Measuring Wisdom: Existing Approaches, Continuing Challenges, and New Developments
Judith Glück, Measuring Wisdom: Existing Approaches, Continuing Challenges, and New Developments, The Journals of Gerontology: Series B, Volume 73, Issue 8, November 2018, Pages 1393–1403, https://doi.org/10.1093/geronb/gbx140
The question how wisdom can best be measured is still open to debate. Currently, there are two groups of wisdom measures: open-ended performance measures and self-report measures. This overview article describes the most popular current measures of wisdom: the Berlin Wisdom Paradigm, the Bremen Wisdom Paradigm, Grossmann’s wise-reasoning approach, the Three-Dimensional Wisdom Scale, the Self-Assessed Wisdom Scale, and the Adult Self-Transcendence Inventory. It discusses the specific challenges of both open-ended and self-report approaches with respect to content validity, convergent and divergent validity, concurrent and discriminant validity, and ecological validity. Finally, promising new developments are outlined that may bridge the gap between wisdom as a competence and wisdom as an attitude and increase ecological validity by being more similar to real-life manifestations of wisdom. These new developments include autobiographical approaches and advice-giving paradigms.
When I tell people that I am a wisdom researcher, they usually first ask me what wisdom is—and then almost invariably the next question is, “But can you measure that?” How wisdom can be measured is indeed a complex question, and I do not think we have found a fully convincing answer yet. This article intends to review the current state of wisdom measurement, but also to stimulate new research that adds to our toolbox of wisdom measures.
