How to make wise decisions
In almost every society, few human qualities have been prized as highly as wisdom. We tend to imagine the genuinely wise as a rare breed – a thin scattering of grey-bearded sages – yet the findings researchers have gathered point elsewhere. Wisdom, this body of work suggests, is no exceptional gift reserved for the select few; place ordinary people in the right circumstances and most turn out to be quite capable of choosing wisely.
The forces that shape wisdom – what we live through, the situations we land in, the surrounding culture – carry far more weight than anyone previously credited, says Associate Professor Elias Vantorre of the University of Craymoor in Alberta, Canada. ‘Recent work across cognitive, developmental, social and personality psychology shows that how soundly a person reasons can swing enormously from one setting to the next,’ he says. ‘Grasp the pull of these conditions, and we gain a rare view of how wisdom works in daily life – and of how it might be strengthened and passed on.’
The truth, then, is less that a lucky few come equipped with wisdom while everyone else does without, and more that the circumstances around us decide how well any of us can reason. ‘There is no describing the sort of thinking we label wise without reckoning with the setting in which it occurs,’ Vantorre explains. ‘Wisdom is not merely some quality lodged inside a person; it takes shape according to whatever situation that person happens to occupy, and certain situations coax it out far more readily than others.’
Boiling wisdom down to a tidy definition is far from straightforward, yet Vantorre and his colleagues have isolated four features that together make up wise reasoning. The first is a readiness to admit how little we may truly grasp – an honest modesty about the limits of what we understand. The second is a willingness to weigh standpoints reaching well past the matter in hand. Alertness to the way bonds between people can shift over time makes a third; the fourth is an ability to reconcile competing beliefs and attitudes rather than clinging to just one.
Vantorre’s team has also hit upon one particularly reliable device for bringing wisdom into our routine choices: to regard a situation as an outsider would, much as we might were a friend seeking our counsel. Take the first-person angle, the research indicates, and our focus tightens onto whatever sits directly before us; move to the position of a removed observer, and our reasoning widens, pulled instead toward shared, ethical matters such as justice and even-handedness. It is this roomier vantage point that appears to activate the mental machinery behind wise decision-making.
So how should we proceed when a situation demands that we ourselves have something at stake – a quarrel with a partner, say, or thrashing out terms in a workplace negotiation? Vantorre’s answer is that changing the situation isn’t the point; what matters is that we can still weigh up such episodes through more than one lens, even those we are caught up in.
Take a study run at the height of a recent economic slump. Those taking part were asked to picture their working life in one of two ways – either ‘through the eyes of someone watching from a distance’ or ‘as though it were unfolding right in front of you’. Set against a control group, the volunteers assigned the distant-observer framing produced noticeably more of the reasoning tied to wisdom, including a certain modesty about the limits of one’s knowledge and an openness to change.
A separate study worked with couples who had been together for many years. Each was asked to call to mind an unsettled, ongoing dispute, picturing it either as a stranger might see it or strictly from their own side. The partners then spent ten minutes talking the episode over, and afterwards set their reflections down on paper. Those who had imagined the quarrel through a stranger’s eyes proved far readier to reason wisely – taking in the other’s point of view and hunting for middle ground – than the couples who had stayed locked inside their own.
‘Stepping outside the self pushes attention toward other people and lets a broader, more conceptual picture emerge, which in turn makes room for a modest sense of one’s own limits and for an acceptance of change,’ Vantorre observes.
We are inclined to tie wisdom to raw intelligence or to particular traits of character, yet the data reveal only a slight positive link between reasoning wisely and both accumulated knowledge and the personality dimensions of openness and agreeableness. ‘What strikes me is how widely one person’s wisdom can swing from moment to moment, and how much more these situational effects tell us – about someone’s feelings, or whether they will forgive or hit back – than any broad label of character ever could,’ Vantorre says. ‘Knowing how wisely someone acts in a particular spot tells you more than knowing whether they are wise across the board.’
