Abstract: Interest in wisdom in the cognitive sciences, psychology, and education has been paralleled by conceptual confusions about its nature and assessment. To clarify these issues and promote consensus in the field, wisdom researchers met in Toronto in July of 2019, resolving disputes through discussion. Guided by a survey of scientists who study wisdom-related constructs, we established a common wisdom model, observing that empirical approaches to wisdom converge on the morally-grounded application of metacognition to reasoning and problem-solving. After outlining the function of relevant metacognitive and moral processes, we critically evaluate existing empirical approaches to measurement and offer recommendations for best practices. In the subsequent sections, we use the common wisdom model to selectively review evidence about the role of individual differences for development and manifestation of wisdom, approaches to wisdom development and training, as well as cultural, subcultural, and social-contextual differences. We conclude by discussing wisdom’s conceptual overlap with a host of other constructs and outline unresolved conceptual and methodological challenges.
Character
strengths as wisdom in disguise?
The
last several decades have not only seen the emergence of the
psychometric base to the wisdom construct, but also a proliferation
of potentially related constructs. Psychological scientists so far
have not considered the conceptual and psychometric relationship of
such constructs to wisdom. Below we provide two examples. This list
is not exhaustive and questions below may be applied broadly.
Intellectual
humility.
Several constructs have recently emerged under the umbrella rubric of
character strengths and virtues (e.g.,
Bleidorn & Denissen, 2015; Fleeson, Furr, Jayawickreme, Meindl, &
Helzer, 2014; Peterson & Seligman, 2004) ,
which include a range of characteristics such as courage, gratitude
(e.g., DeSteno, Li, Dickens, & Lerner, 2014; McCullough,
Kilpatrick, Emmons, & Larson, 2001) , compassion (Goetz,
Keltner, & Simon-Thomas, 2010) and forgiveness (McCullough,
2000) . Some
of these constructs have their roots in the virtue theory and
Christian theology, and have become popular within the positive
psychology movement (Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2014) . One
character strength that has received a great deal of attention
concerns (intellectual) humility (e.g., Leary et al., 2017; Stellar
et al., 2018; Van Tongeren, Davis, Hook, & Witvliet, 2019) ,
defined as the “ability
to accurately acknowledge one’s limitations and abilities and (b)
an interpersonal stance that is other-oriented rather than
self-focused” (Van Tongeren et al., 2019) . Intellectual humility
was the focus of Socrates' definition of wisdom and the overlap of
this conceptual definition with the common wisdom model is striking,
raising the question about the distinctiveness of humility from
wisdom, and the discriminant validity of the extant measures. Indeed,
several of the most common measures aiming to capture the common
wisdom model (Table 1) include intellectual humility as a central
facet. Moreover, features of humility and wisdom are listed among the
28 measurable character strengths (Peterson & Seligman, 2004) .
Undoubtedly, intellectual humility is an important concept in a time
of ever increasing political polarization (Haidt & Lukianoff,
2018; Leary et al., 2017) . The question that remains open concerns
its uniqueness beyond the PMC components it shares with the common
wisdom model advanced in the present target article. If it is just a
facet of the same broader construct, researchers studying humility
and wisdom may benefit from insights from respective fields,
including concerns with measurement levels and usability of the
self-report scales (see Section 3). After all, most humility
instruments so far appear to involve abstract self-ratings, even
though the process
they arguably aim to capture concern is meta-cognitive and thereby is
not easily amendable to abstract self-beliefs (Brienza et al.,
2018; Grossmann, Dorfman, et al., 2020) . Abstract self-beliefs may
be self-deceiving or used for purposes of impression management
(Dunning, Heath, & Suls, 2004; Kihlstrom, Eich, Sandbrand, &
Tobias, 2000; T. D. Wilson & Bar-Anan, 2008) , raising questions
whether a person claiming that they are “much more humble than you
would understand” accurately expresses their humility.
Open-mindedness.
A related characteristic that has experienced a resurgence in
scientific interest concerns open-mindedness. The construct itself is
not new and can be traced to theories by Carl Rogers and others
(e.g., Rogers, 1954) . Indeed, the initial intent of the openness
factor of the OCEAN model of personality has included open-mindedness
(for review, John, Naumann, & Soto, 2008 , esp. Table 4.2).
However, whereas openness/open-mindedness in personality research has
been conceptually defined as a description of “the breadth, depth,
originality, and complexity of an individual’s mental and
experiential life” (John et al., 2008) , there appears to be no
unified definition of open-mindedness neither as a character strength
nor as a thinking disposition. Some scholars define and proceed to
measure it as intellectual flexibility and openness to diverse
viewpoints in the process of making a decision (Fujita, Gollwitzer,
& Oettingen, 2007; Price, Ottati, Wilson, & Kim, 2015) .
Others define it almost identically to the definition of humility
above, as “an intellectual quality displayed by someone who
recognizes that her belief could be wrong, so her mind is subject to
change” (Spiegel, 2012) . And yet others define open-minded
thinking as “the
disposition to weigh new evidence against a favored belief heavily
(or lightly), the disposition to spend a great deal of time (or very
little) on a problem before giving up, or the disposition to weigh
heavily the opinions of others in forming one's own”
(Baron, 1985 , p. 15; also see Stanovich & West, 1997). The
conceptual confusion concerning open-mindedness is particularly
evident in the puzzling observations that open-minded thinking
appears to be positively
related to political
polarization about
climate change (Kahan & Corbin, 2016) : If the definition of
open-mindedness involves openness to diverse viewpoints and a
potential of one being wrong, one ought to expect less
polarization
among more open-minded individuals! Similar to the concept of
humility, this conceptual confusion raises questions about the
meaning of the term, as well as the overlap with the definition of
wisdom as a morally-grounded PMC. Researchers on open-mindedness may
benefit from the present discussion of the common wisdom model, which
may provide a roadmap for conceptual and methodological clarification
of the open-mindedness construct, as well.
Overall,
bodies of research on character strength and thinking dispositions
have not sufficiently clarified the relationship to psychological
characteristics of wisdom. Is wisdom one of many virtues linked to
creativity, open-mindedness, perspective, and innovation, and
distinct from humility, prudence, or justice (Peterson &
Seligman, 2004) ? Both the common wisdom model advanced here and the
relevant psychometric evidence are inconsistent with this
perspective: The common wisdom model involves psychological
characteristics of humility, prudence, as well as moral aspirations
concerning justice and fairness. An alternative possibility advanced
in Aristotelian and Thomistic virtue ethics is that wisdom (or
prudence) represents a cardinal meta-virtue allowing one to discern
which actions to pursue in concrete circumstances one may be
experiencing (e.g., Darnell et al., 2019; Schwartz & Sharpe,
2006) . In relationship to thinking dispositions or character
strengths, wisdom may be represented as a tool allowing one to figure
out which of the character traits are more relevant in a given
situation. This perspective is consistent with the common wisdom
framework advanced here, with PMC oriented towards discerning the fit
between one’s dispositions, one’s goals, and the features of a
given situation. However, this “cardinal virtue” perspective
requires measurement of the fit between one’s tendencies and the
situational demands across multiple diagnostic situations, to
estimate whether PMC indeed allows one to flexibly switch between
different behaviors to optimally fit the context of a new situation.
No psychometric instruments for the assessment of character strengths
(e.g., Fleeson, Furr, Jayawickreme, Meindl, & Helzer, 2014) ,
thinking dispositions (e.g., Baron, 2019; Perkins, Jay, &
Tishman, 1993; Stanovich & West, 2002) or wisdom (Staudinger &
Glück, 2011) have so far even attempted to assess relevant
characteristics within such “strategy-situation fit” framework.
Toward
a psychological and cognitive science of wisdom
Beyond
individual differences in character strengths and thinking
dispositions, the common wisdom model as morally-grounded PMC also
has implications for research on consciousness and artificial
intelligence. We review possible connections and a range of
unanswered questions below.
Consciousness.
Within the body of research on consciousness, some researchers have
suggested three different levels of awareness (e.g., Pinard, 1992;
Schooler, 2002), including unconscious processes, basic conscious
processes, and meta-conscious processes. At the implicit or enacted
level of consciousness, experience is embedded in the actions one is
experiencing. At the explicit level of consciousness, the person
engages in conscious processing of the phenomena. At the third,
meta-conscious level, the person deliberately and consciously takes
charge of their cognitive functioning (Damasio, 1999; Pinard, 1992;
Proust, 2013; Winkielman & Schooler, 2011) -- i.e., one becomes
aware of the content of one’s conscious processes in ways that
become increasingly transparent. The concept of meta-consciousness
shares a great deal in common with the meta-cognitive components
central to the empirical conceptualizations of wisdom (see Figure 1).
Both require a perspectival appreciation of one’s conscious
experience (e.g., experience of the inadequacy of one’s
explanations of a given concept). Moreover, theoretical and empirical
work on meta-consciousness suggests that the processes triggering
meta-consciousness (Winkielman & Schooler, 2011) may be
relevant for boosting wisdom as well. At the same time, the lack of
moral grounding for the concept of meta-consciousness, compared to
its centrality to the common wisdom model, raises the questions about
the limits of the conceptual overlap. Is meta-consciousness a
necessary, but not sufficient aspect of wisdom? If meta-consciousness
is necessary for wisdom, can wisdom ever become habitual or
automatic? Are the individuals prone to mind-wandering more or less
likely to think wisely? Answers to these questions can help better
understand the concept of wisdom from a cognitive science
perspective, including the role of implicit, automatic, and
physiological processes.
Artificial
intelligence.
Artificial intelligence (AI) research typically aims to develop
“rational,” intelligent agents, a quality attributed to devices
that adaptively react to the environment and take actions that
maximize their chances of successfully achieving their goals
(Russell & Norvig, 2016) . Notably, AI is often attributed to
those qualities that machine devices have not yet mastered – an
observation often described as the Tesler’s Theorem (Hofstadter,
1980 , p. 601) or the AI effect (McCorduck, 2004) . Given the
steady AI advances in the domains of speech comprehension, language
translations, and human-superior performance on strategic games such
as chess or Go, a question arises: Will AI at some point be able to
acquire wisdom? The development of “wise” AI systems is of
special relevance in the time of ethical debates concerning the use
of AI and machine-learning approaches to human-machine interactions,
autonomous cars, political advertising, and criminal court decisions.
For some time, AI researchers have recognized the hierarchy of Data,
Information, Knowledge, and Wisdom (DIKW), in which data represent
measurements or symbols, information is the application of data to
answer questions, knowledge depends on the context of question and
answer, and wisdom depends on values. Indeed, there is a growing
recognition that values need to be incorporated into the development
of AI (Conn, 2017) . On the surface, advances in AI-based knowledge
representation, expert systems, and planning suggest that some
aspects of human wisdom may be approximated via the AI. At the same
time, the ideal of a goal-oriented, rational agent central to the AI
research (Russell & Norvig, 2016) can be idiosyncratic to the
common characteristics of a wise person: Under many circumstances, a
wise person may choose a socially conscious, reasonable
option, rather than preference-maximizing rational
option (Rawls, 1971; Toulmin, 2001) . This characterization of a
wise person is not idiosyncratic, as it is shared among laypeople
across a range of contemporary societies (Grossmann, Eibach, et
al., 2020) . Whether AI researchers can go beyond the maxim of
goal-oriented optimization and to simulate psychological
characteristics of wisdom in the context of ill-defined problems
remains an open question. How will AI be able to integrate the influx
of multi-model streams of information with moral aspirations as
suggested by Asimov’s zeroth law or robotics (1986) ? Without
doubt, “wise” AI requires discerning where, when, and to what
degree to apply different rules for processing information, but it
also requires optimization towards resolution of certain trade-offs
(e.g., trade-offs between general and context-specific strategies).
Perhaps a first step in testing the viability of a “wise” AI will
be contingent on the development of systems capable to effectively
simulate PMC common to psychological wisdom in the context of
complex, social issues.
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