Defining Wisdom | A Project of the University of Chicago

What is the role of reflection in practical wisdom?

wattawa — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 16:27:50 GMT

For ancient philosophers, wisdom required knowing the good and a wise person could live a flourishing life, in part, because he or she possessed this knowledge. These days, we are less certain that there is a good to be known that will help us live flourishing lives. Further, if we want to measure how much wisdom different people have, we would need to operationalize “knowing the good”, which seems daunting if not impossible. These problems are reflected in the definitions of wisdom used in psychological research. Of the ones I have seen, none make explicit reference to knowledge of the good. Baltes and Staudinger (2000) do include knowledge about the “fundamental pragmatics of life” as one of the two main criteria for wisdom, but this knowledge turns out to be about

such topics as human nature, life-long development, variations in developmental processes and outcomes, interpersonal relations, social norms, critical events in life and their possible constellations, as well as knowledge about the coordination of the well-being of oneself and that of others (p. 125).

Baltes and Staudinger recognize (correctly, in my view) that wisdom must include the kind of knowledge that is necessary for living a good or meaningful life, but this knowledge, on their view, is not knowledge of values. This is entirely understandable. If you want to be able to figure out who has wisdom and who doesn’t, the criterion “must know the good” is at best unhelpful if we don’t have clear standards for what counts as such knowledge.

One way to solve the problem would be to make some uncontroversial assumptions about the good and stipulate that knowledge of the good is knowledge of these assumptions. This is problematic because truly uncontroversial assumptions are likely to be bland and general and therefore not very revealing about wisdom. Another way would be to give up on the connection between wisdom and the good. I think this would also be a mistake. If wisdom is of interest, it really should have something to do with living a good or meaningful life and this means we cannot avoid the evaluative (or “normative” as we say in philosophy) domain when we are thinking about wisdom.

A better way to solve the problem, I suggest, is to move from metaphysics to epistemology: from what is of value to the process by which we acquire knowledge of it. On this line of thought, an important component of wisdom is the set of reflective capacities that allow us to think constructively about what is good, to formulate ideal conceptions of a good life and of the kind of person we want to be, to assess how we are doing at living up to these ideals and to reevaluate our ideals in the light of new experiences. I think we need an argument to show that it is fruitful to think about what these capacities are without presupposing particular substantive assumptions about the good. Though this isn’t obvious, I do think such an argument can be made, and this is one of the subsidiary goals in my own wisdom research.

The idea that in our thinking about wisdom we could replace THE GOOD with REFLECTION ON THE GOOD invites some questions.

First, could this philosophical idea be helpful to social scientists concerned with measuring and teaching wisdom? My sense is that it could. For example, consider this passage from Baltes and Staudinger:

The second wisdom-specific metacriterion, relativism of values and life priorities, deals with the acknowledgment of and tolerance for value differences and the relativity of the values held by individuals and society. Wisdom, of course, is not meant to imply full-blown relativity of values and value-related priorities. On the contrary, it includes an explicit concern with the topic of virtue and the common good. However, aside from the recognition of certain universal values (Kekes, 1995), value-relative knowledge, judgment, and advice are part of the essence of wisdom (2000: 126).

What exactly is the distinction between universal values and relative values? What are universal values and how do we know? A focus on reflective capacities (rather than knowledge of the good) might provide sufficient answer to these questions without making prescriptive (or normative) assumptions. If reflective capacities enable us to engage in sorting out which values are universal and which are subjective or parochial, then we can look for these capacities as evidence of wisdom. Moreover, we can do this even if we don’t have a criterion for distinguishing universal and relative values.

Second, some psychological research seems to pose problems for the idea that we can improve our values by reflecting. Timothy Wilson’s work on reflecting on reasons seems to cause certain problems (see Nahmias 2007 for problems related to autonomy), as does, Jonathan Haidt’s work on the causal irrelevance of reasoning to our moral judgments. I think philosophers ought to be concerned about the psychological assumptions that underlie philosophical conceptions of normative notions such as the virtue of wisdom. If our normative notions are supposed to have, ultimately, some practical upshot, we cannot ignore the psychology. Hence I’m concerned about these studies from Wilson, Haidt, and others, and keen to discover what other research in psychology might bear on these questions about the role of reflection in wisdom. Of course, the kind of reasoning that is shown to be irrelevant or unfruitful by psychological studies is not the only kind of reasoning or reflection there is (see my 2009 and Bortolotti forthcoming for discussions that emphasize this point). What I would like to do is to use the empirical research to help shape a picture of reflection that is psychologically possible and beneficial. Toward this aim, I would be particularly interested in hearing about research on reflection (on values, on life-plans, on self-conceptions) that tells us about (1) how people might develop and improve their capacities for such reflection, or (2) how reflection on values is related to well-being indicators. For example, I am currently looking into therapies like narrative therapy and cognitive behavior therapy, because these seem to be programs that encourage a certain kind of reflection on one’s life for the purpose of improving well-being.

"The Role of Reflection in Practical Wisdom"

- Valerie Tiberius, Professor of Philosophy, University of Minnesota

REFERENCES

Baltes and Staudinger (2000) “Wisdom: A Metaheuristic (Pragmatic) to Orchestrate Mind and Virtue Toward Excellence”, American Psychologist Vol. 55, No. 1, 122-136.

Bortolotti, L. (Forthcoming). “The epistemic benefits of reason giving”. Theory & Psychology.

Nahmias, E. (2007) “Autonomous Agency and Social Psychology.” In Cartographies of the Mind: Philosophy and Psychology in Intersection, ed. by M. Marraffa, M. Caro, and F. Ferretti (Springer) 169-185.

Haidt, J. (2001). The emotional dog and its rational tail: A social intuitionist approach to moral judgment. Psychological Review. 108, 814-834.

Tiberius (2009) “The Reflective Life: Wisdom and Happiness for Real People,” forthcoming in Lisa Bortolotti (ed.) Philosophy and Happiness (Palgrave).

Wilson, T. D. & Dunn, D. S. (1986). Effects of introspection on attitude‑behavior consistency: Analyzing reasons versus focusing on feelings. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 22, 249‑263.

Wilson, T. D., Hodges, S. D., & LaFleur, S. J. (1984). Effects of Analyzing Reasons on Attitude‑Behavior Consistency. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 47(1).

Wilson, T. D., Lisle, D., Schooler, J., Hodges, S. D., Klaaren, K. J., & LaFleur, S. J. (1993). Introspecting about reasons can reduce post‑choice satisfaction. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 19, 331‑339.

Photo from Flickr by GreenNetizen.

Is it possible to define wisdom without saying what it is?

wattawa — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 00:21:43 GMT

In 1873, American poet John Godfrey Saxe published an English-language version of the philosophical fable about the blind men and the elephant. Touching various parts of the elephant, each of the blind men offered his own account of what the elephant was. The man near the trunk said it was like a snake; the one holding the ear likened it to a fan; one next to the leg thought it a pillar; and so on. It is an old story that, in its many versions, has appeared in Buddhist, Hindu, and Sufi sources. But Saxe, writing in the heyday of high modern antagonism toward professional theology, used the old image to comment on what he saw as the silliness inherent in theological disputation:

So oft in theologic wars,
The disputants, I ween,
Rail on in utter ignorance
Of what each other mean,
And prate about an Elephant
Not one of them has seen!

As academic wisdom-seekers, it is no doubt true that we have blindnesses of our own, or, at the very least, that we are in the habit, for good or for ill, of focusing our vision by donning disciplinary blinders. Unlike Saxe’s bickering theologians, though, I think we have shown restraint, the kind that comes from being trained to take critical account of methods and assumptions.

Take earlier postings on this blog for example. Contributors have not set out to examine wisdom per se but rather to attune us to critical frameworks relevant to wisdom inquiry. Joy Wattawa nudged us toward a more collaborative, tech-savvy pursuit of wisdom. Howard Nusbaum drew attention to the limits of our understanding of the expressive power of language. Clark Gilpin followed with a helpful brief on the role of contextual reasoning in decision-making. Most recently, Valerie Tiberius, in a theoretically explicit way, has proposed shifting the discussion about wisdom from metaphysics to epistemology.

All to the good. I, for my part, see no way to pursue our common project without adequate attention to technology, language, contextual reasoning, and the role of critical reflection. And, from the perspective of my own checkered disciplinary past (some mix of history, philology, and theology), I believe that we might say even more about meta-issues that bear on the study of wisdom. For example, it might be helpful to think about the role of text and tradition in forming communal visions of the good life (my DW project), the effects of religious belief on moral and scientific thinking (considering, for example, the ‘open’ and ‘closed’ ‘immanent frames’ of Charles Taylor), and the tension between individual fulfillment and communal flourishing over the long and rich history of the Western intellectual tradition. This small list could surely be extended.

And yet I wonder whether meta-sapiential reflection of this sort engenders too much restraint. Is it possible to define wisdom merely by analyzing the technological, psychological, philosophical, cultural, or social processes that we, for one reason or another, happen to associate with wisdom? I believe that an ‘analytics of wisdom’ is a desirable and necessary thing, but I am not sure it is all that is needed. I wonder, in other words, whether we ought to try and touch the elephant.

Valerie has offered a sound reason for not doing so. Any “uncontroversial” assumption about the specific content of wisdom, she argues, is likely to be “bland and general and therefore not very revealing about wisdom.” This is certainly true.

But why restrict ourselves to uncontroversial assumptions? In the realm of intellectual inquiry, I know of no productive assumption or consequential idea that is uncontroversial. The kinds of beliefs that command loyalty, deepen the moral imagination, and inspire bold action tend to be pointy. In Western religious, political, and intellectual history, influential “wisdom” traditions grew up around people and ideas with sharp profiles. To be sure, we ought not accept the historical legacies of such people and ideas uncritically, appropriating them merely because they were influential or, for that matter, pointy. Nor should we be ignorant of the counterproductive ways that strong, deeply held beliefs (and the people who held them) have troubled human societies throughout history.

Yet, I believe that wisdom, inasmuch as it makes claims on action and belief, engages human aspiration at its deepest levels—and not simply its technical ones. The problem for academic wisdom-seekers is that wisdom brings questions of meaning, content, and value into its compass, while modern scholarly inquiry cannot adjudicate such questions.

In his famous 1919 lecture on “science as a vocation,” Max Weber probed the nature of modern Wissenschaft. According to Weber:

Science… presupposes that what is yielded by scientific work is important in the sense that it is 'worth being known.' In this, obviously, are contained all our problems. For this presupposition cannot be proved by scientific means. It can only be interpreted with reference to its ultimate meaning, which we must reject or accept according to our ultimate position towards life.

What is “worth being known,” what is meaningful, and what is good can only be determined in light of one’s ultimate values. The critical processes associated with modern scholarship cannot generate content in its deepest sense; they can only operate on what is given (Latin: data). Because scholarship on the Weberian model cannot decide among ultimate values, it can only direct us in the pursuit of goals we have already accepted as worthy.

What it would mean to broach non-trivial questions of content in the context of this project I am not entirely sure. What are immediately obvious are the obstacles, problems, and objections: the functional relativism inherent in disciplinary boundaries, lack of experience or vocabulary for handling such questions in a way that remains fair and rigorous, fear or discomfort associated with self-disclosure, and so on. It may be best, in light of these issues, not to raise substantive questions.

Like all who hear the elephant story, I find it is easy to smile at the blind men quarreling, to pity and even to disdain them. I certainly do not want to emulate them. Yet I wonder about the true nature of their mistake. Surely it was not in being blind, which they could not help, nor in touching the elephant, which curiosity certainly warranted. Perhaps the problem was that the blind men reached their conclusions hastily—and without comparing notes.

Michael C. Legaspi
Creighton University

Photo by Matthieu

What makes a decision wise?

wattawa — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 18:57:37 GMT

Wisdom: “It’s the Context, Stupid.”

In his recent blog “Can wisdom be taught with words?” Howard Nusbaum points to research suggesting that intelligence is context-specific, and Howard builds on this idea to propose that wisdom, too, may be “specific to particular contexts.” I think not only that wisdom is context-specific but also that research clarifying the relation of wisdom to its context would represent an important step toward answering the question of whether wisdom can be taught.

In brief, it is not sufficient to say that wisdom is context-specific unless we argue further that only particular aspects or problems within that context are able to prompt responses that could appropriately be called wise. Howard mentions an example from the Berlin Wisdom Paradigm that allows me to illustrate my point, the situation of giving advice to a pregnant teenager. One could imagine giving the young woman sensible advice about conversing with the father. One could imagine giving intelligent scientific advice about reproductive health. One could imagine giving prudent advice about all sorts of things. But what aspects of the situation might be said to call for or elicit wise advice? I tend to think that wise advice would be advice that helped the young woman resituate her immediate circumstance in a broader frame of reference than her own relatively brief life experience might afford. Beyond the immediately ensuing months, how might this pregnancy relate to her longer-term joy, remorse, meaning, aspiration, and responsibilities? Wisdom, in such cases, encourages taking a wider perspective on matters in the very moment of anxiety or crisis that tempts us to narrow the focus of our attention or the range of our choices.

This suggests that to find out whether wisdom can be taught, we probably need to ask whether and how a style or practice of contextual reasoning can be taught. Wisdom as a habit of reasoning about situations would be a sort of mental training or discipline that trained us to identify and address those aspects of a “context” that were not amenable to resolution through technical knowledge, the straightforward application of general principles, or standard operating procedures. Wisdom is the habit of reasoning required when we need fresh ideas about what to do. At the limit, wisdom is the habit of reasoning required when there is nothing we can do.

- Clark Gilpin, Margaret E. Burton Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Christianity and Theology in the Divinity School, University of Chicago

(photo taken from Idea-Listic at Flikr Creative Commons)

Wisdom: addition through subtraction?

wattawa — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 20:52:47 GMT

I just came back from our first conference of “wisdom scholars” in Chicago, and was fascinated by the topics that the wisdom grant winners are investigating. I thought I would try to blog about a topic that allowed me to mention several of them.

Wisdom commonly is thought of as something that one accumulates slowly over time. This idea is consistent with the near-universal notion that the elders in a society are the repositories of wisdom (even if they don’t know how to tweet), due to the accumulation of life lessons from experience.

But could increases in wisdom also come about via subtraction? As the Chicago architecture tour guide said about modernist metal and glass skyscrapers, sometimes less is more. To be specific, wisdom sometimes may be increased by unlearning certain behaviors, ignoring information, inhibiting impulses, or even avoiding thinking too much.

Perhaps the most time-honored approaches to wisdom involve the supernatural. Proverbs 1:7 states that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Christians and adherents of other faiths often assert that real wisdom must involve the moral and spiritual realm, and that human sinful nature is unable to discern true wisdom without divine assistance (e.g., by help from the Holy Spirit). Even without reference to a deity, wisdom may be compromised or lacking if there is no immortal soul that fears the eternal consequences of foolishness. Ryan Hanley shared a quotation by Louis de Jaucourt: “only considerations of eternity contain motives sufficient to elevate [the soul] above all weaknesses.” Therefore, wisdom in these cases involves renouncing one’s worldly motives and perhaps even one’s capacity to acquire wisdom without divine assistance.

That may stretch my point of subtraction too far. So, let me turn to a simpler and more literal type of subtraction. Sometimes considering less information helps us make wiser (e.g., more rational and effective) decisions. We live in an information-saturated age. This allows, for example, my wife and me to solve a disagreement by rapidly googling a particular topic. (It’s enormously gratifying to be proved right within seconds, and even being proved wrong is less painful relative to a ten-minute discussion that one still ultimately loses.) However, a critical part of wisdom involves knowing when to stop gathering more information and take action before it’s too late (the recent market crash comes to mind). For example, computer scientist Ankur Gupta is studying wisdom as data compression and emphasizes the importance of “wisdom in time.”

Psychologists have studied heuristics, or mental shortcuts for making judgments, that usually are useful and efficient (you get the right answer without a laborious search for and consideration of a great deal of information), though occasionally using these heuristics leads us astray (see the representativeness heuristic example below).

The recognition heuristic (Goldstein & Gigerenzer, 2002) involves using a general sense of familiarity to make a judgment; relying on this heuristic sometimes leads to a superior judgment relative to basing a judgment on additional information. In one demonstration of the recognition heuristic, American students were somewhat less accurate in judging which of two U.S. cities had a greater population than they were in making similar judgments of German cities! They had to rely on a general sense of familiarity to stand in for the information about the population of the German cities, but that turned out to be a fairly successful strategy. The additional information they had about U.S. cities apparently hindered them from rendering accurate judgments.

The representative heuristic is opposite in some respects, because it operates when additional information leads people to make a stereotypical—and inaccurate—judgment. Consider this example. Hal is short and slim and likes to write poetry. Is it more likely that he is a truck driver or a classics professor? You said classics professor, didn’t you? (Unless you, like my students often do, decided to go against your intuition, suspecting some sort of trick.) When I try this exercise with my students, 90% answer that Hal must be a classics professor rather than a truck driver. I then ask them to estimate the number of truck drivers versus classics professors in the U.S. We proceed to estimate the percentage of members of those professions who are both short and slim, and then the percentage that writes poetry. Even if it’s true that the vast majority of truck drivers is neither short nor slim, and wouldn’t be caught dead writing poetry, there are so many truck drivers and so few classics professors that Hal still is much more likely to be a truck driver. If I had simply provided the minimal information that “Hal lives in the U.S.,” everyone would have said Hal is probably a truck driver! More information led people to use their stereotype about portly, poetry-eschewing truck drivers (contrasted against the stereotype of slim, iambic pentameter-loving classics professors), which led to a poor decision. Less information in this case leads to a wiser judgment. Wise individuals tend to know when to stop gathering information and just make a decision—time to sell that stock or propose to that romantic partner before it’s too late! Even if they are exposed to some information, such as hurtful gossip about another, wise people know to discount the information.

Ignoring some information is one thing, but what about thinking less? Recent research by Tim Wilson and colleagues has highlighted that sometimes less introspection leads to better judgments. (This is related to the type of “thinking without thinking” that Malcolm Gladwell has popularized in his book Blink.) It may be that greater introspection actually reduces the effectiveness of our adaptive unconscious. Obviously, it’s not always the case that explicit consideration of a problem leads to inferior judgments, so don’t consign an important decision to your unconscious and refuse to analyze or gather information on the problem. But one particularly fascinating frontier of wisdom research involves investigating the adaptive unconscious, and, relatedly, investigating limits to overt deliberation. Melissa Ferguson and Baruch Eitam are on this frontier, investigating wisdom as intuitive problem solving.

Wisdom surely includes more than correct judgments or decisions. Judith Glück currently is investigating a model of wisdom that includes emotion regulation. I think self-regulation in general plays a pre-eminent role in whether or not wise actions take place. Social psychologists have made wonderful discoveries in recent years regarding the principles of self-regulation or self-control, and I wish that schools (elementary through college) would teach these self-control principles to foster wisdom. Self-control is critical to help us unlearn bad habits and resist temptations (sometimes regarding evolutionarily-influenced predispositions such as our desire to eat lots of fat and sugar). Self-control also is an asset when one should inhibit negative responses to threats to one’s self-view (such as negative feedback by a teacher or romantic partner that may feel bad but actually be helpful for future growth). All of these examples include some form of unlearning or inhibition as a means toward pursuing a wise path

I’m certainly not denying that wisdom involves the addition of knowledge, principles, habits, counselors, and more. But I think that the path toward wisdom is a meandering one that also involves subtraction – three steps forward followed by two steps back. Sometimes the tortuous path temporarily takes you farther away from the ultimate goal, but it is nonetheless necessary in order to make progress.

-Jeffrey Green, Professor of Psychology, Virginia Commonwealth University

Photo from Flickr Creative Commons.

Could an 'explicit wisdom perspective' advance interdisciplinary research?

wattawa — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 19:54:39 GMT

The Defining Wisdom project was born from a concern that talk of wisdom has disappeared from a wide range of academic disciplines, and to their detriment. That wisdom has departed from the conversation is certainly true in the two worlds in which I work, economics and the law.

In this post I want to think about why—or to what extent—this happened. Have these fields turned their back on wisdom, or do they discuss it in different terms? And if the latter is the case, what are the gains from adopting a wisdom-centric perspective?

I should start by defining what I mean by wisdom. My take is simple: wisdom is 1) having a good understanding of what you know (and of what you do not know) and 2) using that understanding to achieve a good outcome; I will remain agnostic for now about what that good outcome should be. It is an admittedly broad definition, a potential concern I will come back to later.

My particular focus is less concerned with how individuals use knowledge to live the good life, and more with how higher-level social institutions channel knowledge to accomplish good outcomes. Think of it as “social wisdom,” as opposed to personal. I will assume that per-sonal and social wisdom are essentially analogous—whether I am right about that may be an interesting question, but one beyond the scope of this post.

With these definitions, it should not be surprising that economics has little to say about personal wisdom. The field generally declines to evaluate people’s preferences. After all, we have only one Latin maxim: de gustibus non est disputandem—there is no disputing tastes (although that is not exactly how Becker and Stigler (1977) famously used the phrase).

But social wisdom is a different matter. Economists often make policy recommendations, and these require some sort of normative basis (1). In general, economists take a utilitarian perspective. We remain silent about the value or merit of what makes people happy, but instead try to maximize that happiness, whatever its causes (2). In other words, economic policymakers are always considering how to channel people’s knowledge to achieve a particular view of the (social) good. This is basically social wisdom.

Law’s failure to discuss wisdom should be even more startling. At every turn, the law is deeply enmeshed with questions of right and wrong, good and bad. Substantive rules allocate rights, duties, costs, and benefits, all of which reflect, shape, and define what a good life is and how it should be led. In turn, the procedural rules are designed (at least in theory) to ensure that those substantive goals are accomplished, taking into account what people know and how they can use that knowledge.

Consider evidence law. For three centuries, lawyers, judges, and academics have struggled with how to use complex scientific evidence in the courtroom (Golan 2004). These debates clearly implicate issues of what we do and do not know: can jurors understand the evidence? Can we shape our procedures to help them understand it better?

But these debates also consider what a good legal system should do. For example, do we need to abandon our commitment to adversarialism—which embodies a host of normative values besides getting to the truth—in this particular area? How do we balance, say, the value of accuracy with that of litigant autonomy?

Thus legal actors have been debating the social wisdom of the legal system—and how to make it wiser—for centuries, just without using the word or thinking about it in such terms. (As an aside, so too have economists who have asked how to make the world more utilitarian-efficient.)

It is clearly a debate that has much to offer to wisdom research. It forces us, for example, to think about how lay actors can proceed wisely at the outer edges of their epistemic competence. It also asks whether a system like the Anglo-American law, which relies on self-centered competition, can come to wise decisions, or whether some sort of “outside” guidance necessary—an instance of the more general question of whether the “marketplace of ideas” is a powerfully accurate or perni-ciously misguided metaphor. And so on. All these issue help us better understand what wisdom is and how we can achieve it.

But what does wisdom research have to offer to this legal debate?

It is clear that epistemology has much to offer the law and social sciences. It is also clear that debates about what the good should be do as well. But do we gain something more from consciously linking them together under an explicit wisdom perspective (EWP)? More precisely, does EWP offer policy fields enough to encourage them to change, or at least expand, their current and long-held traditions for how to think about wisdom-related issues?

The answer to this question may shed light the broader issue of why wisdom is not discussed in so many fields. Few interdisciplinary efforts are selfless: One field will ignore another if it cannot see much to gain from it. Statistics has much to offer the law, for example, but not vice versa. As a result, lawyers increasingly wrestle with what it means for a sample to suffer from selection bias, but statisticians rarely wring their hands over what “intermediate scrutiny” means.

I have been able to come up with at least two benefits that flow from EWP to the social sciences. But they are thin, and I am hoping to find something meatier.

First, EWP may introduce some much-needed clarity. By phrasing a question in terms of wisdom, the analyst is reminded to focus on three things: the positive question of what people know, the normative question of the goal that knowledge should be used to advance, and the “conditionally positive” policy question of how to use that knowledge to achieve the goal (3). Far too often these three distinct issues are blurred or elided. Authors fail to address the importance (or even the existence) of their normative priors, for example, or they make heroic—and unacknowledged—assumptions about how people do or can act.

Second, there may also be some normative punch to framing questions in terms of wisdom. Wisdom may not be a neutral idea of using knowledge to advance any good, but rather using knowledge to advance a particular concept of the good (one that surely varies from place to place, from culture to culture). In other words, the question “That outcome is good, but is it wise?” has meaning. Thinking in terms of wisdom may force us to reconsider normative values we may have other-wise applied reflexively or with little thought (4).

But can wisdom contribute even more? Does a deeper benefit emerge if I lift my assumption that social and individual wisdom can be treated roughly the same? Am I understating the importance of the normative reminder that a wisdom-based approach provides? If its benefit is from reminding us of a particular concept of the good, what is that concept, and does it have meaning in a pluralistic society (the question Valerie raised)?

Or, in the end, is the relationship more fruitful in one direction than the other—and if so, what does that suggest about the future of interdisciplinary work on wisdom?

These questions are by no means rhetorical. Unlike the previous posts, I come bearing only questions, and I am excited to see what thoughts people have in the comments.

by John Pfaff, Associate Professor of Law at Fordham University

(1) Not all economists do. Some recognize a science/policy divide and attempt to study only the former. For these, Frank Knight (allegedly) said it best: “As an economist, I cannot tell you whether you should adopt food price controls, but I can tell you that if you do you should expect widespread hunger” (Mashaw 1997).
(2) I have always found it ironic that economics is called the Dismal Science, given that all economists want to do is make people happy. (Or perhaps not ironic, if Levy (2002) is right that economics received its nickname by siding with the anti-slavery forces in 19th-Century England.)
(3) I say “conditionally positive” because taking the normative goal as a given, the policy recommendation is a positive statement. If you want to drive from New York City to Chicago as quickly as possible—that’s the normative goal—you should take I-80W, a positive statement conditional on the goal.
(4) If this is right, then it suggests one possible concern with a proposal Valerie made in her post—a proposal that I almost wholly agree with. Valerie suggests that instead of asking “what is the good?,” we should ask “do people have the power to reflect on the good?,” a substantially less normative question. But while that is surely a good plan for bringing other disciplines to wisdom research, it may not help bring wisdom research to other fields if “what is the good” is a major contribution of EWP to those disciplines.

Sources

Becker, Gary S., and George J. Stigler. 1977. “De Gustibus Non Est Dispu-tandem.” American Economic Review 67: 76–90.
Golan, Tal. 2004. Laws of Men and Laws of Nature. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Levy, David M. 2002. How the Dismal Science Got Its Name: Classical Economics and the Ur-Text of Racial Politics. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Mashaw, Jerry L. Greed, Chaos & Governance. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Photo by Levi

Can wisdom be taught with words?

wattawa — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 17:26:06 GMT

Is wisdom a characteristic of a person or is it a skill that anyone could acquire? The idea of the wise person like Socrates or King Solomon has figured prominently in many cultures and suggests wisdom may be viewed as an individual trait. Even when wisdom is viewed as learnable, people often think that wisdom takes a lifetime to acquire. Both of these views of wisdom suggest that it cannot really be taught. In this respect wisdom might be understood as similar to the way many people think about intelligence—you either have it or you don’t. Just as psychologists talk about “g” (Spearman, 1904) as a general measure of intelligence (although see Sternberg, 2002), there could be some property “w” that reflects the general wisdom of a person.

However, if we move beyond the folk psychology of intelligence, research has suggested that intelligence is context-specific and even mutable (Sternberg, 1987). The suggestion that wisdom may be specific to particular contexts and knowledge (e.g., Sternberg, 1998) and may represent a kind of expertise (Baltes & Staudinger, 1993), also suggests that perhaps wisdom can be learned—and thus taught (Sternberg, 2001), even without wading through decades of experience. But if wisdom can be learned, how would we teach it (see Reznitskaya & Sternberg, 2004)? For that matter, how can we know wisdom when it is manifest in an individual? In order to teach wisdom, we need some metric by which to measure learning.

If wisdom depends on knowledge, the classroom might serve as a kind of learning paradigm. Indeed, we often talk about imparting wisdom to others and the importance of words of wisdom and Socratic dialogue could be viewed in just this way. People seek wisdom through sage advice, and stories and fables are written to convey wisdom. Clearly language could play an important role in teaching wisdom and language is also important in measuring wisdom scientifically. The Berlin Wisdom Paradigm (Kunzmann & Baltes, 2005) depends entirely on the use of language. People read stories about real-life situations and must give appropriate advice. For example, you might read a story about a teenage girl’s pregnancy andbe asked about the advice to give her. Your analysis of the situation is scored for mentioning a variety of factors that should be taken into account for wise advice.

Although this might suggest some close connection between language and wisdom, for most people, language is simply a communication channel. Language plays an important role in any kind of social interaction and therefore its only function with respect to wisdom may be the medium of communication. Thinking about language as a communication channel, we think about words and sentences as a vehicle for transporting mental states and attitudes from one mind to another. The general scientific study of language accords with this view. Words are viewed as symbols that stand for concepts and sentences combine these words into logical propositions through syntax. Indeed, scientists generally think there are two channels of communication in spoken language. One is the propositional structure that symbolically conveys ideas and descriptions and is used to ask questions and issue imperatives; the second is the prosodic structure that analogically conveys attitudes and emotions and intentions. If someone says, “Hilary Clinton is our new Secretary of State,” with rising intonation, she may be conveying incredulity.

Can wisdom be conveyed by just these two channels of language? Wisdom involves the interaction of cognitive processes with emotional processes and social values. It seems difficult to imagine that this combination of meaning and feeling can be transmitted effectively if language is limited in this way. But perhaps language can do more than just send symbolic forms with an attiudinal value attached. Haidt’s (2003) research on moral dumbfounding suggests that we can use language to convey situations that directly reach into our deep affective reactions and for which we cannot respond adequately using language. Listening to some speeches such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s speech at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963 or Barbara Jordan’s 1976 keynote address to the Democratic National Convention or Mario Cuomo’s 1984 keynote address at the Democratic National Convention (see these at http://www.americanrhetoric.com/newtop100speeches.htm), there is an impact that goes beyond understanding the speaker’s intended meaning and attitude. While it may be that we can learn lessons from the propositional structure of language, perhaps imparting wisdom also depends on language impact or an effect beyond meaning.

It is interesting that this very issue has been debated during the recent Presidential Primary. Clinton argued that words can be understood and evaluated but in the end, they are just words. Obama argued that speech has the power to impel action that goes beyond simply agreeing with an argument (see video clips below). While these are not scientific arguments, they outline an interesting question about the nature of language and its potential connection to wisdom. Some models of nonverbal communication (e.g., Owren & Bachorowski, 2003) suggest that there might be a more direct route for language to affect the listener. Shintel (Shintel et al., 2006, Shintel & Nusbaum, 2007, 2008) has shown that speakers vary properties of their speech to analogically gesture acoustically descriptions of events and objects and listeners can understand these acoustic gestures. Analogical acoustic gestures in speech represent a different channel of communication from symbolic-propositional and analogic-attiudinal and suggest that we may need a different model of language to understand communication.

[Video]

Teaching wisdom may require more than conveying ideas that can be understood. The difference between a speech that is understood and a speech with impact seems clear in subjective experience, although understanding this difference scientifically will pose a challenge. Is a clear and understandable message sufficient to teach wisdom or must such instruction rise to a different level of impact on the listener? Understanding how to communicate wisdom is a fundamental scientific problem and addressing this problem may reveal shortcomings in our current conceptualizations of language.

Howard Nusbaum, Co-Director
Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience
Department of Psychology
The University of Chicago

References

Baltes, P. B., & Staudinger, U. M. (1993). The search for a psychology of wisdom. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 2, 75–80.

Haidt, J. (2003). The moral emotions. In R. J. Davidson, K. R. Scherer, & H. H. Goldsmith (Eds.), Handbook of affective sciences. Oxford: Oxford University Press.(pp. 852-870).

Kunzmann, U., & Baltes, P. B. (2005). The psychology of wisdom: Theoretical and empirical challenges. In R. J. Sternberg & J. Jordan (Eds.), Handbook of wisdom: Psychological perspectives (pp. 110–135). New York: Cambridge University Press.

Owren, M. J., & Bachorowski, J.-A. (2003). Reconsidering the evolution of nonlinguistic communication: The case of laughter. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 27, 183-200.

Reznitskaya, A., & Sternberg, R. J. (2004). Teaching students to make wise judgments: The
“teaching for wisdom” program. In P. A. Linley, & S. Joseph (Eds.) Positive psychology in
practice, (pp. 181-196). New York: Wiley.

Shintel, H., Nusbaum, H. C., & Okrent, A. (2006). Analog acoustic expression in speech communication. Journal of Memory and Language, 55, 167-177.

Shintel, H., & Nusbaum, H. C. (2007). The sound of motion in spoken language: Visual information conveyed by acoustic properties of speech. Cognition, 105, 681-690.

Shintel, H., & Nusbaum, H. C. (2008). Moving to the speed of sound: Context modulation of the effect of acoustic properties of speech. Cognitive Science, 32, 1063-1074.

Spearman, C. (1904). "General intelligence," objectively determined and measured . American Journal of Psychology, 15, 201-293.

Sternberg, R. J. (1987). Teaching intelligence: The application of cognitive psychology to the
improvement of intellectual skills. In J. B. Baron & R. J. Sternberg (Eds.), Teaching thinking
skills: Theory and practice (pp. 182–218). New York: Freeman.

Sternberg, R. J. (1998). A balance theory of wisdom. Review of General Psychology, 2, 347-365.

Sternberg, R. J. (2001). Why schools should teach for wisdom: The balance theory of wisdom in
educational settings. Educational Psychologist, 36(4), 227–245.

Sternberg, R. J. (2002). Beyond g: The theory of successful intelligence. In R. J. Sternberg, & E.
L. Grigorenko (Eds.), The general factor of intelligence: How general is it? (pp. 447–479).
Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

What is wise counsel? Part III

wattawa — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 20:58:06 GMT

by Keith Whitaker, Defining Wisdom Grantee
Wise Counsel Research—www.wisecounselresearch.org

To continue our discussion of wisdom and wise counsel in the context of comedy, on June 1 our reading group discussed Kingsley Amis’ Lucky Jim.

We began with the question, “What is Jim’s luck?” and with the humorous quotation from Aristotle’s Eudemian Ethics, “The wise are luckier than others.” This conjunction led us naturally to the further questions, “Is Jim wise? And if so, what is his wisdom?”

In contrast, Jim appears to believe himself a loser. He seems fatalistic. Perhaps part of his problem is that Jim starts the novel appearing to believe that doing the right thing is divorced from being happy; that is, he appears ascetic. But by the end he appears to see that happiness and morality can go hand-in-hand.

How does he make this development? We noted the role of counsel in the novel. It is not extensive, but Jim’s turn seems rooted in the “advice” he receives from Carol Goldsmith, another character who appears to look at herself as a sort of “loser.” Is perhaps seeing oneself as a “loser”—set apart from the rest of society—an important element of wisdom or at least insight?

Despite Jim’s fatalism, asceticism, or “loserdom,” though, we like him! We compared Jim to other famous characters such as Sydney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities, Pierre in War and Peace, and Rick in Casablanca. All three share Jim’s sarcasm and his “outsider” status, but none immediately appeal to us (at least those of us in this group!) and the other characters the way he does.

Part of the difference appeared to us to be that Jim, especially in his thinking, gets the best lines in the book. Amis poured his wit into Jim. In this respect we likened Jim to Wodehouse’s Bertie. And certainly wit—linguistically as well as in reality—appears to be a sort of wisdom. Further confirmation for our search for wisdom and wise counsel within the comic realm …

Photo from Wikipedia.

What is wise counsel? Part II.

wattawa — Wed, 26 May 2010 21:05:33 GMT

by Keith Whitaker, Defining Wisdom Grantee
Wise Counsel Research—www.wisecounselresearch.org

After our recent conversation about the Fool in King Lear, our reading group decided to pursue wisdom in a comic context, with the character of Jeeves—the seemingly omniscient “gentleman’s gentleman”—in the Bertie Wooster novels by P.G. Wodehouse. We began with two questions: What are Jeeves’ motivations? And how imaginable is Jeeves in any other setting?

We noted that Jeeves’ calls his own special knowledge “the psychology of the individual.” Jeeves observes characters and events, and with a light touch (or a toss of a cow creamer) he sets things in motion. His near-omniscience may make him seem “creepy,” distant, or hidden. It also appears that he has little or no eros, or deep longing for something beyond possibly a pleasant cruise or a successful side-bet here or there. What do you think are the motivations of the wise counselors to the great?

Could Jeeves exist elsewhere than the rarified world of the Wodehouse English aristocracy? Would he fit with Kim Jong Il’s courtiers in North Korea? Or as the executive assistant in an international corporation? Maybe he has no place in a world in which people lack confidence as masters, since they are used only to machines getting things done? Where, if anywhere, do you think the quiet but wise servant finds a home today?

We ended our call with a discussion of the question, Is comedy truer than other dramatic forms at presenting wisdom? Bertie, for example, comes across as a light and unserious character. But perhaps it is his capacity for comedy—his wisdom?—that allows him to rule and be ruled well? Would you say comedy offers a more complete picture of wisdom than other forms?

For more on Jeeves, I’d refer readers to our portrait of him at www.wisecounselresearch.org. For our next call, we’re sticking with the comic vein and discussing Jim, of Kingsley Amis’ wonderful Lucky Jim.

Image: Stephen Fry (left) as Jeeves and Hugh Laurie as Bertie Wooster in the TV series Jeeves and Wooster. Source: Wikipedia.

How are happiness and wisdom related?

wattawa — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 19:30:02 GMT

“Defining Wisdom” is an interdisciplinary research program within the Arete Initiative at The University of Chicago. Twenty groups of researchers from a wide range of disciplines have been awarded two-year grants under the program to investigate the nature and benefits of wisdom. As a group, we have been wrestling with some fundamental issues related to wisdom, including how we might understand the many different ways that the word has been used—by ancient and modern philosophers, by researchers within our network, by laypeople in everyday conversation, and by others. As a part of our ongoing effort to understand what wisdom is, we have had a number of large- and small-group conversations focused on different conceptions or aspects of wisdom. One issue that has emerged as important to the research group, for example, is a distinction that Aristotle makes between theoretical wisdom (sophia) and practical wisdom (phronesis). We recently had a small-group discussion in which we revisited Aristotle’s original definitions of sophia and phronesis and discussed how he was actually defining each type, how they relate to each other at a deeper level, and whether each of our research projects seems more aligned with one or the other (we concluded that many of us seem to be focusing more on practical wisdom). We also read a paper by a modern philosopher who discussed how conceptions of wisdom have evolved through the ages, from Aristotle to the present day. What is written below came out of my reflections on the process of reading the two papers and discussing with my colleagues from different disciplines two main questions: 1) How have the meanings of “wisdom” evolved over the ages in response to different socio-historical trends and events? and 2) What kinds of distinctions between different types of wisdom seem most useful at present, especially in understanding how our interdisciplinary research projects relate to one another? The main idea that came out of this process for me is the thought that instead of trying to figure out how to define wisdom in terms of what “ingredients” are required for it to exist, perhaps we should begin with the desired “wise outcome”—greater happiness for more people more of the time—and work backwards to figure out what factors will help us drive more reliably toward that outcome.

What if we’ve all been trying to define wisdom from the wrong end? That is, what if the critical questions don’t have to do with the relationships between science and theology/morality/values or even wisdom and practical wisdom? Rather, what if all these considerations are merely derivative of the relationship between wisdom and happiness?

Consider this hypothetical scenario: We are in ancient times. There are no video games, no Sudoku, no movies, few manuscripts to read, almost no pleasure books (and few literate people to read them), and limited travel (which is more dangerous and arduous than exciting and fun). What do people do for fun? Possibly, they hang out with friends; play games, sports, and music; have sex; or do drugs. It is worth noting that the list would have probably been much shorter than it is today.

With happiness at a relative scarcity, it would have been natural to try to understand its causes, and this would have been a useful thing to do to get more of it for more people, more of the time. However, for the ancients there was little of what we would today recognize as science, and virtually no psychology—other than data gathered through introspection and interpreted through reflection. For this reason, the ancients started with what they had—they reflected on what seemed to make people happy. They recognized that some things made people happy temporarily (games, music), but didn’t have the same sort of cumulative or sustainable character as other sources of happiness (generating new knowledge, creating policies that make life better, etc.). Finally, some things actually led to a kind of “false” happiness (drugs, any addiction). We, too, make these distinctions because some things that make people happy are clearly more noble than others, owing to properties like the degree to which they are cumulative (can be shared with others and expand the playground of ideas for everyone) and their distributive scope (better the common good as opposed to looking out for one’s own self interest).

So it turns out that we can’t define the causes of happiness entirely in terms of observable behaviors, because some things like thinking and problem-solving, which make some people happy, are not observable, while other things might make the person who invented it happy but not the person who just executes it. Einstein, for example, probably had a great deal more fun coming up with and applying the theory of relativity than most physics students have while using the equations to solve canned homework problems. The problem is that the state of being happy is itself unobservable—there are behavioral correlates, but the correlation is imperfect and contingent on latent variables.

In an effort to make sense of our experience of happiness, we elaborate a category system to try to capture the kinds of distinctions just described. When we do this we end up with a theory of the causes of happiness in terms of certain kinds of activity (e.g., thinking, acting, producing) in relation to certain other traits or characteristics of the person (e.g., knowledge, experience, intellect, values, character) and with certain conditions on the subject matter (e.g., with respect to permanence of ideas and breadth of impact). That is, among all states of happiness we identify the “best” kinds of happiness and observe that they depend upon sets of external conditions (on the type of activity and its object) and internal conditions (knowledge, capabilities, values, motivations). But we recognize that there’s something else required—a characteristic of the individual that is basically their “capacity for happiness.” Imagine two people on twin worlds, identical in every respect except one: one twin has a much greater capacity for experiencing happiness than the other. It’s hard to imagine the unhappy one spending much time exercising these gifts if exercising them does not make that person happy. And it’s hard to think of the unhappy person as being as virtuous as the person who takes joy in doing such good. The special state in which these factors come together—the capacity to engage fully in happiness-producing activity as well as the capacity to experience the happiness that results from such activity—we call that state “wisdom.”

In his Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle wrote, “wisdom produces happiness the way health produces health.” Perhaps he meant that health is a state that supports the kinds of activities (e.g., exercise) that put people in a state of health, just as wisdom is a state that supports the kinds of activities (e.g., contemplation, judgment, problem solving) that put people in a state of happiness. Even here we have recognized at least two major divisions of happiness-producing activities—happiness that comes from thinking in a certain way and happiness that comes from acting in a certain way. The two seem to derive the happiness from different sources, so we might give them different names (sophia and phronesis). The implication of my analysis is that the concept linking these distinct instances of “wisdom” is not necessarily any particular relationship between the underlying networks of causes (scientific knowledge, values, skills, etc.), but the fact that both states reliably produce happiness, which, as I hypothesized at the outset, might well have been the goal of all this philosophical analysis in the first place.

Simply put, what if the only relationship between sophia and phronesis is that they both produce different varietals of the “best” kind of happiness but through completely different behavioral-cognitive-social pathways? Wisdom, in that case, in both its forms, would be defined roughly as “the capacity for engaging expertly in certain kinds of activities associated with the most noble kinds of happiness, combined with the capacity to experience happiness while so engaged.”

The world has changed quite a bit since Aristotle wrote about wisdom. Let’s consider the example of sophia (or theoretical wisdom). I would imagine that the physics research of Thales and Anaxagoras would have been great fun—building from first principles, making unexpected discoveries about hidden relationships under conditions where there’s lots of low-hanging fruit once you find your way in to the right conceptual terrain. Today, physicists are leaving physics in droves—I spoke to one physicist recently who described it as a domain in which the low-hanging fruit has all been picked-over. Today, perhaps it simply isn’t as easy to experience happiness doing the same kinds of things Thales and Anaxagoras would likely have been doing in the domain of physics.

Additionally, one could imagine that when wisdom was present in ancient times, it had to be more localized in one person than it does today. The ancient philosopher-scientist would presumably have had to carry out such activities as 1) deciding what line of inquiry to pursue, 2) discovering the knowledge, and 3) judging its quality. In modern science, much of the “judging” function has been absorbed into disciplinary knowledge (e.g., best practices for maximizing reliability and validity) and disciplinary structure (e.g., funding policies about what science is worth doing, organization of the research activity around stable paradigms where the next step is logically defined by what has come before, peer-reviewed journals that determine what is in and what is out, etc.). In this sense the scientific domain as a system might be just as wise as ever, even if many of the individual practitioners might seem to be quite a bit less wise than their ancient counterparts. The independent constitutive factors that used to coexist in the ancient philosopher-scientist are now distributed through the scientific system in a different way. The point is, if we try to compare the wisdom of individuals in antiquity with the wisdom of individuals in the 21st century, even though it seems like the most “obvious” comparison to make, we might nonetheless be comparing apples to oranges. A more appropriate comparison might be between the wisdom of the ancient and modern scientists in the context of their respective scientific systems. It just so happens that in antiquity we end up looking at the individual philosopher-scientist anyway because there wasn’t much of a system beyond the individual. But this shift of perspective would require us to think about the wisdom of modern scientists differently in relation to the ancients.

The space of happiness-producing activities has also grown tremendously in the intervening millennia. Today we do have video games, movies, candy, novels, iPods, global political challenges, and entirely new scientific domains opening up, among other things. This will require us to expand the original analysis to accommodate these instances and categories related to happiness that did not exist in ancient times.

To summarize: Under this hypothetical analysis, if we want to define wisdom for the modern day instead of trying to map an ancient network of conceptual, referential, and normative relationships onto a very different world from the one in which they were produced, perhaps we should return to first principles the way Aristotle did and ask:

•   What activities make people happy?
•   Which of these happiness-producing activities are the “best” or “most noble” ones?
•   What are the characteristics of individuals that give them the capacity to both engage in these most noble activities at an expert level and to experience happiness while doing so?

The people who have all the necessary capacities and characteristics to engage at an expert level in these noble activities and who also experience happiness as a consequence of their activity would (applying the updated version of the original theory) be considered wise people. Such a “science of wisdom” would be fundamentally interdisciplinary—potentially drawing on any or all of ontology, philosophy of min, epistemology, education, positive psychology, affective science, cognitive science, organizational science, moral development, moral philosophy, neuroscience, cognitive neuroscience, cultural anthropology, etc. in order to map all the parts necessary to define wisdom for the modern age in this way.

I would like to stress that my collaborator, Seana Moran, and I consider the kind of analysis that centers on the individual “wise person” to be a special case of a more general analysis that focuses on the wisdom in the system, in which overall happiness at the systems level may increase or decrease as a result of collective or distributed action, even when no one wise person exists in the system. The contrast between ancient science and modern science above is a case in point. That is, it may well be true that the proportion of wise people (under Aristotle’s definition) in the world has gone down. But we would emphatically argue that that does not imply that the level of wisdom in the world has gone down. It seems obvious that there are ways in which the elements of wisdom that used to exist only in individuals in ancient times (and then only rarely all together) have been externalized and absorbed into some of our symbolic representations, institutions, etc. This “deconstruction” of the elements of wisdom at the individual level is not necessarily a bad thing, either—as long as there is a new synthesis of the constitutive factors at a higher level to compensate for it and perhaps even to provide additional benefits not available at the individual level.

-Michael Connell, Institute for Knowledge Design, Stanford University, co-PI with Seana Moran on Defining Wisdom Project "All the Wiser."

References

Aristotle; Crisp, Roger (Editor). Aristotle: Nichomachean Ethics. Port Chester, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2000, Book VI.

Harrison, Peter. " Disjoining Wisdom and Knowledge: Science, Theology and the Making of Western Modernity," Wisdom or Knowledge? Science, Theology and Cultural Dynamics, Meisinger, Hubert, Drees, Willem B., and Liana, Zbigniew (eds), T & T Clark International, Continuum Imprint, London, 2006, Chapter 4, pp. 51-73.

Photo from Flickr Creative Commons.

Wisdom and Tradition: Aristotle

wattawa — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 20:51:33 GMT

As a philosophical concept and cultural ideal, wisdom has enjoyed a long history. It has also acquired a prestige such that one cannot speak of “bad wisdom” or “undesirable wisdom.” Wisdom is good – and where it is lacking, the lack is always regretted.

Part of what makes wisdom prestigious is its elusive quality – we know it when we see it even though we cannot always make it seen. This elusiveness is also what makes wisdom difficult to define. And the challenge of defining wisdom today is made even greater by academic specialization, which raises considerable challenges to those who would wish to recover or establish a common language for discussing an already elusive concept.

Fortunately, there is a record to consult, a history from which we can take our bearings. One strategy for coming to terms with how we might define wisdom today is then to revisit this historical record. Doing so can particularly afford us a deeper, genealogical understanding of our own work as contemporary wisdom researchers, and also has the potential to offer new points of reference for articulating and coordinating our own understandings of what wisdom is and where it is found.

In this spirit, eight members of the Defining Wisdom project gathered by phone and by computer to discuss one of wisdom’s greatest spokesmen: Aristotle. Aristotle dedicated the sixth book of his Nicomachean Ethics to an inquiry into the nature of the intellectual virtues. In the course of this discussion Aristotle offers definitions of wisdom that have proven to be among the most historically influential – a significance which makes them a natural place by which to establish our bearings as wisdom researchers today.

Aristotle identified five distinct intellectual virtues in his account in Book 6, three of which have a particularly pronounced relevance for the enterprise of wisdom research: sophia, phronesis, and episteme. Aristotle’s account begins with episteme, or “scientific knowledge.” Its proper sphere is the things that are “necessary” – the sort of things that Aristotle (in Roger Crisp’s translation) says “cannot be otherwise.” Aristotle then turns to phronesis, or “practical wisdom,” which enables its possessor to deliberate well “about what is good and beneficial,” and thereby enables one to see “what conduces to living well as a whole.” Its particular sphere is politics: phronesis is indispensible not just to individuals who wish to live a good life, but also to rulers of communities charged with deliberating about what is good and bad for a city or people.

Only after defining episteme and phronesis does Aristotle come to sophia, or wisdom simply. Of Aristotle’s intellectual virtues, sophia comes closest to embodying the sort of theoretical understanding with which many of us instinctively associate wisdom. At the same time, Aristotle’s definition is by no means simple: “wisdom is scientific knowledge, combined with intellect, of what is by nature most honorable.” Aristotle of course packs an enormous amount into his pithy definition; but particularly striking are his claims first that sophia is “the most precise of the sciences” (and thus presumably even more precise than episteme alone), and second that the subjects of sophia are the “most honorable matters.” Its subject matter thus seems to be matters elevated well above the matters of practical life – “things far more divine in nature than human beings,” including especially “the things constituting the cosmos.”

Aristotle’s nuanced delineations of these three separate categories could hardly fail to provoke a response from contemporary wisdom researchers – and he didn’t disappoint! Indeed one of the most important questions that arose in our consideration of his three categories was the question of our own self-definition: which of these categories in fact best captures the subject of our own inquiries as wisdom researchers? Several members of the group reported that their own research focused principally on the subjects Aristotle associates with practical wisdom: that is, with questions concerning how we make good decisions in matters relating to our own welfare.

At the same time, wisdom research might not be wholly ready to move away from sophia quite yet! As several group members noted, their own work was deeply engaged in the analysis not simply of “good outcomes,” but also with normative questions concerning both what constitutes a good outcome, and how norms that promote such outcomes are internalized. In this sense, it was noted, the study of wisdom necessarily also involves the study of “values.” And while these values might not have been – or even be capable of being – formulated in Aristotle’s terms of what is “most honorable,” such reflections reopen for us Aristotle’s own question of whether it is in fact possible to possess (or even to study) one of the intellectual virtues without also possessing (or studying) the others.

It should also be noted that Aristotle’s distinction between episteme and sophia was every bit as provocative as his distinction between phronesis and sophia. In defining episteme as separate from sophia while also defining sophia as the “most precise of the sciences,” Aristotle may provoke modern contributors to a “science of wisdom” to wonder whether wisdom is not simply the object of such an inquiry but also a concept that poses a fundamental challenge to the way we conceive knowledge itself.

Aristotle’s discussion of the intellectual virtues concludes with a wonderful assessment of wisdom’s relationship to the end of human life, happiness: “wisdom produces happiness not as medicine produces health, but as health produces health. For by being a part of virtue as a whole, it makes a person happy through its being possessed and being exercised.” More than one group discussion would be needed to unpack what’s at stake in Aristotle’s rich metaphor! But the opportunity to reflect on it offered us a welcome opportunity to recall a tradition of thinking on the intimate relationship between wisdom and humanity’s normative ends that has largely defined the wisdom tradition on which our own work seeks to build.

--Michael Legaspi and Ryan Hanley

Photo from Flickr Creative Commons.

What is wise counsel?

wattawa — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 18:29:38 GMT

by Keith Whitaker, Defining Wisdom Grantee
Wise Counsel Research—www.wisecounselresearch.org

Wise counselors or good “seconds” appear in a bewildering variety of guises, from Wooster’s Jeeves to Lear’s Fool, the immoral Talleyrand to the saintly More. In a recently established reading group, we discussed select historical and dramatic passages to see what themes or commonality we could find among these uncommon counselors.

We kicked off our discussion group on wise counsel looking at Shakespeare’s King Lear. Counselors play a major role in the plot of Lear—think of Kent, the Fool, Edgar, and even Oswald, Goneril’s attendant.

We focused on the Fool. The questions we started with were, What do we know about the Fool? And why does Lear like him?

We also asked participants for their own sense of what wise counsel is. In response to this question we discussed the difference between seeing wisdom as embodied in counsel (wisdom “as” counsel) and wisdom as something that exists apart from counsel and gets “applied” in specific situations (wisdom “in” counsel). Do you think wisdom can exist apart from its taking shape (actually or potentially) in counsel?

Regarding Lear’s Fool, we noted some of his characteristics that seem to identify him as a wise counselor: He speaks the truth. He is brave and loyal. He alone of the characters appears to see what’s coming around the corner for Lear. He even speaks a prophecy (and likens himself to a magician, Merlin), raising the question, What’s the difference between a prophet and a wise counselor?

Also, the Fool is powerless, and by not rivaling Lear in any way appears better situated to speak the truth to him. His obvious use of jokes led us to discuss the importance of “indirection” to wisdom. Perhaps we find wisdom most readily in jokes or games or “plays”? And perhaps comedy can present wisdom more readily than tragedy?

We would love to hear our fellow Wisdom Network members’ thoughts on these questions. Is the best place to find wisdom in counsel? Or in jokes? In comedy or in tragedy?

We also talked about other possible examples of wise counselors, including Tiresias, Seneca, and Franklin. What examples would you nominate? Why? Our next discussion is going to continue to look at wisdom in comic guise. We’ll be talking about P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves in late April. Please feel free to join our online conversation!

Photo from Flickr Creative Commons.

Practical Wisdom in Medical Training: What are the Prospects?

wattawa — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 20:06:28 GMT

In a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education (1), Prof. David Hoekema considers how virtue is taught on college campuses. He suggests that the “unacknowledged” ethicists on campuses fall generally into three categories: professors (of all disciplines, by virtue of the examples they set in the way they teach and administer their courses and live their lives), student-life staff (as they help students discern their own intentions and values), and student leaders (who by their community endeavors and accomplishments serve as peer-to-peer moral exemplars).

As an “acknowledged” ethicist at a medical school, I am drawn to Prof. Hoekema’s discussion and its concrete engagement of the means by which academic communities may attempt to encourage moral growth and virtuous practice among adult learners. And as a physician-ethicist involved in the professional development of future physicians, I am particularly interested in the potential for ethics education and training to translate into ethical practice in a profession that is all about making decisions that are, at their root, moral. In medicine, this combination of morality and decision making invites a close consideration not only of virtue in general but of a particular virtue – that of practical wisdom.

Physicians are trained to solve medical problems, and these problems are often highly demanding due to the complex manifestations of disease and the multiplicity of diagnostic and therapeutic alternatives. Moreover, the presentation of disease as an experience of illness means that patients present themselves to physicians through multiple dimensions of human experience (biological, psychological, social, spiritual), and the unfolding of illness in real time means that decisions must often be made amidst uncertainty – either due to incomplete information or the unclear wishes of patients or their surrogates. These demands reflect the need for practical wisdom.

What might practical wisdom in medicine look like? To approach this very large question, we do well to consider how practical wisdom has been understood in the past, especially by thinkers whose influence has been sufficiently potent to endure into our own time. Aristotle’s phronesis (2) and Thomas Aquinas’ prudentia (3) both serve as rich and related repositories from which to gain an understanding of what practical wisdom entails and how practical wisdom is inseparable from a larger framework of virtue and ethics (at least within Aristotelian and Thomistic traditions).

My reading of these historical resources leads me to conclude that the search for practical wisdom in medicine raises a number of basic questions. What are the worthwhile goals of medicine? What vision of human flourishing should inspire these goals? How does the empirical work of medicine (gathering and organization of facts) inform its ethical judgments? Which ethical frameworks have the capacity to support practical wisdom? How can we deliberate in medicine in such a way as to integrate goals, concrete circumstances, and moral virtues and principles – and make that integration transparent? And lastly, how can education and training in medical ethics enhance the motivation that learners need to have in order to make them act on (and not only think about) their ethical judgments?

I read Prof. Hoekema’s assessment of the ethical resources available on college campuses as evidence of his vision of a college campus as a community of moral agents who share a common moral space that has the potential to encourage moral growth among students. Such a vision should resonate with medical educators, especially given the particular practice (of medicine) that is the defining professional feature of their moral enterprise. Academic medical centers are communities of practice in a very special sense, and it is in the midst of these communities that practical wisdom can be learned, if novices are sufficiently guided and supported as they struggle, through success and failure, to gain something that comes only through experience. But experience alone is no guarantee, since the cultivation of practical wisdom requires an integration of multiple domains – clinical reasoning, ethical analysis, moral motivation, and professional identity – as well as dedicated effort by both institutions and educators. Creating training environments marked by such integration is an invitation for substantial and enduring engagement. I wonder what the prospects for such engagement in medical schools may be.

by Lauris Kaldjian, M.D., Ph.D., University of Iowa

References

1. Hoekema, David. The unacknowledged ethicists on campuses. Chronicle of Higher Education, January 24, 2010 (http://chronicle.com/article/The-Unacknowledged-Ethicists/63681/).

2. Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Educational Publishing; 1962.

3. Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologica: a concise translation. Westminster, MD: Christian Classics; 1989.

Can we recognize the wise by the greater good they create?

wattawa — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 21:26:27 GMT

Recognizing the Wise in Contemporary Acts of the Greater Good

Inspired by a desire to win back public confidence and trust, values that were lost in a mudslide of financial scandals, swindles, and corporate greed, students from the 2009 graduating class of Harvard Business School wrote the MBA Oath. It opens with this paragraph:

As a manager, my purpose is to serve the greater good by bringing people and resources together to create value that no single individual can create alone. Therefore, I will seek a course that enhances the value my enterprise can create for society over the long term. I recognize my decisions can have far reaching consequences that affect the well-being of individuals inside and outside my enterprise, today and in the future.

The MBA Oath has become a controversial conversation starter in the global business and economic communities as well as in the general public. Some business people embrace the idea of a code of ethics for managers; others feel that the code unfairly implies that most or even all managers seek profit at all costs. Moreover, members of the global public may take a cynical view of the oath, suspicious (with good reason!) that it is an insincere marketing ploy or is simply too little too late.

Yet, it cannot be denied that the MBA oath expresses many of the same characteristics of wisdom as identified by scholars such as Robert Sternberg (2000), Vivien Clayton (1978), Monika Ardelt (2007), and Randall & Kenyon (2001) to name just a few. Sternberg’s “balance theory” of wisdom seems to be particularly in line with the MBA oath. Sternberg’s theory describes wisdom as existing when people use their intelligence, creativity, and knowledge for a common good by balancing their personal interest with the interests of others and even the larger context over the long term as well as the short term. The tension between interpersonal and intrapersonal interests, according to Sternberg, is mitigated by values that most people would agree are good and helpful.

To my mind, this conversation raises at least two provocative questions: Can we recognize the wise by the greater good they create? Are people who have made a difference for the greater good also wise, or do they at least possess a fair amount of wisdom?

Back in 2000 when I began interviewing people who were identified by others as being wise, I wondered if I could understand wisdom by examining what these people actually do in their lives and if what they do can be seen as serving a common good. Indeed, during my interviews, these nominated wise people ultimately tell stories of their involvement and passion for work or projects that most would see as contributing to a greater good, either for their family, local community, or on a larger societal scale. Moreover, the nominators themselves often spontaneously justify their recommendation with a story about how the person is serving a greater good. Additionally, I found that most of the people referred to me used the losses and challenges in their lives to fuel their commitment to the greater good. These insights are intriguing because they suggest that we can recognize wisdom and even, as the MBA oath strives to do, create structures and opportunities to live wisely.

If the world’s population growth continues at the current rate of 1.2 percent (U.S. Census Bureau, 2009), the number of people on the planet will double to 12 billion by 2054. These numbers suggest that we are certain to see more people taking action to serve a greater good, even as we continue to witness spectacular acts of foolishness. At the risk of appearing foolish myself or at the least a bit naive, I am optimistic that linking wisdom to actions for the greater good makes wisdom more visible, practical and attainable for all.

Elle Allison, Ph.D. elle@wisdomout.com
The mission of Wisdom Out is to teach the strategies that wise people, couples and organizations use, to face whatever challenges come their way, and transform adversity into growth. Check out our website and sign up for our newsletter with monthly wisdom stories and practical wisdom strategies at www.wisdomout.com

Has the world become more or less wise over the past 50 years?

wattawa — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 19:16:40 GMT

At the Defining Wisdom Network Meeting in June 2009, participants were asked to come up with a series of questions about wisdom that might shed light on the broad issues of our project.

One participant asked the following question: “Has the world become more or less wise in the last 50 years? Or is the total amount of wisdom constant?”

I would like to ask the Defining Wisdom Network members to reflect and share their thoughts on this topic. What do you think? Is this a good question?

-Joy Wattawa, Assistant Director for Interdisciplinary Outreach and Communications, Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience

Photo from Flickr Creative Commons.

How can we train people to become wise?

wattawa — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 13:38:43 GMT

Can we train professionals to become wise in their respective fields? Do we already do so in some professions, perhaps unwittingly?

Baltes and colleagues have conducted a body of empirical work related to wisdom, some of which focuses on wisdom within different professions. For example, Smith, Staudinger, and Baltes (1992) discovered that the “think-aloud” protocols of human service professionals contemplating wisdom dilemmas ranked higher on five criteria of wisdom than those of other professionals.

This same research group (Staudinger, Smith, & Baltes, 1994) subsequently found that clinical psychologists outperform control groups. These professionals were understood to demonstrate wisdom because they were selected into and trained in settings where wisdom-related tasks, such as life-planning and value relativism, were relevant. Later research identified that training and practice in clinical psychology was the strongest predictor of wisdom-related performance on two of these think-aloud protocols for the group of clinical psychologists (Staudinger, Maciel, Smith, & Baltes, 1998). In addition, using a structural equation analysis, Kunzmann and Baltes (2003) were able to determine that wisdom entails a value orientation focused on enhancing others’ potential – which might be expected in these professions. However, older non-psychologist adults nominated for their wisdom also gained high scores as well as older clinical psychologists . This finding suggests that there may be various paths to wisdom and that wise lay people may perform as wisely as professionals trained to deal with the kinds of problems being explored (Baltes, Staudinger, Maercker, & Smith, 1995).

Still, this body of research suggests that professional training does enhance wisdom and suggests that clinical psychologists nominated for their wisdom may be expected to perform even more highly on wisdom-related tasks than lay persons nominated for wisdom. It also raises questions about how training in other disciplines that deal with wisdom related skills, such as value-relativism, might influence the acquisition of wisdom.

In our research, we have been interviewing psychologists and judges nominated for either their clinical wisdom or their judicial wisdom, respectively. Although our data analysis is still underway, we thought we might share with you some of the preliminary findings related to the training of professionals that we have found interesting to consider. We will share them in the form of questions that have been raised in the analysis. Some quotes from the psychotherapy interviews will be used to help frame these questions.

1.   Should instilling wisdom constitute a goal of professional training or is this a quality that develops only after years of professional practice? Perhaps we should instead seek to develop some values that set professionals along a path towards the development and valuation of wisdom? One psychotherapist said, “…wisdom is somehow based on having had experiences and I think that experiential base that I have over 30 years is something that you couldn’t compress into a course or put into a 5 year graduate program…I think what you can do is you can alert people to opportunities for increasing their wisdom.”

2.   If we desire professionals capable of wisdom, what does this mean with respect to our admissions processes? Currently, most psychology programs and law programs select students by considering some combination of essays and grade point averages and test scores. Other methods could include assessment of wisdom-related traits, such as value-relativism, perspective taking, and interpersonal skills. In relation to this notion, one participant said, “Using primarily undergraduate grade point average, GRE’s and…research experience might work well for selecting PhD students, but they’re not very effective selection criteria for psychotherapists….I’m not suggest(ing) we select people with IQ’s below 80 or something, but once we get up to sufficient, then I think there are other personality characteristics of potential trainees that we should be looking at rather than standardized scores and grade point averages.”

3.   Are there ways to train students to develop a sense of cross-cultural sensitivity and appreciation – a trait that was widely thought across both professional groups to be related to wisdom? Participants have suggested mechanisms such as cultural immersion programs, directed readings of literature beyond one’s profession, the analysis of one’s own culture, and legal aid or front line therapeutic work with minority communities. In speaking about the importance of having such broad appreciations, a participant said, “…with people I’ve thought are wise…they’re reasonably well read or cultured and they have some sort of broad, rather than narrow, kind of perspective on things … I think there’s a lot to be learned from novels and films and movies and art forms that are beyond… classic psychotherapy textbooks… you gotta like something, you gotta understand what that’s about, and I don’t think that’s the…continued education that your licensure requires… I think of that as sort of the ‘one night stand’ of education … it has to be some sort of ongoing immersion.”

4.   In what ways can academic programs help students develop self-awareness? Self awareness and acceptance of one’s good and bad impulses were also traits that were thought to be relevant to the development of wisdom across professional groups. Although the participants seemed to think that engaging in personal therapy was very helpful, there were concerns about the ethics of a program requiring this activity. Other suggestions included activities that gave participants feedback from others, engagement in group processes where students had to work together, focusing on collaborative problem solving versus competition between classmates, and developing an acceptance of the “dark side” of humanity and appreciating the complexity within all people. One participant expressed, “… I’m always saying that I always see the good in people… I certainly think it involves looking for the strength in people and also recognizing the evil in myself and others… [recognizing] that there is an odorous rage and that there is spite and vengeance and hate and jealousy and all these things…and … not shying away from that either and helping people to integrate that rather than deny it and also to universalize it and to understand that, that’s what it is to be human.”

By examining responses to these questions, we can see some of the issues academic programs might need to face if wisdom were to become valued as a core trait within their graduates. Programs might wish to reevaluate both admissions and training practices, following from the degree to which wisdom could be a direct outcome of training. These questions have been helpful to us in considering the prospects for training professionals to utilize wisdom within their practices. We look forward to continuing our analysis and to further developing our understanding of these wisdom-related processes.

-Heidi Levitt, Professor of Clinical Psychology, University of Memphis & Beth Piazza-Bonin, graduate student, University of Memphis

Photo from Flickr Creative Commons.

Can the unwise recognize wisdom?

wattawa — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 16:08:30 GMT

Wisdom grantees Michael Sargent and Shabnam Mousavi examine the question.

Anchoring Judgment in Wise Principles

Michael J. Sargent, Bates College, United States

I’ve been asked to write a blog entry about a related pair of questions: “Can the unwise recognize wisdom?” and “Can one act wisely without being conscious of it?” In thinking about this pair of issues, I suspect that the answers to these questions are, respectively, “Yes, at least in principle” and “Absolutely.” In other words, even the unwise may recognize what is wise, even though they fail to make wise choices. And there may be ways of helping them make wiser choices, even without their awareness. In other words, there may be ways to help them help themselves.

Whatever one’s definition of wisdom, even the unwise probably have an in-principle understanding of wisdom in many domains. They understand that saving for retirement is probably essential if one wants to avoid poverty in one’s old age. They understand that reducing caloric intake and exercising regularly are wise if one wants to be physically healthy. They understand these things in principle, and so at least in that sense, even the unwise can recognize wisdom.

Still, as evidenced by low savings rates and high rates of obesity (at least in the U.S.), applying these principles is often difficult. What can be done to facilitate individuals’ acting upon the principles whose wisdom they explicitly endorse, even if they would be unlikely to apply those principles under normal conditions?

One answer that Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein propose is to “nudge” individuals’ behavior in directions that benefit them and others, which could be thought of as wise. By attending carefully to choice architecture, policymakers can influence individuals’ behavior, even as those individuals retain freedom of action. A well known example that Thaler and Sunstein describe is implementing opt-out policies to promote participation in retirement plans. In contrast to conventional approaches whereby the default is not to participate in a plan unless one chooses to, opt-out policies set the default so that employees are automatically enrolled in a plan unless they choose not to be. As Thaler and Sunstein note, such opt-out policies raise the level of participation in retirement plans. On the basis of such findings, they argue for an approach termed libertarian paternalism: Individuals retain their freedom to act as they choose, but policymakers structure the choice context in a way that is intended to promote individual and social welfare.

In my research, I’ve recently been exploring applications of such ideas to the study of attitudes toward punishing criminals. Obviously, criminal wrongdoing is a ubiquitous problem, one that societies often attempt to address, at least in part, through punishment. A reasonable question to ask is whether societies’ penal systems are constructed in a manner that is wise. What would a wise penal system look like? And will citizens support it?

Arguably, a wise penal system will optimize the deterrent effect of punishment. In the case of general deterrence, the goal of punishment is to use the punishment of a particular criminal as an example to deter other would-be criminals from the same sort of crime. Punishment is used to ensure that the expected value of punishment (i.e., the probability of punishment × the magnitude of punishment) is kept at a high enough level to deter potential criminals from the same crime as those who have already been punished. A key factor that ought to therefore influence sentences is the likelihood of detection. For crimes that are hard to detect, punishments should be set relatively high. Because the low likelihood of detection of the crime entails a lower likelihood of punishment for the criminal, a greater magnitude of punishment is needed to maintain the same expected value of punishment.

As I mentioned last June, research by social psychologist Kevin Carlsmith and others suggests that people often endorse deterrence in principle, but rarely apply it in practice. For example, Carlsmith and others have found that manipulations of detection-likelihood generally make little difference in recommended sentences of specific, hypothetical criminals. Crimes that are hard to detect are punished no more than harshly than crimes that are easy to detect. Similar results occur when individuals are asked to evaluate general policies intended to optimize deterrence. One group of researchers found that law students at the University of Chicago (who were well versed in deterrence) were generally opposed to policies that delivered lower penalties when crimes were easy to detect than when they were hard to detect, whether the agent meting out the different penalties was bureaucratic (the IRS) or judicial (a judge). Thus, even individuals with expertise seemed reluctant to embrace policies based on deterrence. Data such as these have led researchers to conclude that people’s intuitions are rooted in retribution and not deterrence.

These findings raise many questions that have motivated much of my work under the grant. One question is when individuals are willing and able to apply deterrence theory. Specifically, when will they recommend more severe penalties for crimes that are hard to detect? Like others (including Carlsmith), I have found it difficult to identify circumstances when this occurs.

In one of my recent studies, though, I’ve found that a familiar phenomenon known as anchoring can be used to produce differences between those individuals exposed to high detection-likelihood crimes and those exposed to low detection-likelihood crimes. Anchoring (famously described by Tversky and Kahneman) describes a way of making judgments under uncertainty where one begins with a specific starting point and adjusts from it. A classic demonstration is the Mississippi River problem. Half of a sample is asked whether the Mississippi River is longer or shorter than 500 miles (most say longer) and then to estimate its length. The remaining individuals are asked if it’s longer or shorter than 5,000 miles (most say shorter) and then asked to estimate its length. Individuals in the second group generate larger estimates (typically differing by over 1,000 miles). The assumption is that the initial value that’s mentioned acts as an anchor from which participants adjust to get to a final judgment. But, critically, different starting points lead to different outcomes.

I’ve begun applying this framework to studies of deterrence and detection-likelihood. For example, in one study participants in the low detection-likelihood condition read about a case of embezzlement in which the crime was described as hard to detect. Critically, they were also told that in such cases state governments recommended a sentence of 15 years (a high value on the sentencing scale they would ultimately use to report their recommended sentence). By contrast, other participants read about the same case of embezzlement but were told that it was easy to detect and that, as a consequence, state governments only recommended a sentence of 2 weeks (a low value). In short, each group was given an anchor, in addition to information about detection-likelihood. In this study, participants in the first group recommended higher sentences than those in the second group. This was true, even after dropping from analysis those participants whose recommended sentence was equivalent to the anchor, arguing against the possibility that the effect was driven by participants merely repeating the number that had just been presented.

Of course, anchoring effects are highly robust, as anyone who has used the Mississippi River example as a teaching demonstration can attest. Consequently, it would have been surprising not to obtain an anchoring effect. What we are more interested in is our next step, which is to recruit a new set of participants and describe to them the sentencing disparity obtained in our first anchoring study. We also plan to experimentally vary our description of the process that produced such a disparity. A key condition will be one in which we attribute the discrepancy to jurors whose starting point for deliberations on a sentence was recommendations that penalized hard-to-detect crimes more severely. (Their freedom to ignore the recommendations will be emphasized.) Will being told that a jury of their peers decided to punish hard-to-detect crimes more severely lead to more acceptance of such a discrepancy than if it is the work of a bureaucracy or an individual judge? Might it even lead to majority support for such discrepancies in penalties?

We don’t yet know what we will find in the second stage of this work, but if we did find this result, it could have implications for the issue of popular support for public policies that advance deterrence. Previous scholars have suggested that, because citizens are intuitive retributivists, they will not accept policies that optimize deterrence. In the words of the research team who studied the University of Chicago law students, “the fact that optimal deterrence policies are rejected in both the administrative and judicial domains among a group likely to be predisposed in their favor strongly suggests that any effort to move in the direction of optimal deterrence would encounter significant popular resistance” (Sunstein et al., 2000, p. 248). Perhaps this is true under many conditions. But if we find that attribution of a sentencing disparity to jury behavior legitimizes that disparity, even if the juries’ decisions were clearly rooted in numerical anchors provided to them, then it would suggest one condition under which citizens may accept optimal deterrence policies. Despite the fact that such policies are at odds with citizens’ intuitions about how punishment should be applied, if the disparity is said to be due to the free choice of their fellow citizens perhaps they will be accepted.

Again, it is yet to be determined what we will find. But the data we already have shows that, whatever individuals’ willingness or capacity to apply deterrence theory in an explicit fashion, they can be induced through anchoring effects to behave “as if” they apply it. Insofar as optimizing deterrence through penalties is wise sentencing, then this would be a case of individuals adhering to wise principles despite a lack of awareness of what they are doing. As with Sunstein and Thaler’s work, it would suggest that the choice context can be structured to nudge individuals toward wise choices, even without their awareness. Additionally, where juries play a role in setting penalties for offenders, it would suggest that optimal deterrence may be legitimized in the public’s eye by their influence, even if anchoring strategies are used to influence their decisions.

My students are just finishing the online survey that we will use to collect the data for the second part of this project, so time will soon tell what our findings are. In the interim, though, I welcome comments and questions.

References
Carlsmith, K. M., Darley, J. M., & Robinson, P. H. (2002). Why do we punish? Deterrence and just deserts as motives for punishment. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 83, 284-298.

Sunstein, C. R., Schkade, D., & Kahneman, D. (2000). Do people want optimal deterrence? Journal of Legal Studies, 29, 237-253.

Thaler, R. H., & Sunstein, C. R. (2009). Nudge: Improving decisions about health, wealth, and happiness. New York: Penguin Books.

Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1974). Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases. Science, 185, 1124-1131.

Is Wisdom Intuitive?

Shabnam Mousavi, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Germany

IS WISDOM INTUITIVE? From what I have read and heard so far, it is often at least assumed that this is the case. What is wisdom? We do not know exactly, and we do not aim to provide a universal definition. But we all agree that wisdom is good, useful, and worth exploring. Can we measure wisdom? Yes, and we do so by eliciting people’s judgments of their own wisdom (self-assessment), or their judgments of others’ wisdom (asking for nominations). Why do we want to measure wisdom? To specify this admirable human capability, unravel its secrets, and obtain more of it; to make it accessible to all; to learn from wise decisions and to develop wise strategies. We want to learn about wisdom to spread it and to expand it. In sum, we all seem to agree that everybody would be better off if we could produce more of this indefinable wisdom; if we were to increase our wisdom scores. Once again, a rational principle prevails: “more is (of course) better.”

SO, PEOPLE’S JUDGMENT is the basis for discovering and specifying wise people, whose behavior is then studied to unravel wisdom. This practice must assume that people are reliable in judging, observing, and identifying wisdom, even though they are not necessarily wise. However, some researchers would not, for instance, accept a self-nomination when seeking nominations for wise people. This takes me back to my first question in one step: How are people able to identify wisdom? Is it intuitive? If yes, why can’t they judge their own wisdom? Is it because this recognition is based on an intuition limited to outside oneself? If so, how can we rely on any kind of self-assessment? If one requires some primary level of wisdom to identify wisdom, do we then face circularity? As if these questions aren’t challenging enough, allow me to throw in another twist: We should not forget that people have been shown to suffer from persistent judgmental biases, and irrationalities. After all, many scientists have dedicated themselves to the task of finding treatments for this widespread captivity of human kind to irrationality.

Wrestling with these questions, I couldn’t help but wonder: Can I imagine a way of specifying and understanding wise actions that can avoid these difficulties? I have put my bets on one idea: A study of wisdom as heuristic processes, which rely on intuitive inference. Allow me to sketch this idea here. (And of course, I need a reference, but I’m doing my best to avoid its anchoring effect.) The RATIONAL AGENT has been a popular scientific reference for judging, modeling, and theorizing human behavior and choice. This agent is axiomatized as omniscient in overcoming epistemological uncertainty, as inferring statistically and as complying to logical truth (-tables). I define a WISE AGENT as one that is comfortable with ontological uncertainty through flexibility of intuition and robustness of simple heuristic strategies. This agent makes good decisions based on intuitive inferences and ecological reasoning. I define ACTION as a mapping between representation of information and matching/triggered heuristic strategy. I replace, (1) The information set by representation of information; and avoid the necessity of pre-specifying goals (that cause reduction of actual situation to a solvable form) by specifying a relevant/triggered heuristic strategy; (2) Statistical inference by intuitive inference and gain flexibility; (3) Logical truth with ecological reasoning to rethink habitual norms of behavior and to develop requirements (and methods) for construction of content-sensitive norms. So far I have one suspected corollary: The axiomatization of a wise agent does not necessitate the imposition of invariance. That is, replacements (1), (2), and (3) above remove invariance from the list of requirements for the study of human choice behavior framed with reference to wise actions.

Am I too ambitious in expecting this pursuit to produce a primary framework for the study of actual human behavior (including wise action)? Well, of course, time will tell…. But maybe in this case “faster is better”? In the interest of wise academic practice: Can anyone help me get wiser? Can you give me a good (or ‘good enough,’ because we are all boundedly rational) reason for stopping this imaginative inquiry?

Photo from Flickr Creative Commons.

Responding Phronetically to Organisational Savantism

wattawa — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 17:04:18 GMT

The recently concluded Pittsburgh Summit at which world leaders called for better global governance over financial trading and the preceding UN climate summit at which Ban Ki-moon warned that failure to agree on fighting global warming would be morally inexcusable might be seen optimistically as the world finally coming together to solve global problems. More realistically, however, Goldman Sach's chief financial officer stated recently that their “model really never changed, we’ve said very consistently that our business model remained the same”. As well, we know as world leaders talk 20% of Bangladesh’s land mass that is a metre or less above sea level with about 20 million human inhabitants is slowly disappearing or becoming uninhabitable.

Globally we seem to retain an unfathomable capacity for selfishness, denial, and greed. But this is simply a macrocosmic outcome of microcosmic decisions in our daily lives. Here, we consider only the microcosm of organizations.

Like these grim global issues, an abundance of knowledge in organisations has led many to savant-like rather than sagacious behaviour. In other words, knowing more and having ‘better’ knowledge is insufficient for individual or collective wisdom (Rooney, McKenna, & Liesch, 2010). Because of our experience as business school academics where we encountered not just naïve models of knowledge, but also heroic leadership models, management fads, and isomorphism, we began our search for a useful notion of wisdom. Pleasingly, we encountered many others who were similarly motivated to search. Our search was essentially in two parts: locating a western philosophical tradition (there are, of course, outstanding “eastern” models that we later dealt with) and then looking at the psychology of wisdom. We separately distilled principles of “ancient” wisdom and principles of contemporary psychological wisdom. Wisdom psychology broadly divides into two major strands: Sternberg’s Balance Approach and the Berlin School . Central to Sternberg’s Balance Theory of Wisdom (Sternberg, 1998) is values. Although his theory has a cognitive element, wisdom involves applying intelligence, creativity, and knowledge to the common good. The Berlin School takes a more cognitive approach defining wisdom as “expert knowledge in the fundamental pragmatics of life that permits exceptional insight, judgment, and advice about complex and uncertain matters” (Pasupathi, Staudinger, & Baltes, 2001, p. 351). Other theorists such as Csikszentmihalyi have moved these studies to intersect with such areas as positive psychology (e.g. Barbara Fredrickson). The strong alignment of philosophical and psychological sets of principles gives us considerable optimism about the validity of our wisdom principles.
Briefly, our five wisdom principles are:

•   Wisdom is based on reason and careful observation. They establish ‘facts’ and their logical deductions incorporate salience and truth-value of propositions.

•   Wise people appropriately allow for non-rational and subjective elements when making decisions. They acknowledge their senses and gut instinct; they respect and draw on tradition. They accept contingency and look to the long-term.

•   Wisdom is directed to humane and virtuous outcomes.

•   Wise people are practical.

•   Wisdom is articulate, aesthetic, and intrinsically rewarding.

However, when it came to analysing wisdom in contemporary organisations, we found 18th century philosopher, Vico, and the ancient Greek philosophers provided the most useful concepts. Of the five intellectual types that Vico identifies, two seemed to describe much contemporary management. The savant moves “in a straight line from general to particular truths” in order to “burst through the tortuous curves of life”; sometimes successful, they more often fail. The astute ignoramus knows how to succeed in worldly affairs, but lacks phronesis.

The ancient Greek notions of episteme, technē, Sophia, phronesis, and aesthetics provide the foundations for wise organisational practice. Let us take as given that good organisations dynamically adapt to (often rapidly) changing circumstances, and that they have communities of practice that reflectively learn through praxis and structuration. But adopting Jennifer Rowley and Paul Gibbs’ simple definition of wise organisations as “the ability to make right judgements”, then we need to incorporate a teleology, ethics, and sophia, collectively understood as phronesis.

The teleology is provided by the Hellenistic notion of eudaimonia, the good life, a state of happiness provided not only by physical comfort but also by psychological balance (Nussbaum, 1994, p. 82). Essential to the eudaimonic existence is that “virtue is expressed not merely in fine action but in fine emotions as well” (Sherman, 1997, p. 24). Thus ethical virtue (although Aristotle spoke also of intellectual virtues) is intrinsic to the eudaimonic existence. Although such wisdom requires reflection, organisations need to get on with the day-to-day jobs by a degree of “mindlessness”. In other words, the technē requires a degree of instrumental rationality (Flyvbjerg, 2004, p. 287). Underlying this rationality is the episteme, which, from a discourse point of view, means the underlying tacit and explicit knowledge upon which the surface processes, practices, and relationships are based. To continually tinker with this episteme produces unnecessary uncertainty and anxiety for organizational members, clients, and stakeholders. However, a wise leader, we argue, must have ontological acuity: the capacity to step out of the rationality of daily practice and collective isomorphism to question the knowledge and rationality underlying normal practice (McKenna & Rooney, 2008). This capacity most closely matches the notion of sophia.

Two other elements of organizational wisdom complete the picture. Wise people must have an aesthetic disposition. We use this term broadly to encompass what is currently understood as emotional intelligence, a capacity to understand and respect the role of emotion and intuition in forming judgments rather than eschewing it as inappropriately irrational. It also encompasses a capacity to articulate understandings and judgments to others, as Aristotle outlined in The Rhetoric. Finally because organizational wisdom works best as distributed wisdom, we need to apprehend the sociology of wise institutions by considering culture, communication, social networks, power and agency.

As we emerge from the strictures of neo-liberalism, perhaps there is reason to hope that we will recognize our “social interdependency” as the Hellenistic philosophers did (Rawls, 1971, p. 424). As Aristotle said in his Nicomachean Ethics (1097b10):

By self-sufficient we mean not what is sufficient for oneself alone living a solitary life, but something that includes parents, wife and children, friends and fellow citizens in general; for man is by nature a social being.

by Bernard McKenna & David Rooney, University of Queensland Business School

References

Flyvbjerg, B. (2004). Phronetic planning research: Theoretical and methodological reflections. Planning Theory & Practice, 5(3), 283-306.

McKenna, B., & Rooney, D. (2008). Wise Leadership and the Capacity for Ontological Acuity. Management Communication Quarterly, 21(4), 537-546.

Nussbaum, M. (1994). The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Pasupathi, M., Staudinger, U. M., & Baltes, P. B. (2001). Seeds of wisdom: Adolescents' knowledge and judgement about difficult life problems. Developmental Psychology, 37, 351-361.

Rawls, J. (1971). A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press
Rooney, D., McKenna, B., & Liesch, P. (2010). Wisdom and management in the knowledge economy. London: Routledge.

Sherman, N. (1997). Making a necessity of virtue: Aristotle and Kant on virtue. Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press.

Sternberg, R. J. (1998). A Balance Theory of Wisdom. Review of General Psychology, 2(4), 347-365.

Photo from Flickr Creative Commons.

Individual wisdom, group wisdom, textual wisdom – different perspectives on the same thing??

wattawa — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 04:19:38 GMT

When I was asked to write about the topic of “wisdom as a property of individuals vs. groups” it took me quite some time to get my unordered thoughts on this topic into some structure. I found out that I’d rather write about wisdom as a property of individuals vs. “bodies of knowledge”, so I tried to do both. Maybe these thoughts can trigger a discussion that spans different fields and perspectives?

The wisdom of individuals has naturally been the focus of most psychological wisdom research: How can individual levels of wisdom be measured, which other constructs is it related to, how does it develop, who is perceived as wise and why, and so on. Being a psychologist, I find these questions really quite interesting and I think some useful findings have emerged from this research over the last 30 years – for example, that most people have a relatively clear idea of what wisdom is, and that there is much agreement but also some meaningful differences in what both laypeople and wisdom researchers consider its essential components.

The issue of “group wisdom,” however, is quite new to wisdom research. It seems obvious, and has been shown, that the collective knowledge of the members of a group is likely to be broader and deeper than the individual knowledge of any group member. I have this experience almost every week when I use group discussions as starting points for my undergraduate lectures: when I later tell my students what psychologists have thought about the topic, it is often with a little embarrassment because more or less everything has been already said in the group discussion. But does the statistical fact that “many know more than one” guarantee that groups are really wiser than individuals – or could it be that knowledge is a necessary but not sufficient ingredient of wisdom?

What worries me about the notion of group wisdom is that groups can be so terribly wrong. Living in the country where Adolf Hitler was born and in a province notorious for its adoration of fascist politicians, the “wisdom of groups” has a scary connotation to me. We all know how good groups of humans (and other animals) are at treating out-group members in bad to evil ways, and how good some group leaders are at making groups do such things. Thus, while a lot of people may have a lot of collective knowledge, knowledge is not all that it takes to be wise. It is remarkable that people nominating wise persons often come up with names who stand just for the opposite of “group instincts:” for non-violence and peaceful conflict solution. For example, in a study by Paulhus, Wehr, Harms, & Strausser’s (2002) the “top four” wise individuals listed by undergraduates were (1) Mahatma Gandhi, (2) Confucius, (3) Jesus Christ, and (4) Reverend Martin Luther King. Thus, there may be wise ways of organizing groups, wise values that a group can follow, and so on. But (just as in individuals), knowledge is not sufficient for wisdom. The way knowledge and actions are organized is crucial.

There is another issue that seems related – it was nicely discussed by Michael Sargent and Valerie Tiberius at our Chicago meeting in June: is it more useful to study wisdom as a characteristic of individuals or a characteristic of “products” – something that can, for example, be found in a text, a legal corpus, a presidential decision, or the organizational system of a corporation? Thus, wisdom can be identified independent of persons (obviously, it has been created by persons, but that’s not the focus). I find it interesting to think about commonalities and differences between these different approaches: What do a wise individual, wise group leadership, a wise decision, and a wise text have in common?

Balance might be one candidate. A wise decision, for example, is probably always complex (simple decisions don’t need that much wisdom), that is, it is a “relatively optimal” decision in a situation that involves many complicated, contradictory, uncertain, interrelated aspects. The wise decision integrates them in a compromise that is acceptable to as many of the parties involved as possible. A wise individual may be good at making wise decisions because she is cognitively able to handle such complexity and motivated to arrive at a solution that optimizes the “common good” rather than some individual good (see Sternberg’s “balance theory of wisdom,” 1998). Balance also fits with the idea that groups see more different aspects than individuals, but that seeing them is not quite enough.

Balance also means integration of affect and cognition through reflection (Ardelt, 2000): wisdom is not purely rational. It entails awareness of the importance of people’s emotions, but also knowledge that strong affect is not always helpful for solving problems. Wise individuals are perceptive to their own and others’ feelings, but also able to take a broader perspective. Wise group leaders are aware of the group’s emotions, but also able to control them for the purpose of a greater good. The same may be true for wise decisions: they come from an awareness of the complex emotions involved in difficult problems – be they political, moral, jurisdictional, religious, or whatever – as well as awareness that a good solution cannot be based on logic alone.

Thus, there may be some interesting commonalities between the different “carriers” of wisdom. Certainly there are important differences too, for example, in the way these different types of wisdom develop. The projects in our group span the whole spectrum from individual wisdom to wisdom in texts. I think this is a great opportunity: we may learn a lot about wisdom by analyzing commonalities and differences between our different perspectives.

-Judith Glück, Professor of Psychology at Alpen-Adria-University, Austria

References

Ardelt, M. (2000). Intellectual versus wisdom-related knowledge: The case for a different kind of learning in the later years of life. Educational Gerontology, 26, 771-789.

Paulhus, D. L., Wehr, P., Harms, P. D., & Strausser, D. I. (2002). Use of exemplar surveys to reveal implicit types of intelligence. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 28, 1051-1062.

Sternberg, R. J. (1998). A balance theory of wisdom. Review of General Psychology, 2, 347-365.

What can animal models tell us, if anything, about human wisdom?

wattawa — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 18:28:26 GMT

Animal models are powerful and profitable tools for understanding both basic biological processes (such as transcription and translation) as well as much more complex ones, such as cancer origination and progression, organ development, and immune processes. This truth underlies the use of rodents and primates for trials of promising medical advances, including pharmaceuticals and various dietary and exercise regimens. Similarly, species that are much more distantly related to humans have proven to be the most powerful genetic models for illuminating a wide range of biological processes and, equally importantly, for demonstrating how processes at the more simple end of the spectrum can be combined and tuned to produce the complex.

A nice example of this is the wealth of research on the molecular genetics of learning and memory. Genetic and biochemical manipulations of the fruit fly (or more correctly, vinegar fly), Drosophila melanogaster, have shown that there are distinct, qualitatively different short-term, medium-term, and at least two types of long-term memories (1). These types of memory are not simply different versions of the same thing, but rather, different genetic pathways and enzymatic interactions are mobilized when data are stored as different types of memory. Blocking the formation of one type of memory with drugs does not prevent the data from being stored as a different type of memory.

But is it possible to use animal models such as these to study something as elusive and ill-defined as human wisdom? This depends, in large part, on how we define wisdom. At one level, it is clear that wisdom requires biological processes, such as the ability to learn and remember. As discussed above, it is clear that animal models have something to offer at this level.

But are there elements of wisdom that are not a biological processes, and therefore not amenable to study using model organisms? One interesting possibility is that wisdom may arise as an emergent property of society – interactions among individuals may fuel the growth of wisdom in a way that is impossible for an individual in solitude. This point was made quite nicely by John Cacioppo and Valerie Tiberius, in an October 2008 post on this site. Thus, in social groups generally, whether they be human or insect, wisdom may a property of individuals that is manifested most strongly when social connections permit extension to a group larger than ourselves.

This type of wisdom brings to mind the concept of “transactive memory” (developed, I believe, by Daniel Wegner (2), and discussed by Malcolm Gladwell in his 2002 book, The Tipping Point (3)). According to this view, individuals possess their own personal knowledge, but also take advantage of the data stored in the minds of the people in their close social network. Within the social group, individuals can then specialize on particular types of knowledge and develop different proficiencies, and need only remember which members of the group possess the knowledge outside their particular areas of expertise. To me, this is highly reminiscent of the division of labor among members of a social insect colony – foragers, nurses, soldiers, queens, etc.

For human individuals, this social dimension must certainly permit the development of individual wisdom. But I would argue that organisms with much less sophisticated neural circuitry can also leverage these social connections to make wise decisions – in some cases more effectively than do humans.

A nice example of this is illustrated in the recent, high-profile study by Susan Edwards and Stephen Pratt, on the ant, Temnothorax curvispinosus, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society of London-Series B (4). To understand their study, we must first know something about human decision-making. Although humans possess a magnificent capacity for reason and thought, we also harbor some cognitive blind spots (5). One of these is evident when consumers attempt to select between two equally attractive alternatives that vary in different characteristics – for example, car A is comfortable, but ugly whereas car B is uncomfortable, but attractive. Normally, each car would have a 50% chance of being selected by the consumer (if truly equally attractive). This is considered a “rational” decision, because the frequency that each car is chosen matches its value relative to the alternative. For our purposes, we can consider this the wise choice.

However, imagine that a third option is presented: a choice (that we’ll call car C) that is horribly uncomfortable, but is the most attractive, appealing-looking car you’ve ever seen. In fact, car C is so uncomfortable that you would probably never choose it over car A or B. Nevertheless, simply having car C presented as an option can skew the perception of the original two items. In this example, including car C as an option would lead to an overvaluation of attractiveness, and you’d be more likely to choose car B over car A. This is now an “irrational”, or unwise, decision. The relative value of A versus B has not changed, but the selection probabilities have. Interestingly, this type of irrational decision-making is not limited to humans, but has also been observed in animals such as honeybees and jays, as well (6).

Now back to the study of Edwards and Pratt. Temnothorax ants typically nest in small nooks and crevices, like inside acorns or hollow twigs, or in the narrow cracks between flakes of stone. Many of these refuges are ephemeral, and this has driven the evolution of a highly effective behavioral system for colony relocation. When forced to relocate, scouts investigate nearby sites and gauge their suitability for nesting. Temnothorax particularly like nooks with small entrances and dark interiors. By presenting nests with entrances of various sizes and interiors of various darkness, researchers have been able to identify combinations that are equally attractive, but also suboptimal in one of the characters (entrance too wide or interior too bright). Now what happens when presented with the ant equivalent of car C? Edwards and Pratt show that the ants don’t fall into the unwise (or irrational) choice - the first two options are still favored at equal frequency.

So how do ants avoid making the irrational choice? Are ants smarter than people? Actually, the ants make the appropriate decision because they know less. No individual ant surveys all the choices, but instead, each scout examines one prospective nesting site, then returns to the colony to recruit other ants to investigate. If these new ants are enthusiastic about the new site, they return to the old nest to recruit more investigators. Good nesting sites continue to attract more and more ants until a threshold number of ants are convinced that this should be the colony’s new home, and all the ants move to the new location en masse. Although poorer sites may initially attract some new recruits, the number of ants going to investigate gradually dwindles as the competing superior site gains momentum.

Thus, the wise choice is made by the ants because their decision-making is distributed across many small minds, rather than in a single large brain where all the information is gathered together. In these ant societies, extraneous, distracting choices do not taint the perception of other options.

I would be interested to hear from the computer scientists about this topic. There are clear parallels to distributed networking, and I know that Daniel Wegner has done at least a little work comparing computer networks to human transactional memory (7).

-Neil Tsutsui, Assistant Professor, University of California, Berkeley

1.   Skoulakis, E. M. C. & Grammenoudi, S. Dunces and da Vincis: The genetics of learning and memory in Drosophila. Cellular and Molecular Life Sciences 63, 975-988 (2006).
2.   Wegner, D. M., Erber, R. & Raymond, P. Transactive memory in close relationships. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 61, 923-929 (1991).
3.   Gladwell, M. The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (Back Bay Books, Boston, MA, 2002).
4.   Edwards, S. C. & Pratt, S. C. Rationality in collective decision-making by ant colonies. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B - Biological Sciences (2009).
5.   Huber, J., Payne, J. W. & ***, C. Adding Asymmetrically Dominated Alternatives - Violations of Regularity and the Similarity Hypothesis. Journal of Consumer Research 9, 90-98 (1982).
6.   Shafir, S., Waite, T. A. & Smith, B. H. Context-dependent violations of rational choice in honeybees (Apis mellifera) and gray jays (Perisoreus canadensis). Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology 51, 180-187 (2002).
7.   Wegner, D. M. A computer network model of human transactive memory. Social Cognition 13, 319-339 (1995).

Photo from Flickr Creative Commons.

Lean on Me and Let It Be: Wisdom in Ordinary Language

wattawa — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 17:10:53 GMT

This is an exciting time to be working on wisdom! This website attests to the emergence of a new network of interdisciplinary academic research on wisdom, and the excitement that has attended it reminds me, in my capacity as a student of the Enlightenment, of the excitement that animated the gens de lettres of the eighteenth century.

At the same time, the academic study of wisdom has its challenges. Two particular challenges seem especially pressing. The first is the very newness of wisdom research. It’s no secret that wisdom hardly registers on the radar screens of most of today’s academic disciplines. This very fact of course is what makes it exciting to many of us. But it also has its challenges – not least of which is the question of where exactly one ought to begin!

But wisdom’s newness is only one of its challenges; no less pressing is its oldness. The neglect that wisdom has suffered in modern academic discourse is equaled in degree only by the attention and indeed preeminence it enjoyed in the philosophical and religious traditions on which our own culture is founded. In these traditions, wisdom was not only celebrated, but shared adherence to such traditions ensured that wisdom could be defined and measured by generally-accepted standards. Today of course we lack such standards (or at least general acceptance of them), with the consequence that the wisdom of the ancients necessarily strikes some as distant.

So what’s a wisdom researcher to do? Three options present themselves. First, we might try to recover the ancient meaning of wisdom by returning directly to the philosophical and religious traditions of our past and asking what aspects of such traditions can be reintegrated in academic discourse today. Alternatively, we might choose to make a break with these traditions, and seek to redefine wisdom for a pluralistic world. Each of these options has its merits and excellent work is presently being done in both veins. Still, there might yet be room for a third line of inquiry, and it’s on this third option that I want to focus in this post.

This third option is predicated on the idea that ordinary language may contain much wisdom on the subject of wisdom. Personally, I tend to agree with C. S. Lewis that language, for all is shortcomings, contains “a good deal of shared insight and experience” – an observation that led Lewis to warn that “if you begin by flouting it, it has a way of avenging itself later on.” By starting with what we know, we thus build a salutary check into our new models of wisdom. Attending to ordinary understandings of wisdom also has the advantage of absolving us, at least at the outset, from having to either reconstruct or reject the comprehensive conceptions of wisdom to which earlier traditions were dedicated.

To test this hypothesis, I’m particularly interested in exploring a specific instantiation of ordinary language treatments of wisdom: pop music. As it happens, wisdom makes appearances in several of the songs likely to be on the iPod playlists of many, and in at least two cases its treatment seems sufficiently prescient to be well worth the attention of academic inquirers.

The first is Bill Withers’ hit, “Lean On Me.” The song has always struck me and many others as remarkable for its celebration of a particular type of love – not the needy erotic love of most pop music, but a much more generous neighbor love. But the song has much to say as well about wisdom, explicitly invoked in its memorable opening:

Sometimes in our life,
We all feel pain, we all feel sorrow.
But, if we are wise,
We know that there’s always tomorrow.

There’s a lot in this first verse, even if the song’s fame rests on the chorus that follows. At least two aspects are especially striking. The first is the context of wisdom’s emergence. The true field of wisdom is suffering – quite literally the “pain” and “sorrow” that “we all feel.” This is itself worth pausing on insofar as we may be inclined to associate wisdom with tranquility and happiness. Certainly there’s an intimate relationship between the two. But it’s more complex than merely saying that wisdom is what we have when we’re happy or at rest. Here the suggestion is rather that wisdom is the indispensible resource in our navigation of the inevitable trials and tribulations that we experience as human beings. Wisdom, that is, promotes human flourishing by helping us to bridge the gap between the suffering that we all necessarily experience and the happiness that we all naturally desire.

So the song has much to say about why we need wisdom. But it also may cast some light on what wisdom is. In the face of the challenges that beset us, our reaction so often is to wonder “what should I do?” Our inclination, that is, is to define wisdom as the process of good judgment that enables us to achieve a desired practical outcome – the maximization of our utility, the resolution of a dilemma, etc. But we get a somewhat different picture in Withers’ song. The wise person is less interested here in figuring out how to solve a problem and thereby banish pain and sorrow than in knowing something else – namely that “there’s always tomorrow.” But what exactly does that mean?

In one sense, it suggests a reconsidering of the relationship of wisdom to virtue, and especially the virtue of hope, to which wisdom seems particularly closely bound. In another sense, it suggests a reconsideration of the relationship of wisdom to knowledge. A brief glance at the history of philosophy helps us see how radical a claim is being made. In the eighteenth century, the philosopher David Hume took as the departure point for his influential defense of epistemological skepticism precisely the claim that it is impossible for us to know with certainty that the sun will rise tomorrow; simply because it rose in the past is no guarantee that it will do so in the future. But this is precisely what Withers’ wise person is said to “know.” Wisdom would thus seem to stand in a deep opposition to skepticism.

At this point one might be tempted to wonder whether this isn’t a lot for Withers’ song to have to bear! But as it happens, his definition isn’t alone, even in the world of popular music. In fact, when I mentioned Withers’ song to my wise colleague Judith Glück during a coffee break at the recent wisdom network meeting, she had at the ready a second song: Paul McCartney’s “Let It Be.” Its opening is similarly well worth considering:

When I find myself in times of trouble,
Mother Mary comes to me,
Speaking words of wisdom,
“Let it be.”

Those with greater credentials as Beatles scholars (or at least those who have at hand the original liner notes – a relic from a pre-mp3 age!) will correct me if I take too many liberties in putting in quotes the verse’s three final words. But the context (as well as McCartney’s own reflections on the song’s origins) seems to indicate that these are in fact Mother Mary’s substantive wise words. And if so, we might note a few parallels with our earlier text.

First, here again the context of the emergence of wisdom is suffering, or “times of trouble” (called in the line that follows “my hour of darkness”). Wisdom, that is, becomes again a resource for helping us as we navigate our challenges rather than the instrument or manifestation of our happiness. Second, McCartney’s lyric, like Withers’, emphasizes the intimate relationship of wisdom to the virtue of hope. Among the other lessons that Mother Mary’s wise words have afforded seems to be (as we learn in the final verse) the recognition that “when the night is cloudy, there is still a light that shines on me.”

But most importantly, McCartney’s wise Mother Mary knows something, and indeed something very specific. Here again that knowledge is not the knowledge of how to navigate a particular practical dilemma through either wise choices or acute prudential judgment. So far from adeptness at navigating circumstances in the hopes of mastering their challenges, wisdom, it is suggested, lies rather in the capacity to disassociate ourselves from such circumstances. Wisdom thus lies less in what we do than in what we choose not to do – less in our capacity to manipulate a situation than in our capacity to liberate ourselves from the compulsion to master those situations we cannot change.

Taken together, McCartney and Withers remind us of what many of us knew by lesson or by instinct about wisdom before: that wise people respond to suffering with hope and to critical dilemmas with perspectives that transcend the immediate context of such dilemmas. Surely this can’t be all that wisdom is, but the very popularity of such conceptions, together with the remarkable economy of their expression, make them well worth attending to as we begin our navigation of these uncharted waters.

-Ryan Patrick Hanley, Assistant Professor of Political Science, Marquette University

Photo from Flickr Creative Commons.

How can we measure wisdom?

wattawa — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 17:24:10 GMT

We've had several questions from readers regarding the feasibility of measuring wisdom. Below, I've included a few of these questions in the hopes of eliciting the thoughts of Wisdom Research Network members.

- Joy Wattawa (Assistant Director for Outreach and Communications)

“There is much impressive work done by Paul Baltes and his associates in Berlin measuring "degrees" of wisdom (see http://www.baltes-paul.de/Wisdom.html). Many of their empirical studies have measured wisdom-related performance based on the Berlin Wisdom Paradigm (BWP). The BWP defines wisdom as an expert knowledge system concerning the fundamental pragmatics of life, i.e. knowledge and judgment about the meaning and conduct of life, and the orchestration of human development toward excellence while attending conjointly to personal and collective well-being.

While I applaud and highly commend the effort, I admit that much reading on the subject leaves my mouth still dry. Unfortunately all empirical measurements of wisdom I analyzed remain predominantly subjective, interpretative and surveyor-dependent. If the same questionnaires, which contain case-situations about pragmatics of life, are rated by different researchers, the resulting wisdom-score can differ on account of who is scoring the responses! In these studies the methodology itself of scoring seems to allow degrees of subjective judgment.

To my quantitatively-trained mind these studies still lack the objective component that is essential for a truly viable construct, one that can claim model-reliability (i.e. measuring something consistently) and internal-validity (i.e. measuring what is supposed to be measured). Personally I am working on a more quantitatively objective construct, one based on scalar data rather than subjective scores. I would love to hear from contributors to this group if some of you have come across other empirical/objective work in wisdom-related performance scoring.”

-Max Gygax

“Many people have challenged the use of GNP as a measure of societal success and some useful attempts have been made to develop a Human Development Index (HDI) and Happiness Indices (HI), or State of the Future Index (SOFI). In a recent article (Integral Leadership Review Volume VIII, No. 5 - October 2008 <http://www.integralleadershipreview.com/archives/2008-10/2008-10-toc.php>) I suggested that the world would benefit from a Wise Society Index (WSI).

But what could go into such an index? What could we try to measure? And how could it actually be measured? How can we be sure that we are really focused on what is important, rather than on just what is easy to measure?”

-Bruce Lloyd

Photo by Freddy Fam

Can Academic Blogging Advance Wisdom Research?

wattawa — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 15:48:44 GMT

Blogs are slowly but surely changing the face of academia. In a world where universities are run like businesses (intellectual property and patents are now, given traditions of disinteredness in academia, still somewhat uncomfortably the norm (1)), and scholars, especially scientists, perennially run into the problem that negative results don’t get published, blogs may offer a way to retain the university’s ideals of vigorous and open pursuit of knowledge while simultaneously launching scholars into the Internet age (2).

Blogging allows for rapid discussion between scholars worldwide on topics ranging from concepts, current events, literature, to data analysis or the sharing of tools. Not only may scholars use blogs to receive feedback from colleagues, they can also use the medium to inform a larger public about their research. Some feel that blogging may be a right step towards reforming the academic publishing industry, by allowing partial credit to be given to those first to blog an idea. More importantly, some feel that blogging might expand the focus of academic work, which is often almost exclusively concerned with publishing in academic journals (3).

The move towards blogging is timely. Studies show that researchers, in an ever-increasing number, publish and patent in teams (4). This trend is not limited to sciences like biology, chemistry, or physics, where it has been suggested that team science merely grows with the cost and scale of ‘big science.’ For example, in 1955 17.5% of publications were authored in teams, whereas in 2000 this number had jumped to 51.5%. Publications in mathematics, wherein the ‘solo genius’ stereotype remains among the strongest, show a similar trend. Moreover, these studies tend to be higher impact, that is to say, field changing (5). Among the many causal factors for this trend is the necessity for teamwork in an environment of increasing specialization. Blogs may facilitate intra and interdisciplinary communications in a world where scholars have already acknowledged the advantages of collaboration (6).

Blogging and collaboration also have the potential to create a new field of wisdom research spanning multiple disciplines by creating a community of scholars. The Wisdom Research Network website was designed as an essentially collaborative tool, allowing scholars to share ideas, data, profiles and opinions. We will actively recruit both Wisdom Network members and others to contribute to this discussion forum. I also welcome and encourage you to post responses, even if they are merely brief thoughts or comments. If you would like to post a discussion question, please email wisdomwebsite@uchicago.edu.

Given recent trends in academic blogging and team science, as well as calls for professionals to engage with the public about their research, I suspect, from a mere lay understanding, that creating a blogging community about wisdom is indeed a wise decision. But maybe that’s just hubris. I’ll leave that for you to determine.

- Joy Wattawa, Assistant Director for Interdisciplinary Outreach and Communications, Arete Initiative

If you seek guidance regarding how to write a blog entry, please see our Academic Blogging Style Guidelines, linked as a pdf at the top of this page.

References

1) For more about academy/ industry tensions see Merton’s famous theory on the “The Normative Structure of Science” in Merton, Robert King. The sociology of science: theoretical and empirical. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1973. Also, see Merton's "The Matthew Effect in Science: The Reward and Communication Systems of Science are Considered," Science, Vol. 159, No. 3810, pg. 56, 1968, which describes trends in academic publishing that tend to renforce the conclusions of those single authors already recognized. For a more modern view on these tensions and another view on how technology impacts how universities work and generate knowledge, see Kathryn Packer, Andrew Webster. “Patenting Culture in Science: Reinventing the Scientific Wheel of Credibility (1996).” Science, Technology, & Human Values, Vol. 21, No. 4, pp. 427-453.

2) “So, might blogging be subversive precisely because it makes real the very vision of intellectual life that the university has never managed to achieve?” the author states in “Attack of the career-killing blogs: when academics post online, do they risk their jobs?,” by Robert S. Boynton (2005). Slate Magazine. http://www.slate.com/id/2130466/ This gives an excellent summary of the controversy surrounding blogging in academia just as the trend was taking off.

3) “By the Blog: academics tread carefully” by Zoe Corbyn (2008), Times Higher Education. http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=403827&c=1

4) Stefan Wuchty, Benjamin F. Jones, Brian Uzzi (2007). “The Increasing Dominance of Teams in the Production of Knowledge.” Science; Vol. 316. no. 5827, pp. 1036 – 1039. Here, team is defined as two or more authors. http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/316/5827/1036

5) Ibid., Higher impact is defined here as an increased number of citations. This has been shown to correlate with research quality. For further details, see paper.

6) Many academic blogs already exist. Please follow this link to an “Academic blog portal” which allows you to search many of them by subject: http://wiki.henryfarrell.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

7) Julia Davies and Guy Merchant. “Looking from the Inside Out: Academic Blogging as New Literacy,” A New Literacies Sampler. Peter Lang, 2006.

Why we tell our stories

wattawa — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 16:53:40 GMT

Wisdom is hot. More people are studying wisdom, and from a wider variety of disciplines. The Defining Wisdom Research Network is just one example of this information explosion. The public also seems to have become enamored of the concept, leading to a spate of published (and otherwise disseminated) material aimed at identifying and documenting wisdom, particularly as held by the elders of society. What differentiates the lay media from much of the research is a focus on the individual life story as a source of wisdom.

This revival of the oral history tradition has the potential to foster a New Wisdom based on widely available sources of personal stories and anecdotes. For example, in February of 2008 our local paper, the Iowa City Press-Citizen, published a supplement to the newspaper called “Words of Wisdom: a collection of advice from our elders.” A book called The Oxford Project (2008) documents the life experiences of residents of a small Iowa town. In 1984, Peter Feldstein photographed almost all of the 693 residents of Oxford, Iowa. Twenty years later, he and colleague Stephen Bloom re-photographed and collected life stories from 100 of the same residents. Henry Alford’s book How to Live: A Search for Wisdom from Old People (2009) seeks life lessons from conversations with his own parents, as well as a few more well-known people over the age of 70. Andrew Zuckerman’s 2008 coffee-table book, entitled Wisdom: 50 Unique and Original Portraits, contains photos and interviews—in both written and audio form—with 50 famous people, including artists, musicians, and politicians, all over 65 years of age. Although this book sought input from experts in their fields, Zuckerman notes that the original title of the book—Our Icons and Their Wisdom—was changed to reflect the contributors’ discomfort with being labelled icons, and his own realization that the iconic status of the participants was not their most important asset: “People are people… It’s about sharing ideas and perspectives.” (p. 208).

Public radio programs such as This American Life (http://www.thisamericanlife.org/) and The Story (http://thestory.org/) have popularized personal perspectives from “real people” rather than pundits. StoryCorps (http://www.storycorps.org/) has documented over 50 thousand life stories since 2003, with the stated goal of creating “a kinder, more thoughtful and compassionate nation”. This value-based focus is even more explicit in This I Believe (http://thisibelieve.org/), which aims “to contribute to the improvement of society by enabling people to think about, express, and share their deepest beliefs.” All of these sources emphasize the lay person as a source of knowledge and wisdom.

Why the preoccupation with individual life stories? Why now? A number of hypotheses are possible: The impact of events from 9/11 in 2001, then Hurricane Katrina in 2005, has wrested attention from our own navels, and renewed our sense of altruism and neighbourly charity. The current financial crisis has highlighted the dangers of greed and excess, and promoted a return to restraint. Obama’s inaugural speech reinforced the “new era of responsibility”, exhorting us to “put aside childish things.” Any of these influences might have focused, or re-focused, attention on what constitutes a life well-led.

But I think the emergence of this New Wisdom is less a response to recent world events, and more an inevitable confluence of the demographics and technology of the age in which we live. As the leading edge of Baby Boomers approaches retirement age, many are dealing with the imminent or recent deaths of their own parents, and are facing the prospect of their own old age and mortality. At the same time, the status of information technology in the twenty-first century allows an ever-increasing variety of ways of documenting and disseminating information. In digital form, text, photos, audio and video materials are readily distributed through internet tools and sites. As I write this, an average of 5 to 6 thousand photos are uploaded every minute to the Flickr photo-sharing site. Wikipedia reports that 20 hours of new videos are uploaded to You-Tube every minute. Facebook boast more than 200 million active users, half of whom log on at least once a day. As individuals, we now have the motivation and we have the means to make history of our own lives, and the lives of our loved ones.

Is this just more navel-gazing, or is it a productive way of passing on wisdom? I would argue that, not only does wisdom—in any real sense of the word—reside within an individual, it is most practically and effectively passed on from individual to individual. Definitions of wisdom emphasize the contextual nature of knowledge, the ability to use judgement, and to adapt to situation-specific factors. This is why we are so attracted to life stories—they are contextualized in a way that illustrates wisdom principles better than any abstract aphorisms can do. The concrete details of others’ personal experiences encourage us to draw analogies to our own lives, facilitating the generalization of wisdom from one individual to another.

An example of the importance of personal life stories to the practice of wisdom in public life recently came to light. President Obama asserted that Sonia Sotomayor’s personal experience contributes to her compassion and understanding and is therefore “a necessary ingredient in the kind of Justice we need on the Supreme Court” (Wall Street Journal, May 27, 2009). The article, however, criticized this stance, saying that Sotomayor would be guided not by “what the Constitution says” but rather by “whatever the judge in the ‘richness’ of her experience comes to believe it should be.” But isn’t that what we mean by ‘judge’? We would be naïve to think that personal life experiences do not strongly influence all of our actions. But vicariously experienced life events can also inform us. The more rich and varied our own experiences, and the more exposure we have to the life experiences of others, the more broadly based the knowledge from which we can draw to guide our own lives.

by Jean Gordon, Associate Professor, Communication Sciences and Disorders, University of Iowa, United States

References

Alford, H. (2009). How to Live: a search for wisdom from old people (while they are still on this earth). New York, NY: Hachette Livre, Twelve.

Feldstein, P. & Bloom, S. (2008). The Oxford Project. New York, NY: Welcome Books.

Wall Street Journal, May 27, 2009. The ‘Empathy’ Nominee.

Zuckerman, A. (2008). Wisdom: 50 Unique and Original Portraits. New York, NY: Abrams, Harry N.

Photo by Andifeelfine.

A wisdom of intentional ignorance?

wattawa — Tue, 05 May 2009 14:31:47 GMT

The Defining Wisdom Project co-leader, Howard Nusbaum, recently wrote an interesting blog entry for Psychology Today, entitled “The Wisdom of Intentional Ignorance.” [Read his blog here]

This blog entry got me thinking about a possible relationship between “intentional ignorance” and “wishful thinking,” here defined as “interpreting matters as one would like them to be, as opposed to what they really are.” Is there a relationship between these two phenomena? Did you have any reactions to Howard Nusbaum’s blog entry?

These phenomena seem particularly salient for the academic community of late, for reasons beyond shrinking retirement accounts. For example, many of you recently submitted proposals for NIH Challenge Grants. I know this because many of you were too busy preparing your Challenge Grants to blog for us this month. However, according to Science (17 April 2009, Vol. 324) (http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/324/5925/318) NIH expected to receive around 10,000 proposals for only 200 available grants (only a 2% success rate for all that hard work)!

It seems that if we were all perfectly rational, we might not takes risks such as these. Given that we do (and given that this project itself would not exist had applicants not taken such a risk), in what ways do you think intentional ignorance or wishful thinking contribute to wisdom?

-Joy Wattawa, Assistant Director for Interdisciplinary Outreach and Communications, Arete Initiative

Photo by rogiro

Can science glean wisdom from disasters?

wattawa — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 15:09:02 GMT

Looking at the geographical distribution of natural disasters in the course of history, one might well wonder how earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, and forest fires can take tragic human tolls, again and again, in the very same place. Why do people return to these vulnerable sites? Why are they unable to recognize nature’s warning signs, signs that have appeared so many times in the past? One answer, from the New York Times journalist Andrew Revkin, is that modern societies have lost one of the virtues of traditional, oral cultures: the ability to listen to one’s elders and learn from past disasters. Today, Revkin hypothesizes, scientists must play the role of wise elder, discovering and maintaining records of distant tragedies and warning of future ones (1).

Revkin’s observation does more than illuminate modernity’s propensity for catastrophe. It drives to the heart of the Defining Wisdom project, since it forces us to consider the form wisdom might take in a technocratic age. What are the implications of looking to scientists as founts of wisdom? Can scientists really glean wisdom from natural disasters?

A century ago, the opinion was common among Europeans that natural disasters were antithetical to the growth of wisdom. As a prominent American geologist pointed out in an 1882 essay on hurricanes, “such conditions as they bring about are not favorable to close observation…[N]o mind can see calmly when the body is in the very hands of death (2).” Some British and German scientists, secure in their sense of superiority over the populations of Asia, South America, even southern Europe, blamed the “backwardness” of these lands on the frequency of great earthquakes there. Were Europe subject to earthquakes on the scale of those in South America, Charles Darwin imagined, it would be “bankrupt,” and “the hand of violence and rapine would remain uncontrolled (3).” His contemporary John Milne, one of the pioneers of modern seismology, concurred that England would “sink to the lowest level in the rank of civilized communities (4).” The widely read Victorian historian Henry Thomas Buckle bluntly argued that human reason could not withstand repeated natural disasters:

The mind is thus constantly thrown into a timid and anxious state; and men witnessing the most serious dangers, which they can neither avoid nor understand, become impressed with a conviction of their own inability, and of the poverty of their own resources. In exactly the same proportion, the imagination is aroused, and a belief in supernatural interference actively encouraged. Human power failing, superhuman power is called in; the mysterious and the invisible are believed to be present; and there grow up among the people those feelings of awe, and of helplessness, on which all superstition is based, and without which no superstition can exist (5).

Antiquated as these claims may seem, the question they confront remains urgent. Consider, for instance, whether Americans have gained any wisdom from the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina. According to New York Times reports, the piecemeal reconstruction of New Orleans has proceeded without acknowledging the vulnerability of patchwork flood protection to outlier storms. The rebuilding has only aggravated the city’s pre-flood geography of risk, putting low-income and African-American residents at comparatively even greater danger in the event of another extreme storm. Residents are being encouraged to consult the risk assessments for their neighborhoods on government websites, but internet access remains an obstacle for many. Even when available, the cost-benefit language of risk assessments may be difficult to assimilate to the values of family, faith, and cultural tradition that also influence a resident’s choice of home (6).

Today’s politicians and pundits may debate whether events like Hurricane Katrina or the earthquake in Sichuan were tragedies of civil engineering or of social injustice. But the real question is whether humans are capable of extracting wisdom from natural catastrophes in the first place.

Until the eighteenth century, the answer to this question seemed clear. Early modern philosophers associated wisdom with the aspiration to transcend the human limits of knowledge and approach a divine perspective that would reveal the universe’s master plan. Natural knowledge was a path to wisdom, because nature was expected to display the rationality of the creator’s design. What place could disasters find in this optimistic vision? Might disasters bear wisdom?

During the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century, many philosophers rejected the view that disasters were deviations from the usual course of nature, concluding that they were neither punishment for sinners nor reminders to the faithful. The promoters of the new sciences insisted that disasters were part of God’s original design, and that it was the task of natural philosophy to elucidate their function in the context of creation as a whole. By studying the workings of nature, scholars would discover “new testimony of the divine Wisdom” and so would “tempests, volcanoes, lightning and earthquakes, begin to lose their horror (7).” Disasters were therefore sources not only of natural knowledge but of wisdom.

According to traditional histories of ideas, a single event severed this link between disasters and wisdom. In 1755, a catastrophic earthquake struck the city of Lisbon, unleashing a tsunami and fire and killing as many as half of the city’s 230,000 inhabitants. The philosophical response to Lisbon radically altered the meaning of wisdom and its relation to natural knowledge in ways that have yet to be elucidated by historians. Kant and Rousseau famously rejected theological interpretations of the disaster in favor of strict naturalism. Rousseau blamed the victims for the location of their homes, while Kant offered (in Walter Benjamin’s estimation) the very first work of seismology. After Lisbon, it seems, natural disasters were set squarely in an objective framework of technical analysis, prediction, and control.

Yet the earlier association between disasters and wisdom did not disappear. It persists in particular in the modern view that science thrives on disaster. As the meteorologist Horace Byers once noted, reflecting on his contributions to the rise of computerized weather forecasting in mid-twentieth century America, “It is an unfortunate characteristic of meteorology, that its great forward strides depend on disasters (8).” Byers had in mind the invention of computerized weather forecasting for aviation purposes in the crucible of World War Two. But his observation applies equally well to the emergence of the first telegraphic weather service in Britain a century earlier, a direct product of the great storm of 1859, which wrecked 343 British ships (9).

In the conviction that disaster breeds good science, we can hear echoes of the providential view of disasters. In the wake of the catastrophic San Francisco earthquake of 1906, for instance, the geologist T. C. Chamberlin injected the following note of optimism:

If, for instance, it shall later be shown, as I think not improbable, that the earth is now in a general way receding from a period of special deformation into one of relative quiescence, and that catastrophic action is on the decline, it will be a contribution of no small value to the comfort of mankind. The public is now very generally depressed by needless apprehension of great impending disasters, if not a universal and final catastrophe, apprehensions derived from the narrow and pessimistic views of the past. From my point of view, which is doubtless a partial one, a contribution of supreme value to the happiness and well being of mankind is likely to grow out of rectified views…derived from the prosecution of the earth sciences (10).

Chamberlin suggested that the earthquake might lead not only to good science (if funding agencies cooperated), but also to a new dialogue between scientific experts and populations in vulnerable areas like California. Through such an exchange, the earthquake might indeed generate wisdom, in the form of liberation from unwarranted fears. Chamberlin, the son of an evangelical minister, may have hoped in this way to reconcile his chosen career with the spiritual mission of his father (11).

Today, Chamberlin is best known for his account of the greenhouse effect, the process by which atmospheric carbon dioxide raises global temperatures. This, however, was a contribution that took decades to win recognition. Perhaps what was missing in the history of global warming science was precisely the spur that Chamberlin identified in 1906: disasters. Indeed, fictional catastrophes have substituted for real ones. A study of audience response to the global warming thriller “The Day After Tomorrow” registered a significant increase in concern over carbon dioxide emissions after viewing the film (12).

Still, history shows that proponents of scientific progress are often too quick to believe that a disaster has left them wiser. Efforts to build more rational societies on the ruins of disaster have often proved to be hollow triumphs. Too often, in catastrophe’s wake, self-appointed modernizers have imposed an iron rule in the name of restoring order (13). If modern science can indeed reap wisdom from disasters, then the question is, by what means?

Here, the history of seismology is instructive. Until the turn of the twentieth century, seismology was a low-tech endeavor, relying primarily on human eyes and ears for its empirical data. Beginning in Switzerland in the 1870s, scientists organized elaborate networks of lay observers in order to mine the experiences of ordinary people when the earth shook. With the proliferation of accurate recording instruments in the early twentieth century, many earth scientists hoped to turn their discipline into a more quantitative, objective discipline, modeled on physics. A new era of geophysics began, which transformed what counted as “evidence” of the earth’s history (14). Out went data filtered by human bodies, in came the “hard” evidence of seismographs and accelerometers. The science of seismology and its practitioners moved increasingly further from the populations who had once served as its witnesses—the populations vulnerable to seismic disaster.

Today, however, geophysics is being transformed once again. New initiatives are setting out to inform populations about the seismic risks of their neighborhoods, as well as to cull information for scientific research from the wealth of experience such communities possess. One example is the Center for Hazards and Risk Research at Columbia University, which has piloted outreach programs that work with earthquake-vulnerable communities to design risk-reduction plans tailored to local economies, infrastructures, and cultures. Another is a website launched by the U. S. Geological Survey to collect data on seismic events in real time. Called “Did You Feel It?”, the site mimics the questionnaires sent out by Swiss scientists over a century ago.

Among the scientists pioneering this new wave of two-way communication between experts and laypeople is Dr. Leonardo Seeber of Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. Dr. Seeber’s career has taken him to disaster sites from California to the Himalayas (his first son was born in the field in Pakistan). Currently, Dr. Seeber is planning an ingenious project in Bangladesh that will conduct basic and applied research on the tectonics of the delta of the Brahmaputra, Ganges, and Meghna rivers, an area at risk for earthquakes and floods, among other hazards. Dr. Seeber and his colleagues will conduct their investigation in part by enlisting local students and local technologies, while at the same time training Bangladeshis to educate their own communities on seismic risk. What’s more, the researchers will produce a geological map with information on all major natural hazards in the area, and, to top it off, will turn the roughly 200 holes drilled for research purposes into wells to provide the population with clean drinking water.

The holistic vision of Dr. Seeber’s project and its sensitivity to local needs suggest a corollary to Mr. Revkin’s insights on natural disasters. For the problem today is not just that modern societies have short memories. If we turn back to the mid nineteenth century, there is no doubt that oral cultures were already disappearing. But one crucial line of communication was still very much in place: that between scientists and laypeople. The divide between expert and amateur was not yet firm, and conversations between the two were not yet hampered by specialization and technical jargon. As illustrated by the history of seismology in the past century and a half, the trend in the sciences has been toward ever higher barriers to effective dialogue between experts studying high-risk environments and the people living in them. Thus, it is only a start for scientists to appoint themselves wise elders. In the modern, post-Lisbon world, wisdom must emerge from negotiations between abstract, universal, technical knowledge and the values and experiences of particular communities. True wisdom will emerge only as scientists once again turn to those who live with natural hazards and ask, “Did you feel it?”

by Deborah Coen, Assistant Professor of History, Barnard College

References

1. “On Elephants Memories, Human Forgetfulness, and Disaster,” http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/08/12/on-elephants-memories-human-forgetfulness-and-disaster/?scp=2&sq=wisdom%20disaster&st=cse
2. N. S. Shaler, quoted in Sheila Hones, “Distant Disasters, Local Fears,” in Steven Biel, ed., American Disasters (New York: NYU Press, 2001), pp. 170-196, on 193.
3. Darwin, Voyage of the Beagle, chapter 14, http://www.literature.org/authors/darwin-charles/the-voyage-of-the-beagle/chapter-14.html.
4. John Milne, “Earthquake Effects, Emotional and Moral,” Transactions of the Seismological Society of Japan 9 (1886): 91-111, on p. 111.
5. Henry Thomas Buckle, History of Civilization in England, vol 1 (New York: Appleton, 1886), p. 87.
6. “A Billion Dollars Later, New Orleans Still at Risk,” http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/17/us/nationalspecial/17protect.html?scp=9&sq=katrina%20engineering%20rebuilding&st=cse
7. Matthew Mulcahy, Hurricanes and Society in the British Greater Caribbean, 1624-1783 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), quoted on p. 58.
8. Quoted in Kristine C. Harper, Weather By the Numbers: The Genesis of Modern Meteorology (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008), p. 7.
9. Katharine Anderson, Predicting the Weather: Victorians and the Science of Meteorology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 110.
10. Chamberlin, Letter to George Darwin, June 30, 1906, in Science in America: A Documentary History 1900-1939, ed. Nathan Reingold and Ida H. Reingold (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 66; quoted in part in Naomi Oreskes, The Rejection of Continental Drift: Theory and Method in American Earth Sciences (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 132.
11. Oreskes, Rejection of Continental Drift, p. 340, footnote 53.
12. Anthony Leiserowitz, “Before and after the day after tomorrow: A U.S. study of climate change risk perception,” Environment 46 (2004): 22.
13. The growing field of disaster studies provides many historical examples of such hubris; see e.g. Steven Biel, ed., American Disasters (New York: NYU Press, 2001); Alessa Johns, Dreadful Visitations (New York: NYU Press, 1999). There is a large anthropological literature critical of technocratic responses to disaster; see e.g. Susanna Hoffman and Anthony Oliver-Smith, eds., Catastrophe and Culture: The Anthropology of Disaster (Santa Fe: School of American Research, 2002).
14. For overviews see Benjamin F. Howell, Jr., An Introduction to Seismological Research: History and Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), Oreskes, Rejection of Continental Drift.