Study On Explicit Theory Of Wisdom: Assessing The Chinese Adults' Competence Of Life-Planning

Berlin wisdom paradigm is one of the outstanding explicit theories of wisdom in the international field of psychology, in which wisdom is conceived as expert-level performance in the fundamental pragmatics of life. Five criteria are used to assess wisdom-related knowledge: (a) rich factual knowledge about the fundamental pragmatics of life; (b) rich procedural knowledge about dealing with the fundamental life matters; (c) life-span contextualism: understanding of life contexts and their developmental relations; (d) value-relativism: knowledge about the differences in values and life goals; and (e) uncertainty: knowledge about the relative uncertainty of life and its management.This study, following the framework and method of Berlin wisdom paradigm, adopts life-planning as an avenue to access wisdom-related performance and aims at examining the contribution of age to individual differences in wisdom-related performance. The article also intends to find out the applicability of Berlin wisdom paradigm in Chinese culture and the difference between the results of this study and those of the western research.71 adult subjects, ranging in age from 20 to 82 years and forming 3 age groups , were asked to think about 2 fictitious life-planning problems, one of whose key characters was a youth and the other was a senior. Verbal protocols were scored on 5 wisdom-related criteria by 3 qualified raters, who used a 7-point Likert-type scale. In such scale, 1 represented poor response, 4 represented average, and 7 represented top response. To obtain the consistency, each rater was supposed to read the Manual of the assessment of wisdom-related knowledge (Chinese edition), another core part of this study. Two major findings were achieved:First, it was found that the Berlin wisdom paradigm's reliability and validity were both satisfactory in China. There were three reasons: (a) the Cronbach's alpha coefficient for raters on the 5 criteria ranged from 0.83 to 0.91, which indicated that all the raters shared approximately the consistent rating procedure; (b) in the multivariate generalizability theory (MGT), the paradigm got the composite generalizability coefficient of 0.784, which showed the whole measure of wisdom, relative to each of the 5 criteria, was reliable; (c) the Pearson's correlation coefficients between the 5 wisdom-related criteria and the 3 positive indicators of psychological well-being (PWB) were mostly significant, which indicated that the conception of wisdom did test the knowledge and skills about the real life just like the PWB.Secondly, there was no negative age-related development in the function of wisdom, that is, on solving the real life problems, old adults performed as well as the young and middle-aged did. The reason is that multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) showed that the main effect of age was not significant.