves the use of certain types of pragmatic reasoning to navigate important challenges of social life. For instance, Paul Baltes, who developed the Berlin Wisdom Paradigm, defined wisdom as knowledge useful for dealing with life problems, including an awareness of the varied contexts of life and how they change over time, recognition that values and life goals differ among individuals and among groups, and acknowledgment of the uncertainties of life together with ways to manage those uncertainties (9). Similarly, Michael Basseches (10, 11) and Deirdre Kramer (12)-representing the neo-Piagetian or postformal view of reasoning-formulated a set of cognitive schemas involved in wise thinking, among them acknowledgment of others' points of view, appreciation of contexts broader than the issue at hand, sensitivity to the possibility of change in social relations, acknowledgment of the likelihood of multiple outcomes of a social conflict, concern with conflict resolution,...

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“…The slim dotted limiting curves indicate the large interindividual variability of the fluid functions with increasing age. The fat, punctured black curve reflects continuous improvement of social competencies with age, adapted from Grossmann et al (2010). The gray solid line indicates the course of sensory functions (vision and hearing) adapted from Baltes and Lindenberger (1997).…”