The need to distinguish personal from general wisdom: A short history and empirical evidence
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Contributors
Abstract
The quest for wisdom is as old as humankind. Even though theoretical and empirical work on the psychological study of wisdom has increased tremendously over the last decades, this research in comparison is still in its infancy. It was not before the 1970s that empirical wisdom research began (Clayton, 1975). Since then, psychological wisdom research has covered a series of different topics such as lay definitions of wisdom (e.g., Bluck & Glück, 2005), defining and measuring wisdom (e.g., Brugman, 2006), understanding the development of wisdom (e.g., Sternberg&Jordan, 2005), investigating the plasticity of wisdom (e.g., Baltes & Staudinger, 2000), and also exploring the applicability of psychological knowledge about wisdom in life contexts (e.g., Sternberg, Jarvin, &Grigorenko, 2009; for a general review of wisdom research see: Staudinger& Glück, 2011). In this chapter, I would like to demonstrate the usefulness of a rather recent addition to the conceptualization and measurement of wisdom, and that is the notion of "personal or self-related wisdom," which was first introduced as a concept in the late 1990s (Staudinger, 1999a, pp. 366). The need for a distinction between general and personal wisdom emerged from my attempt to integrate research from the fields of selfand developmental regulation, personality development, and wisdom so as to derive the components of a psychological approach to the art of living.
Details
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | The Scientific Study of Personal Wisdom |
Editors | Michel Ferrari, Nic M. Weststrate |
Publisher | Springer, Dordrecht [u. a.] |
Pages | 3-19 |
Number of pages | 17 |
ISBN (electronic) | 9789400779877 |
ISBN (print) | 9400779860, 9789400779860 |
Publication status | Published - 1 Nov 2013 |
Peer-reviewed | Yes |
Externally published | Yes |
Keywords
ASJC Scopus subject areas
Keywords
- Posttraumatic Growth, Fluid Intelligence, Life Review, Wise Person, Personal Wisdom