Dr. Ardelt gave a guest lecture entitled "Definitions and Measures of Wisdom and the Promotion of Wisdom and Psychosocial Growth in University Classes". As university students ourselves, Suvi Mononen and myself (Cory Barker) were fortunate to have the opportunity to chat with a world leading expert in wisdom. We learned how her work came about, some of her insightful findings, inquired her insights to overlapping areas of adult development, and where wisdom studies might go in the future. Dr. Monika Ardelt devised the Three-Dimensional Wisdom Scale (3D-WS; Ardelt, 2003), which measures wisdom through the cognitive, reflective, and compassionate dimensions of wisdom. She and others have conducted research using her model across a wide array of topics. We started by asking her about how her work came about. She told us that her inquiry came into focus during her doctoral studies, and how the work of Clayton and Birren struck a chord. Monika: Clayton and Birren's model of wisdom just made a lot of sense to me, this combination of cognitive, reflective, and affective . Now I call the affective the compassionate dimension because people were confused, that affective means any emotions, and it’s not the case, it means compassionate emotions. And so I said, well, you might be able to indeed measure the three dimensions and I have these personality scales from the measures when they were in old age, not in young adulthood but in old age. So I picked items from Haan’s Ego Rating Scale and the California Q-Sort that belonged to the three dimensions and then looked how they hang together individually and also across the three dimensions, and it worked. So for the proposal defense, they already let me do some of the analysis to make sure that wisdom would be related to life satisfaction, because they didn’t want that I have null results. Even now I think null results are results, but they wanted to make sure that I had something, and yes I had something. It was quite highly related. When I got my job at the University of Florida, a colleague suggested I should create a scale for wisdom. So I got some funding, and I had students go through existing personality measures, and we all went through these manuals and looked for any possible items that could fit into these three dimensions and were not copyrighted. So I ended up with 150 something items, and I had three or four people rate the items to decide to which of the three dimensions they might belong. So we ended up with 140 items, which we gave to about 180 respondents, and based on their answers I came up with those 39 items of the Three-Dimensional Wisdom Scale. So the scale had to have validity, the items had to hang together within the scale, but the dimensions also needed to correlate with the other dimensions, because wisdom should be assessed as an integration of the three dimensions rather than three completely independent dimensions. This is how I came up with the 39 items. Cory: Tell us about some of the research that you’ve done. Monika: My primary focus is on wisdom and wellbeing, and particularly wisdom and wellbeing in old age, but I also have looked at wisdom and happiness in a large Dutch internet survey that was comprised of different age groups. You typically find a positive correlation between wisdom and well-being. And then the other question that I had was, what are the moderating and mediating factors? So first of all, what might explain the relation between wisdom and wellbeing? And then also what might be moderating factors? So in terms of moderating factors, it is possible that wisdom is more valuable for wellbeing under adverse circumstances or if things get tough. That’s when you need wisdom, because if you’re rich, healthy, have a lot of friends, you don’t need wisdom to feel fine. But what if things get tough? Then, typically things are not looking so great unless you have wisdom. And so together with a colleague from the University of California in San Diego we did an analysis with the moderating factor of adverse life events. It basically asked whether older adults had experienced any of 11 life events over their last year: did your spouse die, did your pet die, did you have any major conflict with children or grandchildren, did you have any financial difficulty, etc.? If they said yes, they were asked how much it upsets them. So, I created an interaction effect with adverse life events and wisdom and entered the interaction effect in a regression analysis together with the main effects. Again, wisdom had a positive effect on subjective wellbeing, and adverse life events had a negative effect on wellbeing, after controlling for health, demographics, and so on. But there was also a significant positive interaction effect between wisdom and adverse life effects, meaning that higher wisdom actually buffered the negative effects of adverse life events on wellbeing. So for those who had higher wisdom, adverse life events had no significant effect on subjective wellbeing. Cory: Were you ever able to make a distinction between different kinds of adverse experiences people have that creates more of a buffer than others? Monika: No, it doesn’t make a difference. Cory: Do you have any idea why it doesn’t make a difference? Monika: Well, what some people might think is that if your spouse dies, this is really traumatic, but it is not necessarily so in old age, because the spouse might have died after a long-term disability or an illness. In this way, it might be expected. The respondents in the sample were in old age, and so this might not be the most dramatic thing. So actually the pet dying might be equally dramatic. So I didn’t really find a difference. It wasn’t the spouse dying that made people most upset, it was something else. Friends or family having a terminal illness was more dramatic than the spouse dying. It’s interesting. And my guess is that often a spouse dies after a long-term illness. But getting the illness might be more dramatic. I also did a study where I interviewed a community sample, hospice patients, and nursing residents. I called the hospice patients and nursing residents the end of life sample and combined it with the community sample. Then I created an interaction effect between wisdom and the end of life sample, and, again, wisdom had a positive effect on wellbeing in old age, and the end of life sample had a negative effect on wellbeing in old age, not surprisingly. Again, the interaction effect was significant. The effect between wisdom and wellbeing was stronger for the end of life sample than the community sample. Basically, my argument is that it’s more valuable to have wisdom when things are tough, so the relationship was stronger for the end of life sample between wisdom and subjective wellbeing. So higher wisdom really helped. At the same time, on average, the end of life sample had lower wisdom scores than the community sample, because it seems that there is a relationship between physical well-being and wisdom. I would not say that healthy people are wiser, but ill health makes it really hard to be wise, at least in these three dimensions I’m measuring in terms of self-transcendence and compassion. If you are in ill health, it is much harder to care about others, because you go back to yourself, “I have to take care of myself first,” right? Cory: How does wisdom express itself through people when they are older, people who have more wisdom as opposed to people who have less wisdom? Monika: They care about others. They are more giving in general. For example, I compared two cases in the end of life sample. One with a high wisdom score and one with a low wisdom score, both hospice patients. The lady with the high wisdom score came to accept her cancer diagnosis. She decided after she had the first operation and the cancer wasn’t gone, to not go through another operation again. She decided that this is it, and then entered the hospice care center which was really helpful in this case. It was in a really supportive place, people assured her that she would be without pain, and in this way she could continue to be concerned about others and grateful, and therefore felt well. She also felt very much supported by her religion and spirituality. She thought that god guided her and that god actually told her what is the right thing to do, so she felt really supported in this way. On the opposite end was a man who also was in a hospice care center, but his religion was more extrinsic rather than intrinsic. He used to go to social functions in the church and he couldn’t go anymore. He didn’t get support and solace from religion but questioned his religion and said “why am I sick now, I have this and this and this, something is wrong here, right?” Religion didn’t give him comfort in any way. He had two sons who visited him, but he didn’t get a lot of comfort out of that either. Cory: Do you think religion is necessary for people to develop wisdom? Monika: No. But, I think transcendence is necessary. Cory: What’s the difference? Monika: Well, I think you can be a humanist. My sample came from the south of the United States, and people are more religious, particularly older people. So most of the people who scored high on my wisdom scale tended to be higher on intrinsic religiosity, but not extrinsic religiosity. There was actually a negative relationship between wisdom and extrinsic religiosity. There was a zero relationship between wisdom and intrinsic religiosity. Now, what does this mean? Most people who scored high on the three-dimensional wisdom scale also were religious, but so were people who were low on the wisdom scale. So you couldn’t distinguish the two groups. Except that the wiser group was less likely to be religious for extrinsic reasons, such as going to church to socialize or to make friends in the community. They tended to be intrinsically religious. There was only one case who was high on wisdom and really low on spirituality. This was a humanist, and he was an academic and he said “well I just can’t believe in this stuff. It just doesn’t make sense logically. The virgin birth and those kinds of things, just don’t make sense.” But he was a humanist, he said “well we are all in this together, we should help each other out” – that's self-transcendence. Cory: Amidst all these things that your work has been related to or you’ve written papers on yourself, what are your ideas for future inquiries into wisdom? Monika: I think what needs to be done is really more how wisdom develops in longitudinal studies. I talked to Dr. Katja Kokko, Research Director of the Gerontology Research Center yesterday, and she has this great longitudinal study, and I said, "hey next time can you administer the wisdom scale? That would be great!" Doing more longitudinal studies, what are the early life predictors of wisdom? We don’t have enough longitudinal data on wisdom development. So that would be one thing. And I think there should also be more research on how wisdom can be promoted. For example, there’s only one published study, which looked at the association between wisdom and meditation. The study found there is positive relationship between wisdom and meditation, and I think more should be done in this direction. This was a cross-sectional study, but we need to study the phenomenon long term. Cory: If wisdom is actually related to stage, stages take years to develop. Monika: Yeah. Wisdom is not a trait that is unchangeable, but it is more like a stage that can be changed, but definitely not a state you can have in the morning and then not so much in the evening, because that would be very fleeting. It should be more durable than that. I looked at longitudinal data over ten months, which had a test-retest stability coefficient of about .7 in the wisdom scale, which I thought is good, because wisdom should be more stable. There should be some kind of change in the long-run, but in the short term, wisdom should be relatively stable. Cory: Context seems to have a lot to do with wisdom behaviors, in your presentation [of forthcoming research] you were talking about doing the survey with students at the beginning, and then at the end of a semester, and the cognitive wisdom dimension went down. Monika: I think it is just fatigue at the end of the semester. The cognitive dimension asked for things in the negative direction, “I don’t like to think about something in depth” and “people are either good or bad.” And at the end of the semester, students might be cognitively overloaded, they don’t want to think as much anymore, which is why this dimension might go down. We also looked at the relationship between wisdom and stress over a semester and found that wisdom at the beginning of the semester reduced stress at the end of the semester. In addition, there were reciprocal relationships between stress and the reflective and compassionate dimensions of wisdom. But even after controlling for baseline scores, there was still a significant residual correlation between stress and wisdom at the end of the semester. So I think it’s similar to physical illness and physical ill being. Stress just makes it harder to look at things from different perspectives and to be more compassionate. Cory: So one could suspect that if you had done another survey on the same students sometimes in the summer, then maybe the cognitive wisdom dimension would have gone up a little bit. After all, people often develop wisdom from adverse experiences… Monika: (Laughs) Right. But people don’t always develop wisdom from adversity. Stress-related growth or post-traumatic grows only happens to some people, it does not happen automatically. Yes, this might be one pathway to wisdom, but it is definitely not an automatic pathway to wisdom. I think what helps is probably social support, the motivation to grow, openness to experience, and a willingness to grow and learn from experiences. But for a lot of people, adverse experiences actually make them more depressed, more devastated. In the Berkley guidance study, about half the participants were affected by the Great Depression. The psychological health score of those who were affected by the Great Depression and were rated high on the wisdom dimensions in old age increased after the Great Depression. If they were rated low on wisdom in old age, their psychological health score decreased after the Great Depression. After this devastating event, some grew wiser, and some declined in psychological health. Now I don’t know where they were on wisdom earlier, but based on their psychological health, some declined in psychological health and ended up lower on wisdom when they were older. The interesting thing was, those who were not affected by the Great Depression had no changes in psychological health after the Great Depression. Cory: So what’s the determining factor then? Monika: Well I think social support probably makes a lot of difference and openness to experience, the willingness and motivation to grow. Some kind of social support but also the inner willingness to grow and learn from experiences. A less neurotic tendency probably helps too, like not blaming others for one’s circumstances, and not being paranoid about the world. Cory: In regards to uncertainty in wisdom. I know in Hebrew wisdom traditions, for example, the term for wisdom was hokhama, which meant waiting to see. There was also the term, olam, beyond the horizon. The notion was that you can’t see beyond the horizon, and so having a certain kind of patience there. Monika: One of the characteristics of wisdom is acceptance of uncertainty and unpredictability, and being able to deal with changing circumstances. And this is why adverse life events do not affect people with wisdom as much. They know how to deal with the vicissitudes of life. So whatever comes their way, they can just deal with it. Suvi: This is something I was thinking when Eeva was asking about [during the presentation questions], the cultural effects on wisdom. Is it situational that wisdom might change from situation to another? And then I was thinking, could it be an inner trait still, like wisdom within your own thoughts, your own feelings, emotion regulation maybe? And dealing with uncertainty in a different kind of a way? Monika: That’s exactly what it is, right? Emotion regulation, staying calm under trying circumstances, trusting in the situation. It is kind of trusting in the universe, trusting that god will guide you, the dharma will lead you, or something like that. Something greater than yourself will guide you in the right direction. Cory: It’s the same concept in Taoism, the tao, The Way is identifying with pure possibility for things to come into being, and I think a similar concept with the Buddhist sunyata, which is also associated with emptiness. In the concept of nirvana, there’s the metaphor about the flame going out, but the whole notion is that the candle exists at all, as does the darkness, so having trust in both. Monika: Nirvana is a long way off (laughs). But just trusting the dharma, going in the right direction, whatever happens, it’s okay, I can handle it. To be able to accept whatever there is. For someone who is not completely wise, there will always be fluctuation, you go up and down, and of course, if things happen, there’s always a struggle at the beginning. A wiser person will be able to come to this acceptance through mediating, praying, talking to god, social support, spiritual support, whatever helps. Suvi: I think social support, how it is related to wisdom is really important. I’ve been studying supportive communication for the past year – how we can affect each other through social support. And I think this has something to do with wisdom, in developing. Monika: That would actually be an interesting topic to explore in more detail. How does social support promote wisdom? Particularly under trying circumstances, that would be interesting to do. Dr. Monika Ardelt's research has been applied across a wide range of topics by herself and others. You can find more of her work from her home page. >>> If you'd like to see Dr. Monika Ardelt's lecture "Definitions and Measures of Wisdom and the Promotion of Wisdom and Psychosocial Growth in University Classes," her slides and a video of the lecture can be found via the Sophia and Phronesis website. >>> Selected references
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