While our negative stereotypes are a-plenty about growing older, one of the few positive stereotypes of aging is that you become wiser. Popular media has depicted older adults as knowledgeable sages, capable of drawing on a vast bank of experiences to help solve problems with greater ease and sensibility. Eastern cultures are more likely to revere older adults as an invaluable resource of information, experiences, and emotional maturity. Even in other species, elders are heavily relied upon for their experiences. Elder orca whales, especially post-reproductive females, play a vital leadership role within their pods.
But what does the scientific literature have to say about how wisdom changes over the lifespan? Is it indeed the case that all of us can count on accumulating wisdom as much as we can gray hairs? Or is the picture more complex, with acquired wisdom conditional on other relevant factors such as emotional intelligence, culture, or cognitive ability?
Defining Wisdom
Empirical study of how wisdom changes over the lifespan requires us to define wisdom with precision and specificity. As you might imagine, there have been no shortage of theories attempting to do just that, some of which have long histories. Aristotle saw wisdom as a virtue involving both moral character and making ethical decisions based on experience and reasoning.
In looking at more contemporary theories of wisdom, Sternberg’s Balance Theory holds that wisdom is the ability to balance personal, interpersonal, and extrapersonal interests to achieve a common good. This can involve using problem-solving, critical thinking, and creativity, and balancing different perspectives, among other skills.
Baltes and Staudinger’s Berlin Wisdom Paradigm, in contrast, views wisdom as the accumulation of pragmatic and factual knowledge, as well as an appreciation for the relativity and contextualism present in life, and the willingness to accept uncertainty and the unpredictability of life.
Other theories emphasize the emotional and interpersonal components of wisdom—specifically, being able to identify and manage our emotions effectively, relating to others with compassion and empathy, and being able to view a situation from multiple perspectives.
All of these approaches are valuable in conceptualizing and measuring age-related changes in wisdom over the lifespan. From empirical research, we have a clearer sense of what aspects of wisdom improve, remain stable, or decline as people get older.
How Does Wisdom Change as People Age?
Given the various ways in which wisdom can be defined, a more complex and nuanced picture emerges when considering how wisdom changes as people age. There are components that increase, remain stable, and decline, as well as relevant contextual factors that influence the trajectory of wisdom over our lifetimes.
Aspects of wisdom that are known to improve, based on longitudinal and cross-sectional research, are life experience, the ability to self-reflect on these experiences, emotional regulation, empathy, and perspective taking. This suggests that as we age we generally get better at holding space for different emotions and learning from experience, while simultaneously becoming kinder and more aware of others’ experiences.
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As for aspects of wisdom that may not be as robust as people age, when rapid speed of processing information is required—for example, in solving novel complex problems—older adults perform less well. However, many older adults may learn to compensate for this decline by using other strengths, such as relying on previous experience with similar problems.
Culture is an important contextual factor to consider in the trajectory of wisdom over the lifespan. Culture instructs us on what type of wisdom is valued and how it is attained. For example, cultures may differ in the extent to which they value forms of wisdom that are more individualistic (e.g., problem-solving, factual knowledge) versus collectivistic (e.g., compassion, perspective-taking). They may also espouse different cultural practices for developing wisdom, e.g., spirituality, meditation, life experience, talking with elders.
Given the myriad of ways in which wisdom, variously defined, grows and deepens as we get older it’s puzzling why older adults remain a neglected societal and cultural resource, often marginalized and frequently forgotten, particularly in Western society. Perhaps if we ask them why, they’ll shed some wisdom.
References
Baltes, P. B., & Smith, J. (2008). The study of wisdom and aging: Integrating the macro and micro perspectives. The Oxford Handbook of Human Development and Culture: An Interdisciplinary Perspective, 13-34. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199364175.013.24
Takahashi, M., & Overton, W. F. (2005). Cultural Foundations of Wisdom: An Integrated Developmental Approach. In R. J. Sternberg & J. Jordan (Eds.), A handbook of wisdom: Psychological perspectives (pp. 32–60). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511610486.003
Grossmann, I., Na, J., Varnum, M. E. W., Park, D. C., Kitayama, S., & Nisbett, R. E. (2010). Reasoning about social conflicts improves into old age. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107(16), 7246-7250. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1001715107
Ardelt, M. (2004). Wisdom as expert knowledge system: A critical review of a contemporary operationalization of an ancient concept. Human Development, 47(5), 257-285. https://doi.org/10.1159/000079154
Staudinger, U. M., & Glück, J. (2011). Psychological wisdom research: Commonalities and differences in a growing field. Annual Review of Psychology, 62, 215-241. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.psych.121208.131659
Sternberg, R. J. (2014). Wisdom in a complex world. In A. C. Michalos (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Quality of Life and Well-Being Research (pp. 7104-7109). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118996874.ch34
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