Wisdom is a quality of human nature that has been discussed extensively throughout history, perhaps most notably by Aristotle. In modern times, however, there has been little public discourse about wisdom or its importance in human enterprise, and even less scientific study of wisdom. However, an interdisciplinary group of scientists and scholars at the University of Chicago, led by Prof. Howard Nusbaum (pictured left) in the Department of Psychology have begun to change that, collaborating on a set of projects that use a range of methods from textual analysis to cognitive neuroscience to understand wisdom.
Wise decisions and action go beyond being smart, clever, or knowledgeable—being wise requires the quality of prudent judgment. Aristotle defined wisdom as practical decisions that lead to human flourishing, grounding wisdom in a more prosocial notion of human well-being in terms of seeking the highest human good. On this view, wisdom integrates cognitive, affective, and social information, and typically includes aspects of pro-social consideration, emotional homeostasis, reflection/self-understanding, value relativism, and tolerance.
The Chicago Wisdom Research Project is now in its third year of studying wisdom. In its current form, the focus of the research is on understanding where wisdom comes from and the role of experience in its development. People often believe wisdom comes with age; an idea that may be due to examples that come readily to mind either from personal experience or from popular culture. Currently, the Chicago Wisdom Research Project supports six different research areas that examine the role of expertise and experience in practical wisdom. Across these areas studies are examining how experience and expertise affect empathy, insight and cognitive creativity, decision biases, and overall measures of wisdom. The kinds of experiences and expertise examined range from training in medical school to the use of a second language, to different kinds of language use, to practices such as meditation and ballet. In essence, these projects seek to understand how different aspects of wisdom such as prosociality and decision processing are changed by specific types of experiences.
The results of these studies have been varied and often surprising. Work by psychology professor Boaz Keysar and graduate student Sayuri Hayakawa has shown that people who are using their second language are less biased in economic decisions, show more cognitive creativity, and, in collaboration with Albert Costa at Pampeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain, have found them to be more utilitarian. This suggests that people are wiser in a second language than their first. A research project led by economics faculty Ali Hortacsu and John List, College alumnus Lester Tong, and economics graduate students Karen Ye and Asai Kentaro has shown that experience in EBay trading reduces economic decision biases by reducing loss aversion, as indicated by reductions in activity in brain regions related to negative affect. A study by music professor Berthold Hoeckner and postdoctoral researcher Patrick Williams with psychology graduate students Carly Kontra and Heather Harden has shown that increased meditation and ballet experience increase measured wisdom whereas other kinds of experiences do not. And research by psychology professor Howard Nusbaum on the role of sleep in developing insight, carried out in collaboration with colleagues Hao Zhang and Qinglin Zhang at Southwest University in Chongqing, has demonstrated that sleep increases the effectiveness of incubation thereby promoting insight.
This research represents the first attempt to study wisdom systematically from a variety of directions and disciplines, examining how different aspects of wisdom develop and how they are related. Although scholars have thought about wisdom throughout human history, the scientific study of wisdom is relatively young. Research at the University of Chicago on wisdom and its nature and development is the first organized approach to studying wisdom using modern scientific methods. The early results of this research have already begun to illuminate ways in which different kinds of experience can lead to increasing practical wisdom.
