Wisdom
Chapter 3 - Experiential Growth Method®
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Welcome to the Wisdom page
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| Reality also has its merits. “Jung-gyeon” is a Buddhist term that means seeing through the superficial illusion of the material world and seeing things as they are. |
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Thinking about the concept
A visual thesaurus search is always an excellent starting point to discuss a concept definition:
| WISDOM |
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| https://www.freethesaurus.com/wisdom |
| PRUDENCE |
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| https://www.freethesaurus.com/prudence |
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Science based model on how to act wisely
Wise behaviour tends to
- Resolve long-term issues.
- Provide support or contribute to the greater good.
- Do the right thing.
How does wisdom help us achieve the above goals?
- Gain an objective understanding of the situation. The first thing wise individuals do when faced with a new challenge is to speak with many people and collect information about the facts of the problem and its emotional and social aspects. More importantly, they remain calm, respectful, and sympathetic when speaking with others.
- Discover solutions or ways of reaching solutions that maximize common interests. Wise individuals try to balance everyone's concerns. If they have a stake in the outcome, they take a step back to identify their biases and reduce the likelihood of giving self-serving advice.
- Suggest or implement the best solution. Wise individuals do not usually tell people what to do, but they use their skills and experience to offer guidance and support. For instance, they encourage in situations where finding the best solution necessitates trying out different paths and thus requires patience and hope.
We provide a science-based model of wisdom leading towards:
- Wisdom-related knowledge: Knowing life and oneself (e.g., one's needs, strengths, weaknesses, biases). This knowledge is not always conscious but may involve practical intelligence.
- Metacognitive abilities: One, being aware and able to consider different views, interests, values, and goals open-mindedly. Two, being humble. This humility comes from the awareness of the limits of what we can know about life and our power to control or predict it.
- Self-reflection: The capacity to reflect on our thoughts, feelings, and behaviours. And to learn from mistakes, to identify biases, preferences, and blind spots, so that biases do not influence our judgment.
| Source |
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| A Science-Based Guide to How to Act Wisely - Psychology Today - Arash Emamzadeh - 2022 |
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Deep dive
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Wisdom and social judgement
| Wisdom is the hallmark of social judgment, but how people across cultures recognize wisdom remains unclear—distinct philosophical traditions suggest different views of wisdom’s cardinal features. We explore perception of wise minds across 16 socio-economically and culturally diverse convenience samples from 12 countries. Participants assessed wisdom exemplars, non-exemplars, and themselves on 19 socio-cognitive characteristics, subsequently rating targets’ wisdom, knowledge, and understanding. Analyses reveal two positively related dimensions—Reflective Orientation and Socio-Emotional Awareness. These dimensions are consistent across the studied cultural regions and interact when informing wisdom ratings: wisest targets—as perceived by participants—score high on both dimensions, whereas the least wise are not reflective but moderately socio-emotional. Additionally, individuals view themselves as less reflective but more socio-emotionally aware than most wisdom exemplars. Our findings expand folk psychology and social judgment research beyond the Global North, showing how individuals perceive desirable cognitive and socio-emotional qualities, and contribute to an understanding of mind perception. (1) |
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| (1) | Dimensions of wisdom perception across twelve countries on five continents - I. Grossmann - Nature communications - 2023 |
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Wisdom from experience
Understanding how wisdom, resiliency and mastery work together to improve a person’s subjective well-being later in life is important given common challenges of aging.
The study found that wisdom in old age “tends to enhance resilience and a sense of mastery and to reduce perceptions of stress directly and indirectly through greater resilience and mastery.”
Resiliencyis defined as older adults’ perceived ability to bounce back after adversity and their sense of mastery or control over their environment, life and future.
Not everyone gets wiser as they get older, A person has to be interested in the deeper meaning of life, open to perceiving things from different perspectives and have an intellectual humility about the fact that there is so much more to know. The really important part is learning from experiences and not everybody is learning from their experiences.
This suggests that coping skills, focusing on silver linings during stressful events while trying to learn from the experience, and feeling in control of one’s life might be possible pathways from wisdom to well-being through a reduction in stress,
| Source |
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| Wisdom as a Resiliency Factor for Subjective Well-Being in Later Life. - M. Ardelt - 2022 |
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Do you want to know more?
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A knowledge curse
| The advance of knowledge is normally seen as progress for humankind. Knowledge expands what human beings can achieve. As Homo erectus learned how to make and control fire, it expanded what they could eat and do for comfort in wintry days, and this made them better off. Greater knowledge expands the set of what is possible and, as long as we are rational, this can only be an advantage. Indeed, this is true for a Robinson Crusoe economy. A rational person on an island, discovering new truths, can only do better for herself.
Reality is more complicated. As Robert Oppenheimer realized, when watching the first detonation of a nuclear bomb on 16 July 1945, ‘We knew the world would not be the same.’ In this case, the scientific advance was the discovery of a new action, which meant that new strategies were now available. Clearly, the discovery of a new action can transform a game, which was otherwise a game of joint interests, into, for instance, a Prisoner’s Dilemma, to the detriment of all. However, when knowledge does not expand anybody’s set of strategies, but instead enhances our understanding of the state of nature that together with our actions determines payoffs, it seems that it can only be to the benefit of humankind, or at least not lower human welfare. This article uncovers the finding that knowledge, even when that does not expand the set of available actions, can impact all of us negatively, what we refer to here as a knowledge curse.(2) |
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| (2) | A knowledge curse: how knowledge can reduce human welfare - Kaushik Basu and Jörgen Weibul - Royal Society - Published:07 August 2024 - https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.240358 |
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Resentment
The age-old pact between the people and the elite is broken, and the cause of this is the digital revolution, also known as the invention of the internet. There have been only four such revolutions in human history in which society has changed beyond recognition as a result of technical innovation in the field of communication.
- The first was the invention of writing, which began history and made possible administration, legislation, chronicles, and philosophy.
- The second was the invention of the codex, the bound book that replaced the old familiar scroll. Because leafing became possible, it became possible to look things up. This seemingly trivial innovation created the conditions for ordering information, encyclopedic works, exegesis, theology, and the foundation of universities.
- The third revolution was the invention of the printing press, which caused the Reformation, helped the emancipation of the middle classes, made pamphlets and lampoons possible and brought about the French Revolution.
- The fourth revolution is the result of the invention of the internet. This revolution has only just begun.
For centuries, there has been an unspoken pact between the people and the elite, which amounted to the agreement that the elite, by its superior knowledge, was entitled to certain privileges in exchange for the obligation to lead the people as best they could and govern the country as competently as possible. The digital revolution has broken that pact. Now that the people themselves think they have access to all the knowledge reserved for the elite until recently, the justification for the privileges they enjoyed has disappeared. Because the elite is understandably not too keen on actually giving up these privileges, it is distrusted, demonized, and hated by the people. The elite are responsible for all the disastrous choices made in the past, just as they are responsible for all the brilliant and beneficial initiatives that have improved and extended the lives of billions of people.
Every world citizen can theoretically reach an instant audience of billions on the internet with a single mouse click. Nonsense and malicious lies are no longer rejected but are also believed. The internet has ensured the definitive emancipation of the stupid. The consequences of the democratization of truth are exacerbated by the business model of the internet, which serves you more and more bites of the dish you previously enjoyed. The algorithms pull you into the fable trap. In the internet's echo chambers, everyone can hear the truth they want to hear. The fact that contradiction occurs elsewhere, far out of earshot, explains why even the wildest conspiracy theories can enjoy a staggeringly massive following.
Another consequence of the invention of the internet, or at least a phenomenon to which the internet has significantly contributed, is globalization. The classic political dichotomy between left and right has given way to a division between those who fear globalization and those who see it as an opportunity and a challenge. Here, too, it is a matter of privilege. Globalization has losers, even in our wealthy West, such as the once proud workers in the American auto industry, who have been laid off because factories have closed or been relocated to low-wage countries and who have seen their habitat change into a Rust Belt, where there can be no other future than the certainty that the day after tomorrow will be worse than tomorrow.
Last but not least, it is because of them that the winners of globalization are identified with the damned elite. Their misery is the elite's fault because it is the fault of the winners that the losers lose.
We should no longer be ashamed of our love for the truth, for we need the truth to defeat resentment.
| Content source |
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| Waarom de rancune van de verliezers van de globalisering zich richt op minderheden, vrouwen en de culturele elite - Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer - De Morgen - 2024 |
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