Content area
Full text
We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom.
—E. O. Wilson (1999)
Are the smartest people also the wisest? Not necessarily. While traditional intellectual reasoning and procedural knowledge have helped build the communities we live in, there is a growing scientific understanding that we need emotionally balanced and better-fitting prosocial frameworks for coping with the uncertainties and complexities of life and addressing new challenges of the modern world. We are now poised on the edge of a new science of wisdom.
The concept of wisdom, long considered the “pinnacle of insight into the human condition” (Baltes and Staudinger 2000), has been that of an intangible, subjective, culturally specific entity—an unscientific construct, perhaps best reserved for abstract religious and philosophical discussions. Now consider the modern world in which we find ourselves—diverse, uncertain, polarized, rapidly changing. It is no surprise there is increasing interest in the tantalizing promises of a scientifically based, supple, and powerful concept like wisdom. When we face real-life decisions, how do we integrate a broad range of perspectives? How do we balance intelligence with emotion? How do we navigate uncertainty with limited information, and how do we find solutions that can meet society’s needs? Mighty challenges, but challenges to which some scientists are beginning to rise. This essay aims to introduce the new science of wisdom research to the broader scientific community.
Humans have been driven to bottle and pass on wisdom since the earliest civilizations emerged, and almost certainly long before that, just without written records. The Bhagavad Gita, a Hindu text dating from around 500 BCE (based on the Yogas, which date back a couple of millennia BCE) discusses wisdom at great length. Ancient Greek philosophers, or “lovers of wisdom,” also highly prized the construct, with Socrates finally accepting the Oracle at Delphi’s declaration that there was noone wiser than him, with the words “I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.” The Bible contains the Books of Wisdom (Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon). However, empirical wisdom research didn’t begin until the 1970s, with pioneering work by Vivian Clayton at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles and Paul Baltes at the Max Planck Institute...