The need to distinguish personal from general wisdom: A short history and empirical evidence

Research output: Contribution to book/conference proceedings/anthology/reportChapter in book/anthology/reportContributedpeer-review

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 languageEnglish
Title of host publicationThe Scientific Study of Personal Wisdom
EditorsMichel Ferrari, Nic M. Weststrate
PublisherSpringer, Dordrecht [u. a.]
Pages3-19
Number of pages17
ISBN (electronic)9789400779877
ISBN (print)9400779860, 9789400779860
Publication statusPublished - 1 Nov 2013
Peer-reviewedYes
Externally publishedYes

Keywords

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Keywords

  • Posttraumatic Growth, Fluid Intelligence, Life Review, Wise Person, Personal Wisdom