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.
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