Defining Wisdom-The Most Recent Attempt

This is a revised version of the blogs posted on July 28, 2021, called “How Wise Are You?” and August 10, 2021, called “Defining Wisdom – Part 2.”

Dr. Dilip Jeste is a neuropsychiatrist who has spent over 20 years studying wisdom, a professor at UC – San Diego, and author of “Wiser,” published in 2020 by Sounds True (no kidding). One might say this is the “latest word” in the ancient quest to define “wisdom.”

After reviewing the work of prior social scientists, Dr. Jeste came to the conclusion that “wisdom is a complex trait comprising several components.” What are they?

Dr. Jeste started with this list:

prosocial behaviors like empathy and compassion, emotional regulation, decisiveness while recognizing the uncertainty of life, insight and self-regulation, general knowledge of life [whatever that means], and social decision-making [ditto].

He concluded that this list was made up primarily from “papers written by Western scientists, working in Western labs, studying a fairly homogenous population.” He decided to broaden the scope of his research and reached out to “international experts in wisdom who had published papers or book chapters on this topic.”

Using something called “the Delphi Method,” he refined his original conclusions. I have learned enough about research methodology from my study of positive psychology to be dangerous, but one reason I am going into this is because I question Dr. Jeste’s methodology and conclusions. The Delphi Method was developed as a forecasting tool to predict future events by polling anonymous sources in attempt to reach a consensus. It is also referred to as “Estimate-Talk-Estimate” and has been “widely used for business forecasting. … The Delphi method was developed at the beginning of the Cold War to forecast the impact of technology on warfare.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delphi_method). Now, Dr. Jeste applies this quasi-analytical forecasting tool to defining wisdom?

Who are these so-called “international experts”? Without knowing who they are or anything about them, how can we determine their biases (and, surely, they have some)? How many were there? What are their cultural backgrounds? Was there a control group? Was any of this peer-reviewed?[1]

Eventually, our diverse experts arrived at some conclusions: Wisdom is a form of advanced cognitive and emotional development driven by experience. It can be measured, learned, and observed. We all know people who epitomize wisdom.

That’s it? All of those experts, and that is the best they could do?

Our experts concurred that wisdom does increase with age[2], that it is uniquely human [so much for the wise old owl theory] and distinctly personal.

Not too helpful to me.

Somehow that led him to the following list of components, which is very similar to his original list:

1.   Prosocial attitudes and behaviors (e.g., “empathy, compassion, and altruism”)

2.   Emotional stability with happiness.

3.   Balancing decisiveness with acceptance of uncertainty.

4.   Reflection and self-understanding.

5.   Social decision-making and pragmatic knowledge of life.

These, we concluded, are the bases of wisdom. However, they do not stand alone and apart from one another. Quite the contrary. They all share commonalities and sometimes overlap in surprising ways. And, yet, like pillars, they are distinctly foundational to wisdom. You need them all, albeit the levels of individual components in a person may vary. (emphasis supplied)

Several years later, Jeste added another member to his team to “further refine the empirical definition of wisdom, based on novel and emerging types of assessments” (whatever that means). These new techniques confirmed his list of components with the following exceptions: the addition of spirituality, and two “minor components” (whatever that means): openness to new experiences and sense of humor. He notes that “spirituality” is not the same as “religiosity.”

In considering spirituality, because he grew up in India, showing another distinct bias, he reviews the Bhagavad Gita and notes that:

Thus, the Gita considers equanimity to be an essential virtue [he does not mention that Stoicism reaches the same conclusion][3]. Wise people are characterized by balance: no extreme emotions, negative or positive. Wisdom implies that events of joy or sadness are treated similarly. We deemed this to be emotional regulation.

A wise person is compassionate, says the Gita. Sacrifice for the sake of sacrifice and not for its material rewards is also an element of wisdom.

In fact, most of Jeste’s opinions about the components of wisdom are found in the Gita. Jeste’s conclusion was that “the basic concept of wisdom had not changed across millennia or cultures. To me, this further suggested that wisdom is biologically based.”

What about Toltec wisdom; Buddhist wisdom; Confucian; the Tao Te Ching, and its recent echo in the concept of “flow” as developed by Dr. Mihály Csíkszentmihályi; Native American wisdom; the wisdom of the Stoics, which has been the basis of cognitive behavioral therapy; Islamic wisdom; Socratic wisdom; Alan Watt’s “wisdom of insecurity”; the secular, psychological approach of Richard J. Sternberg; Hermetic wisdom, which is one of many schools of thought that sees wisdom as paradox; and, “the wisdom of crowds”? I could go on. If there is any comprehensive research going on here, I have not found it.

Dr. Jeste has developed the Jeste-Thomas Wisdom Index, a self-reporting research technique, which consists of 28 questions – a very short questionnaire – designed to evaluate how wise one is and where your wisdom strengths and weaknesses are while giving you an overall wisdom score. If you are unfamiliar with self-reporting surveys, many social scientists use them, but they are uniformly known to be limited by “social desirability bias.” That means that many people do not answer them candidly, but, instead, give the answers that they believe people would want to hear. Nevertheless, you can take the wisdom survey by logging in at: https://medschool.ucsd.edu/research/aging/research/Pages/SD-WISE.aspx.

I do not disagree with Dr. Jeste’s five components, but I believe it is incomplete. I will have more to say about that.

I also question the inclusion of spirituality, which I will also address in more detail later.

Obviously, I question his methodology.

I am glad to see Dr. Jeste’s taking an interest in defining wisdom, but I believe he has a way to go before we have anything remotely resembling a reliable and valid empirical approach.

[1] In fairness to Dr. Jeste, he has published several journal articles on wisdom, and he may have decided to exclude a topic as potentially boring as methodology in his book. I confess that I have not read his articles. My comments are restricted to the text of his book.

[2] “Wisdom often comes with age but, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, sometimes age comes alone.”

[3] Although it is speculated that the Gita was written before the philosophy of Stoicism took form, I know of no authority that supports the notion that Hinduism influenced the Stoics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhagavad_Gita