Wisdom: Assessment, development and correlates

The study explored a conceptual model of wisdom in a sample of young, middle-aged, and older adults. A newly designed measure objectively assessed wisdom-related cognitive ability according to five ideal criteria of wisdom: factual knowledge about people and lifespan development, procedural knowledge about dealing with important but uncertain life matters, and general cognitive styles reflecting life-span contextualism, relativism, and the management of uncertainty. Wisdom was also subjectively assessed with self-ratings of wisdom characteristics highlighted by existing research about social judgment and lay theories of wisdom. Friends also rated the same wisdom characteristics and the quality of subjects' advice-giving. Multiple measures of wisdom's hypothetical antecedent correlates were also administered to investigate their relationships with objective and subjectively-assessed wisdom.; Correlations among the five objective wisdom criteria suggested that they formed distinct but overlapping dimensions of wisdom. However, subjective and objective assessments were not strongly related. Subjective self-ratings of wisdom were correlated with others' ratings, and both types of other's ratings were highly correlated.; Investigation of wisdom development showed that age and objective wisdom were positively correlated, but middle-aged adults tended to score highest in procedural knowledge. On average, objective wisdom performance remained stable with age for subjects with lower levels of education, but rose for those with higher levels. Subjective ratings did not vary systematically with developmental factors.; Antecedent correlates measures that reflected desirable qualities from the domains of traditional cognitive abilities, social/practical intelligence, and personality tended to be positively correlated with both objective and subjective assessments of wisdom.; Predictions of wisdom revealed that in general, personality was more related to subjective wisdom ratings and intellectual abilities more to cognitive performance. After considering its shared variance with social/practical intelligence, traditional cognitive abilities did not contribute to objective performance. Rather, social and practical intelligence were most predictive of objective wisdom. Personality and life experiences predicted both objective and subjective wisdom.; Results suggest that standard objective assessments of wisdom hold promise for research, that both social/practical abilities and personality are important for wisdom, and that people's perceptions of life experiences may impact wisdom development.