Socrates’ Revenge: A Symposium Presenting Three Conceptions of Wisdom for Modern Times

Judith Glück

This question can be understood in (at least) two different ways: (1) Do people show consistent amounts of wisdom across different situations? (2) Does wisdom mean the same thing across historical periods, places, and cultures?

Do people show consistent amounts of wisdom across different situations? Research from Igor Grossmann’s lab clearly demonstrates that wise behavior varies within individuals across situations and contexts (e.g., Grossmann, 2017; Grossmann et al., 2019); in fact, most people have done some very wise things and some very unwise things in their life. The elephant model proposes that it is mostly the non-cognitive components of wisdom (motives and emotional states) that vary across situations and drive the extent to which people are willing and able to utilize their cognitive wisdom components (Glück & Weststrate, 2022). Strong emotions or egocentric goals, for example, can lead people to act much less wisely than they could.

Does wisdom mean the same thing across historical periods, places, and cultures? Just as in most other fields of psychology, most wisdom research has been conducted in WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) parts of the world (Henrich et al., 2010). However, as wisdom draws on accumulated life experience, it may be even more culture-dependent than many other psychological concepts. What constitutes “a good life” is obviously influenced by the cultural and historical context and the social conditions a person lives in. I saw this most clearly when we investigated the meaning of wisdom among poor people in rural Uganda (Atwijukire & Glück, 2020). Participants there essentially defined wisdom as the ability to do the right thing under very challenging conditions—escaping poverty through hard work or extraordinary creativity, enabling one’s children to get an education when schools are far away and almost unaffordable—while at the same time remaining closely connected to one’s community, sharing the fruits of success with less fortunate others. The contrast to our “Western,” individualistic culture, where wisdom often means selecting what fits best for oneself from an abundance of options, was striking. Notably, the meaning of wisdom also varies by language. Farsi, for example, has three different words for aspects of wisdom, and while together they cover the concept domain of the English word “wisdom” or its German equivalent “Weisheit” (e.g., Asadi et al., 2019) quite well, they parse it in a different way than we do in our psychological models.

While wisdom may manifest itself in different ways depending on cultural contexts and circumstances, I do see strong commonalities across the cultural conceptions of wisdom that have been investigated (for overviews, see Ferrari & Alhosseini, 2019; Yang and Intezari, 2019). First, wisdom is considered across cultures to be about living a good life (Kekes, 1983; Kunzmann, 2004). Second, wisdom is consistently seen as involving aiming for a greater good—something larger and more important than oneself (Curnow, 1999; Sternberg, 1998, 2019). Third, wisdom is typically needed to resolve difficult problems (Bluck & Glück, 2004; Glück & Weststrate, 2022). Fourth, wisdom is usually about achieving some kind of balance (Sternberg, 1998, 2019, 2024a). In the words of Ursula Staudinger:

Wisdom concerns mastering the basic dialectics shaping human existence, such as the dialectic between good and bad, positivity and negativity, dependency and independence, certainty and doubt, control and lack of control, finiteness and eternity, strength and weakness, and selfishness and altruism. Mastery of such dialectics in the sense of wisdom does not mean that a decision for either one or the other side is taken but rather that both sides are essential for grasping human existence. Wisdom embraces these contradictions of life and draws insights from them. (Staudinger & Glück, 2011, p. 217)

Cultures have often been characterized using bipolar terminologies such as individualistic vs. collectivistic (Hofstede, 1991). Perhaps growth toward wisdom may mean outgrowing such cultural preconditions to some extent, becoming a bit more collectivist in an individualistic culture or a bit more individualist in a collectivistic one. (Along similar lines, Ardelt et al., 2020, found that wisdom was negatively related to gender-stereotypicality.) In general, however, I think it is important to take variability within as well as between cultures into account. For example, while humility and modesty have been described as characteristics of “Eastern” conceptions of wisdom, many “Western” people also consider them as typical for wise individuals (Glück & Bluck, 2011; Weststrate et al., 2016). I have not seen a cultural conception of wisdom that is in actual opposition to at least the broader ones among the wisdom models, such as the elephant model (Glück et al., 2019a, 2019b; Glück & Weststrate, 2022). The emphasis on different components of wisdom may differ, however, not just across situations but also across cultures and other contextual factors. I think it is very important (and humbling) for wisdom researchers to take the context-dependency of wisdom seriously, both concerning people’s conceptions of wisdom and its concrete real-life development and manifestation.

Michel Ferrari

Attributions of wisdom can be universal or situation-specific, so the answer to this question depends on the type of wisdom under discussion.

Situation-specific wisdom is deeply contextual: By analogy to hope or danger, situation-specific wisdom requires an appraisal of the interaction between oneself and the situation—including available resources and obstacles (Greimas, 1966/1983; Sternberg et al., 2023). And just as one can have false hope by deliberately or naively discounting risks that more informed people can reliably foresee, so too some appraisals of wisdom are considered false or foolish by more informed others. Situation-specific wisdom necessarily changes according to social, cultural, and historical circumstances, although often we can appreciate its meaning. Reading Homer’s Odyssey today, I still marvel at the craftiness of Odysseus. How—dressed as a beggar—Odysseus tricked the suitors who wanted to marry his wife and usurp his kingdom into throwing him his old bow that they were too weak to string themselves. But after they were trapped and begged for their lives and promised to repay him for everything they had taken, did he really have to kill them all? Maybe he did, since they might well have returned with reinforcements: Still, did he really have to kill all the servants who slept with the suitors too? To me, raised with axial values of charity, compassion, and redemption, this was unwise—but many ancient Greeks probably did not think so. The same point applies across domains: What is appraised as exemplary depends on the values and outcomes of an ideal performance in that domain. Wisdom in science and wisdom in business manifest differently because the prototypical aims and outcomes for ideal people and situations differ (Cantor & Mischel, 1977; Sternberg, 1985).

However, domain and culturally-specific manifestations of wisdom can sometimes express universal transcendental wisdom. When asked, King Pasenadi told the Buddha that he had been negotiating treaties and doing other kingly duties alien to virtually all contemporary readers. But when the Buddha then inquires what he would do if mountains destroying everything were closing in from all four directions, the king says: “What else could I do… except live by the Dhamma, act rightly, do what is wholesome and meritorious?” And the Buddha replies, “So it is, great king: aging and death are rolling in upon you. You cannot bargain with them; you cannot stop them or escape them…” (SN 3.25, Bodhi, 2000)—that reality remains universally true down to the present day, and many still consider the Buddha’s response to this universal truth wise.

Complicating the question further, non-English words translated as “wisdom” differ in semantic range in different languages and in different times and places, so we must be careful not to become “imprisoned in English” or any other language (Wierzbicka, 2013)—the Greek words phronesis and sophia did not have the same meaning for Homer as they did for Plato and Aristotle—who themselves had several meanings for those terms, some very different from the Buddhist understanding of prajna/panna (Kraemer, 2011; Moore, 2019), let alone the English word “wisdom.” Even so, direct reference to exemplars of these terms can improve or extend our understanding of the English word “wisdom,” because the actions of Odysseus and the Buddha are still worth contemplating—which explains why stories about them have been copied and translated for thousands of years, down to the present day.

Judith Glück

The elephant model of wisdom suggests two ways of developing wisdom: long-term development of people’s trait levels of wisdom and short-term activation of people’s state levels of wisdom in a given situation. As wisdom requires life knowledge, one could expect trait levels of wisdom to increase with age for everyone, but empirical findings do not support this assumption. Few people reach high levels of wisdom, and their developmental pathways tend to be somewhat idiosyncratic (Glück, 2019, 2024). Whether people grow wiser over their lifespan depends on how they reflect on experiences (Glück et al., 2019; Weststrate & Glück, 2017) and whether they are willing to learn from others (Auer-Spath & Glück, 2019; Igarashi et al., 2018). In addition to this “natural” development, wisdom traits can certainly be intentionally cultivated, and some research has looked into ways to train or teach wisdom (e.g., Bruya & Ardelt, 2018; Sternberg, 2001). Many psychosocial interventions, including psychotherapy, aim to foster wisdom-related qualities such as self-reflection, emotion regulation, or perspective-taking. I think the wisdom trait that may be hardest to train in adulthood is the motivation to work toward a greater good. At least in current “Western” societies, many people, including role models such as political leaders, are quite explicitly focused on maximizing their own or their group’s benefit over everyone else (Glück, n.d). Such general orientations are probably learned early in life and thus are hard to change later. Teaching someone like the current (2026) U.S. President to care about all of humanity (or even all of the U.S. population) seems futile.

In addition to interventions for trait-level growth in wisdom components, specific state-level strategies can be trained that can help people reason or act more wisely. For example, instructions to think about a problem in the third person rather than the first person, imagining that the problem concerns someone else rather than oneself, or imagining to look at the issue from far away can all boost wise reasoning (Grossmann & Kross, 2014; Kross & Grossmann, 2012), and engaging in such activities regularly over an extended period of time may even lead to habituation and trait-level growth (Grossmann et al., 2021). Staudinger and Baltes (1996) found that talking to another person about a problem and reflecting on the conversation afterward led to significant increases in wisdom, as did just imagining such a conversation. These findings support the notion that wisdom is learned from interactions with others (Igarashi et al., 2018).

To measure the success of wisdom interventions, a number of well-established measures are available (Glück & Brienza, 2025; online repository at https://osf.io/jk5xe/files/osfstorage). However, given the complexity of wisdom as a construct, it would be surprising if wisdom were easy to measure (Glück, 2018, 2022). The main challenge for capturing wisdom psychometrically is content validity. An ideally valid measure would need to assess people’s behavior in those challenging situations where wisdom manifests itself most clearly (Glück, 2018). Self-report wisdom scales (e.g., Ardelt, 2003; Glück et al., 2013; Koller et al., 2017; Thomas et al., 2019; Webster, 2007) are quick to administer and score, but they assess people’s ideas of themselves in general and may not adequately capture how wisely someone would truly deal with a real-life challenge. Open-ended wisdom problems (e.g., Baltes & Staudinger, 2000; Grossmann et al., 2010) are more costly in terms of time and effort, but they offer insights into people’s actual ability to reason wisely. However, theoretical problems may not capture a person’s real-life wisdom in challenging situations in their own life either. A promising recent approach uses a self-report to assess people’s wise reasoning concerning actual challenges from their own life (Brienza et al., 2018). There is still room for a lot of improvement in measuring wisdom (Glück & Brienza, 2025), and new technologies such as artificial intelligence may soon enable us to create virtual wisdom-requiring situations and evaluate people’s behaviors in more naturalistic ways.

Michel Ferrari

Wisdom is best developed through insight and expertise gained through informal, nonformal, and formal education (Smith, 2002). Informally, wisdom develops by internalizing examples of people we admire and consider wise in our own lives, and our own best moments of action or insight—these become prototypes of wisdom (Cantor & Mischel, 1977). Nonformal education through religious and philosophical traditions (Porcarelli & Guglielmi, 2025) develops wisdom through what Hadot (1995, 2023) called “spiritual exercises”; that is, practices designed to cultivate qualities associated with wisdom (attention, emotion regulation, relational or environmental attunement) that are subject to nonformal evaluation (e.g., level of mastery of the skills needed to become, for example, a yoga instructor) and through how closely one’s experience and actions align with canonical stories about cultural-historical wisdom figures like Socrates, Confucius, Jesus, or the Buddha, or to contemporary figures whose narratives fit prototypes of such wisdom. Nonformally, teacher and lineage matter to the very meaning of, for example, Christian or Islamic wisdom (Brague, 2015).

Sometimes, public schools try to formally teach skills associated with developing informal or nonformal wisdom. Although the meaning of wisdom, and hence what specifically one is trying to cultivate, depend on background assumptions about what people need to understand about humanity and reality to live the best life, these different learning contexts typically share key features appraised as wisdom. For example, cultivating dynamic metajudgment (Grossmann & Eibach, 2024)—or more generally metaconscious appraisals (Pinard, 1992)—through: attending to personal experience, time, or motives through mindful self-observation, or behavioral experiments. Another important consideration is attributions about learning: If people judge themselves incapable of becoming wise, that judgment itself needs to be dispelled before any teaching method will be effective (Alhosseini & Ferrari, 2020).

Can development of wisdom be measured? Superficially, there are as many ways to measure wisdom as there are empirical studies employing different methods to do so. Measuring wisdom development needs a before-after design. But a further issue is whether one’s motive is to assess wisdom as general impersonal instrumental knowledge, or as personal interpretive or critical knowledge in which one meaningfully participates (Habermas, 1970; Staudinger & Glück, 2011; Vervaeke et al., 2024). So-called “general wisdom” is measured by social-science methods adapted to the study of wisdom; for example, when self-report questionnaires originally designed to assess personality attributes are used to assess attributes associated with a particular theory of wisdom (Ardelt, 2003; Webster, 2007); or vignettes originally used by cognitive science to assess expertise in solving ill-defined problems are used to address problems associated with “the fundamental pragmatics of life” (Baltes & Smith, 1990, 2008). By contrast, so-called personal wisdom is often studied through narrative methods in which people explain their understanding of a life problem and how they resolved it (using situated experience techniques adapted from moral or interpersonal psychology (Brienza et al., 2018) or critical incident methods (Yang, 2011)). Personal interpretive understanding of wisdom is also studied through implicit theories methodology, sometimes compared across cultures (Yang and Intezari, 2019) or professions (Sternberg, 1985). And the creative adaptation of existing methods to study wisdom continues, as we see in recent reviews (Glück & Weststrate, 2022; Zhang et al., 2022), and includes the use of exemplar autobiography (Ferrari et al., n.d) and large language models (LLMs) (Stavropoulos et al., 2024) to study wisdom.

Going beyond psychology to other social sciences, we see an even wider range of methods including: systematic self-observation in advertising (Mick et al., 2012); neighborhood wisdom in sociology (Berardi, 2020); and studies of specific texts—both culturally significant religious texts like the Bible (Dell et al., 2022) or the Bhagavad-Gita (Couture, 2021), and literary texts (Domínguez-Rué, 2018).

But, as personal critical knowledge, I’m not sure wisdom can be measured the way the circumference of the Earth or shared meaning can be measured, because critical wisdom needs to change someone (Habermas, 1970). Let me give a personal example: A few years ago, as part of a study, we asked older adults people in Canada and other countries to “think of a moment in your life when you were wise.” A man of 90 to whom I posed this question answered something like: “Last year, I was stepping onto the bus, and I slipped and fell and broke my hip.” Confused, I asked: “So, missing the step was wise?” “No,” he answered, “that was incredibly unfortunate. I spent months in the hospital, and it took a long time for me to recover. But my life changed in that moment. And to realize that every moment of your life has that potential: I think that’s wise.” This interview took place almost 20 years ago, but I still think it was the wisest thing I heard in that study. The speaker was not famous, but in a profound sense, I find that he echoes wisdom traditions like Taoism, and that he is right. How can we measure this kind of wisdom? True, we can document it and consider the circumstances around its emergence and its universal truth—but in the end, its wisdom is seen through the critical transformation it evoked in me, or you—the reader. Any secondary measurement of that change seems trivial.

Judith Glück

In my view, wisdom can be a characteristic of a system or collective at least as much as a characteristic of a person. As mentioned earlier, situational and contextual factors can have positive or negative effects on how wisely people behave. Situational aspects influence which goals a person is pursuing in a conflict situation, whether they establish an in-depth understanding of a problem before making a decision, or whether they consider divergent perspectives and uncertainty. Therefore, systems or structures for how groups of people work or live together can be designed that enable or even elicit wisdom or that do not support or even that block wisdom. For example, Surowiecki (2004) argued that groups can make wiser decisions than even their wisest individual members, but only if the group members are heterogeneous in the knowledge they bring to the task and if the group establishes a culture that values and aims to integrate those different perspectives. If one person dominates the group, for example, the group cannot be wiser than that dominant person.

I have recently argued that democratic systems of government are designed to elicit components of wisdom in those who govern as well as those who vote (Glück, n.d). The constitutions of democratic countries are designed with the goal of “forcing” leaders to work for the greater good of the whole population, build their decisions on as much sound knowledge as possible, and take divergent perspectives into account. We are currently seeing in the United States how the design of such wisdom-fostering systems can come under stress when individuals with highly unwise goals come to power. Many other systems for how people live and work together have features that are designed to foster elements of wisdom, even if wisdom was not explicitly considered in building them. Examples include the peer-review system in academia, systems for institutional learning from errors in medical institutions, or governance structures in corporations designed to enable participation and consideration of the needs of workers.

I believe that if we want to ensure the long-term survival of our species and our planet, we need to think beyond teaching wisdom to individuals in our educational systems, but we also need to think about how we can design stable, wisdom-fostering systems of collaboration and governance.

Michel Ferrari

I think wisdom can be an attribution made to systems and collectives. Thich Nhat Hanh famously said that: “The next Buddha may not be an individual. The next Buddha may be a Sangha, a community practicing mindfulness and loving-kindness”. The most obvious research example of this is “the wisdom of crowds” (Surowiecki, 2004). The basic finding of that entire body of work is that, under the right conditions, people are much better at problem solving collectively than most are individually.

In a different vein, redundancy and division of labor lead to better outcomes. In this way, wisdom can extend beyond the individual to institutions and systems/procedures that coordinate us, like medical and legal systems or wise businesses (Ardelt et al., 2020) in which people work together, with redundancy and cross-checking, to reduce error and assure better outcomes. Redundancy means that more than one person’s attention and knowledge are in play, overcoming bias or distraction (e.g., pilot and air traffic control confirm each other’s instructions; doctors and nurses verify each other’s plans or intentions).

Sometimes no one need be present: Traffic signals and speed limits make us all wiser drivers, in that they contribute to our collective flourishing by decreasing our chances of being injured or dying in an accident, using an honor system with the risk of a big penalty for offenders who are caught cheating. An interesting study used monastic rules for ethical conduct in business settings to flexibly coordinate and improve an entire organization (Ruppenthal, 2019); others have proposed ecological wisdom that considers urban systems and the climate emergency and wise ways to address them (Steiner, 2018; Zhang & Li, 2024).

This is essentially distributed cognition (Hutchins, 1995) and activity theory (Engeström & Sannino, 2021) extended to wisdom. Activity theory, especially, gives a way to understand the collective and institutional power of collective effort—both for effective action, and through transformation for social justice (see also Sternberg & Soleimani Dashtaki, 2024).

Collective wisdom is also embodied in tools: we are all wiser at cutting paper when we have a pair of scissors, if we know how to use them. Higher-order cognition relies on psychological tools: for example, memory was vastly improved by writing (Vygotsky, 1997), but how much more so by Google searches and AI tools that let us access and synthesize more information than the greatest ancient libraries. Incredibly, AI has itself begun to be used as a tool to read an ancient library of scrolls fossilized during the eruption of Vesuvius (Sample, 2025). Ancient sages memorized the Vedas and the Koran, but even the greatest ancient sage could not match modern memory augmented by computer databases and archives; still, perhaps understanding is more important than access to texts. Plato famously said that the invention of writing made people less wise (Phaedrus 274c–275b). So, although these tools let us share wisdom collectively, we need teachers who help us to master them, and to use them wisely in concert with others to understand things deeply.

Judith Glück

As discussed earlier, wisdom is a complex construct that orchestrates several cognitive and non-cognitive components as required by a problem. As each of these components can be compromised in a given situation, the list of possible obstacles to wisdom is quite long (which may be one explanation for why wise behavior is so rare). Obstacles can be personal, as when a person is simply lacking a trait component of wisdom, or contextual, as when features of a situation are detrimental to wisdom. Here are some examples of obstacles to the components of the elephant model (Glück & Weststrate, 2022) that may be particularly important in today’s world.

An exploratory orientation may be compromised whenever a person has good reason to not strive for an in-depth understanding of a complex issue. For example, for a politician to get elected, it may actually be more effective to proffer simple, bold solutions to complex problems, such as calling climate change a “con job. ¹ ” There are many possible obstacles to a greater-good orientation, such as strong ingroup favoritism or simply personally disliking one’s opponent in a conflict. Emotion regulation is obviously difficult in highly emotionally challenging situations, but adequate consideration of emotions may also be difficult when emotional involvement is too low, such as when a politician has no personal relationship to a subgroup of their constituents and therefore does not consider their strong feelings about an issue. There are certainly individual differences in life knowledge—not everyone reflects on life challenges in ways that can foster the kind of expertise that wisdom draws on (Weststrate & Glück, 2017)—but people may also draw either too much or too little upon their life knowledge in situations that are outside their usual domains of experience. Awareness of the limitations of one’s knowledge, arguably the most important component of wise thinking, can be compromised in many ways. For example, people in certain roles (such as teachers, doctors, or, again, politicians) may feel that they are expected to know everything and need to act accordingly. Self-reflection is closely related to epistemic humility; one typical obstacle is simply not being exposed to critical feedback, as in the case of politicians surrounding themselves with people who are paid for agreeing to everything they say.

To summarize, there are many obstacles to wisdom, and some features of the world in the 21^st century, such as social media and political polarization, may contribute considerably to the widespread non-wisdom shown both by “ordinary people” and by decision-makers, including world leaders (Glück, n.d). Figuring out how these self-reinforcing patterns of non-wisdom can be reversed may be one of the most important challenges for psychology at this time (Glück & Brienza, 2025).

Michel Ferrari

I see at least five main obstacles to the expression of wisdom, broadly conceived: misplaced priorities, delusion, ignorance, lack of discipline, and lack of imagination. These often work together or remain impossible to distinguish in particular cases.

A major obstacle is getting priorities wrong. I agree with Vives (1524), who said 500 years ago that wisdom involves valuing things correctly—although, for him, correct valuing was to manifest Christian values. While we can debate ultimate values and priorities, attributions of wisdom always involve understanding and acting in alignment with them (Mascolo & Stammberger, 2024). In many wisdom traditions, wise people would rather die than betray their core values. But what stops us from arriving at a correct valuing of priorities? Two related obstacles are ignorance and delusion. Ignorance means one does not realize the value, or lacks the skill or the discipline needed to manifest it.

Delusion means one is mistaken about reality, sometimes leading to a narrow moral horizon that values the wrong things, or values them too narrowly. We are considered wise when we help those we care about, but who falls in our circle of care—our moral horizon? Some people have a narrow horizon limited to themselves, their family, and their friends, because through ignorance or delusion, they don’t understand that we are all connected, and that concern for others shows what the Dalai Lama (2026) calls “wise self-interest.” For example, people who believe they should not pay to fund public education because they don’t have children, are ignorant of the reality that they will interact with people who come out of that education system every day, in virtually every aspect of their life, and that if those people are poorly educated, many things will go much worse for them. Likewise, sometimes people are deluded in their understanding of their situation; for example, believing it is totally safe to drive 100 miles per hour on the highway because they have done it before and never had an accident, attributing that result to their skill as a driver, when all it would take is one unexpected event to dispel that illusion through a major crash.

Still another obstacle is lack of imagination. Even if one has a wide moral horizon, and is not deluded about the importance of the widely held principle that one should “do to others as you would have them do to you” (Luke 6:31) or, put another way, “never impose on others what you would not choose for yourself” (Analects 15:24), the question remains: Can I imagine what others actually want done and how to do it—and not believe that they want exactly what I want? It takes both imagination and understanding to put ourselves in others’ shoes and act accordingly, and not everyone is equally good at that.

Finally, some people can know what to do in an abstract way but lack the discipline (and the courage) to actually do what needs to be done. While it is easy to say that one must speak truth to power, most people would rather not, because it will cost them in ways they want to avoid; sometimes, they might even fear for their life. Or people may simply be disorganized and lack perseverance, so that they give up before they see results of their efforts.

When considered in combination, along with the many ways any skilled performance can go wrong, we can understand why wisdom is rare, and why even historical wisdom exemplars are only wise in some aspects of their life, or on certain occasions, but foolish in others.

Living the Good Life

The phraseology “living the good life” is, to me, uncomfortably vague, and may imply, to some people, a materialistic good life, to others, a type of emotional good life (e.g., personal happiness), and to yet others, a sort of spiritual good life (e.g., faithfully serving God or some other spiritual being). If, however, one uses an “exemplar model” of meaning to derive what is common to exceptionally wise people in history—such as Socrates, Abraham Lincoln, Mohandas Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Alexei Navalny, Malala Yousafzai—it is not at all clear that all or perhaps any of them led lives that were so happy in any of these senses. Four of them were brutally attacked, with three of them dying as a result. A fifth was imprisoned for many years. All of them endured great hardships. Their lives were not materially full of material riches, but were full of unhappiness, and they often were spiritually challenged. Unlike many of my esteemed colleagues, I do not see wisdom as being much about leading the “good life,” which to many people involves only their own happiness, self-fulfillment and, too often, self-aggrandizement. Few truly wise people lead the prototypical “good life.” I see wisdom as being about doing the right thing in the face of challenges and often severe adversity—because it is the right thing, and because that is reason enough to do it. I believe the Western obsession with happiness—the basis for the most popular course in history at Yale University—leads people to focus on themselves, not to be wise.

Wisdom is not, typically, a path to any kind of personal “good life” as people usually imagine it. Rather, what the lives of the wise have in common is the promotion of a common good for humanity (Glück & Brienza, 2025; Sternberg, 2024a) and the formation of a model for living that emphasizes noble sacrifice in the face of staggering challenges. The wise are often tormented souls, realizing how much in the world is not as it should be. If such a challenged life is what a “good life” is, I accept the term, but I suspect that is not what most people have in mind.

Measurement of Wisdom

Psychologists, trained as they are and being unduly influenced by the history of the testing of intelligence and personality, often readily gravitate toward measurement of individual traits. That is what they are taught to do. But in the case of wisdom, I believe this sort of psychometric approach is a red herring. Again, in the light of great exemplars of wisdom, what distinguishes these exemplars is not merely a set of traits—based on intellect, personality, emotions, or even spirit—but rather their actions in the service of humankind. Wisdom inheres in action, not merely in one’s advanced cognitive, personal, emotional, or spiritual development. All that advancement often, probably usually, serves for little in the face of the adversity the world presents one. If we adopt a Mensa-mentality for wisdom, where a high level of a score on some kind of psychological test is taken as a criterion for desired behavior rather than as a predictor of it, we are in trouble. And self-report tests of wisdom are truly fraught: Not only are they merely measures of one’s implicit theory of one’s own wisdom, but they also encounter the paradox of epistemic humility: Someone who rates themselves as very wise is, by the definition of wisdom, not all so wise after all. Thus, one could as well argue that a low score rather than a high score might signify wisdom. I believe no score in itself says much about true wisdom—the wisdom that is revealed in action.

Wisdom of the Crowd

I am deeply skeptical of the wisdom of the crowd. In a time when multiple countries, including my own, are (a) enthusiastically electing dictators and would-be dictators, (b) supporting the development of the poorly understood AI super-intelligence that may destroy them (Brundage et al., 2018; Yudkowsky & Soares, 2025), and (c) neglecting or working against solutions to problems such as pollution, climate change, autocracy, income disparity, homelessness, and violence, simply relying on diverse points of view and integration of them does not seem to have produced a whole lot of wisdom.

I am deeply skeptical of AI, and especially Generative AI, not necessarily because of the particular tasks it can perform or how it performs them, but rather because it is reducing our intelligence, creativity, and wisdom (Gerlich, 2025; Kosmyna et al., 2025; Power et al., 2015; Sternberg, 2024b, 2026) through cognitive offloading. But it is doing so slowly and, to many, imperceptibly, so that we are becoming the legendary (but not real) frogs in boiling water who do not notice that our brains are being slowly boiled, or fried, or mashed through cognitive offloading, intellectual laziness, and the illusion that we can, cost-free, have a machine do the complex intellectual work for us that we should be doing. Already, we know that AI influences our thinking in subtle ways of which we are unaware (Williams-Ceci et al., n.d). We think we are controlling the AI, when slowly, it is coming to control us. This is what happens when a society is driven by profit (for the already wealthy) at any cost, greed, intellectual laziness, and acceptance of mediocracy, whether in schools, companies, governance, or personal interactions.

There are many diverse people who support evil dictators or climate-destroying industries for diverse reasons—economic, political, social, or otherwise ideological. Diversity of viewpoints does not necessarily produce wisdom. In any case, one finds in the crowd mostly onlookers who tacitly approve of deeply suboptimal problem solving or who leave it to others to act. Wisdom derives not from crowds, but rather from principles of action that lead to the seeking of a long-term as well as short-term common good (for all, not just people like oneself), by balancing all stakeholder interests, through ethical means of action.

If one wants to see how crowds act, one can read Surowiecki (2004), but might learn more from LeBon (1947) on crowd behavior, by reading the history of how society dealt with witchcraft in Salem or imagined Communists during the U.S. era of “Red-baiting” Senator Joseph McCarthy, or simply by watching Leni Riefenstahl’s cinematic nightmare classic, Triumph of the Will. If we teach people to think wisely, we must be sure that the third-person personae they simulate are not those of others who, whether they realize it or not, share their own ignorance, biases, prejudices, or even questionable intentions, or whose intentions are even worse.

In Kafka’s (1937) The Trial, the innocent Joseph K. seeks the advice of many diverse individuals for how, in an unjust world, to avoid punishment. Joseph K. gets a great deal of supposedly wise advice but nevertheless ends up being executed (for no discernible reason). In Kafka's (1937/1958/1969/1998) The Castle, a different K. fights an impenetrable maze of mindless bureaucracy and people’s mindless obedience to it in search of his destiny (as a land-surveyor), but to no avail. What we need most is a world that values wisdom rather than trashing it, and too often ignoring, punishing, or killing those who nobly exemplify it. The year 1984 has passed, but a world of Orwellian 1984-like subjugation (Orwell, 1949) seems, in these times, closer than a world of Socratic or other wisdom.

Judith Glück

Reading my colleagues’ responses to the symposium questions was both fun and fascinating, as they represent two quite different streams of thinking within wisdom psychology. Robert J. Sternberg’s previous accounts of wisdom (Sternberg, 1998, 2019) built on his background in intelligence research; his recent Tree of Philosophy (TOP) theory (Sternberg et al., 2024), building on Western philosophy, also focuses on thinking as the key to wise action in the face of problems with conflicting interests. Michel Ferrari’s account focuses on wise living, drawing on philosophical and spiritual traditions that emphasize pursuit of a good, or fulfilled life. The two concepts are clearly related—a person living wisely would be expected to think and act wisely—but they emphasize different aspects. My own more recent work has been focused on wise problem-solving—trying to understand what would be needed to solve the large-scale problems that are challenging our survival on this planet at the moment.

I think at least two aspects of wisdom are common across all our perspectives, and they happen to be the same that Grossmann et al. (2021) identified as a common denominator among conceptions of wisdom as well: a way of thinking characterized by multiperspectivity and epistemic humility, and an orientation directed toward some kind of greater good. Both aspects have been studied in psychology, but not quite as much as many other capacities. Research on cognition has tended to focus on how people solve clear-cut problems that have clear-cut solutions. Wisdom problems are complex, dynamic, and multifactorial (Glück & Brienza, 2025); therefore, solutions need to be incremental, involving constant reevaluation and redirection. We need to get a better understanding of the cognitive processes that can produce wise solutions to such problems: how to ask the right questions to, how to represent complex problems adequately, and how to design, evaluate, and adapt pathways toward sustainable solutions. Artificial intelligence may be able to help us with that, but it can, of course, also be used for deeply unwise purposes.

The second aspect of wisdom, “orientation toward some greater good,” sounds a bit vague. It clearly implies the overruling of selfish impulses for the sake of something more important, which is how Haidt (2024) defined morality. But moral psychology does not help us much with respect to how to define the greater good, or to decide between several possible greater goods, in complex problem situations (Glück & Brienza, 2025). For example, many people who engage themselves politically do so because they want to better the world, not just for themselves but for the sake of others. However, different ideologies involve different and sometimes directly opposing ideas about what is best for the world. Looking back at the early phases of the COVID pandemic, for example, governments constantly had to weigh the positive and negative outcomes and byproducts of any measures they took to prevent spreading of the virus, making decisions about which groups to protect, to what extent, and at what cost. Making such decisions wisely requires consideration of values; as Michel Ferrari writes, wisdom “necessarily combines fact and value.” Psychology has long been very cautious about values. I remember a discussion at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, where Paul B. Baltes had initiated the first large-scale empirical research program on wisdom (see, e.g., Baltes & Staudinger, 2000). Baltes was quite adamant that questions concerning whether some value orientations are “better” than others were in the realm of ethics, not of psychology. (Some typical psychologists’ values, such as a preference for liberalism and tolerance, may still have crept into our conceptions of wisdom. Note, however, that even illiberal and intolerant people imagine wise individuals to be more liberal and tolerant than themselves; see Glück et al., 2020.) I wonder if psychology can still afford abstaining from discussions of current values , and I believe that many other researchers agree (e.g., Sternberg, 2025). With political polarization on the rise and hate and personal greed increasingly being modeled by world leaders, I do not see how global problems like climate change can be solved if we do not start having more explicit discussions about what counts as a greater good.

Another aspect that all three of us agree on is that wisdom should not be viewed exclusively as a stable trait. Wisdom problems require different wisdom components, and those components are influenced by contextual factors. As Paul Baltes (and Aristotle) argued, wisdom orchestrates mind and virtue—that is, wisdom is a sort of meta-capacity that knows, based on long-term expertise, when and how to use which cognitive and non-cognitive capacities in a given problem context (Baltes & Staudinger, 2000). Manifestations of wisdom are, therefore, the result of a person x problem x context interaction. This interaction implies that wisdom interventions should not be limited to teaching wisdom as a trait, although that is certainly important. As mentioned earlier, we also need to study how contextual factors can be tweaked to foster wise behavior. Such contextual tweaks can reach from a small group’s rules for collective decision-making to how the constitution of a nation ensures the consideration of divergent perspectives.

One central question, however, comes back to the value aspect of wisdom: how do we teach people to care about a greater good? Cognitive wisdom capacities can certainly be taught and practiced, but it may be more difficult to teach which goals these capacities should be used toward. Teaching is certainly important: Sternberg (2019a, 2019b) found that the morals of stories in reading textbooks for children have changed from caring about others to caring about oneself. This is an indicator of changes in the basic values of our society that we are (more or less intentionally) teaching our children. If we want our children to internalize concern for others early on, we need to model the behaviors we want to teach, in textbooks but also as teachers, parents, and authority figures in general—quite a challenge in times when political leaders are excellent models of greed and selfishness.

How can we redesign our school systems and perhaps also rethink some ideas about parenting to promote and demonstrate concern for others over individual striving? I believe there are good ways to do that, but I agree with Bob Sternberg that it is unlikely to happen as long as authorities do not want to promote wisdom. After World War II, the Western world agreed that atrocities like those committed by the Nazis must not happen again, ever. This consensus held up for quite a long time, but now I wonder whether horrible things need to happen again for humanity to realize that it is destroying itself.

To some extent, the different perspectives of the three researchers involved in this symposium are also differences in “Menschenbild,” our implicit or explicit conceptions of human nature: Bob Sternberg is at times highly pessimistic, arguing, for example, that “people are attracted to simple ideas that portray them as victims.” Michel Ferrari has a more optimistic view, focusing on traditional and modern ways people can learn wisdom. I believe that the contexts and systems people live in have a strong influence on what they want in life, and that the current combination of unchecked capitalism (in many countries of the world) and enormous power of digital media (virtually everywhere) is quite dangerous.

To end on a less depressing note, I would like to also touch upon methods for studying wisdom. Michel Ferrari convincingly argues that wisdom is primarily recognized by others, and often only in retrospect. Psychological wisdom measures are mostly trait-type self-report scales or open-ended measures using problem vignettes (see Glück & Brienza, 2025, for a more extensive discussion and an open-source repository of measures). I would like to propose that qualitative methods are essential for understanding wise thinking and action. If we want to get beyond making very general claims about the broad capacities that wisdom involves, we need to look at what these things mean and how they can be achieved in concrete problem contexts.

Michel Ferrari

I find Judith Glück’s Elephant model (Glück & Weststrate, 2022) very elegant to include non-cognitive elements like “an orientation toward exploration and the greater good” and “the need to identify, understand, and regulate emotions” a cognitive aspect of “expert knowledge about life, people, and oneself” and meta-awareness of one’s response—which includes a willingness and ability to self-reflect on one’s cognition, as well as metaconscious awareness of one’s emotions and intentions that depend on the specific situation (Pinard, 1992). Likewise, I’m sympathetic to Bob Sternberg’s tree-of-philosophy (TOP) theory of wisdom (Sternberg et al., 2024) and its seven branches—epistemology, ontology, ethics, logic, aesthetics, hermeneutics and axiology—which necessarily apply to different degrees across persons, tasks, and situations. I think the TOP theory provides a wide range of aspects to consider that extend the elephant model—for example, moral beauty, a virtually unstudied aspect of wisdom (but see Morris, 2025). However, I agree with Chen et al., (2011, 2014) that not all wisdom is about solving problems; wisdom sometimes involves implementing ideals. And whether something is considered wise or foolish depends on one’s ultimate values and aspirations for human life (Masscolo & Stammberger, 2024); for example, that problem-solutions or implementations be sustainable, support a common good, and extend to environmental systems and future generations.

I also agree with Judith Glück that research from Igor Grossmann’s lab supports the view that wise behavior varies within individuals and across situations (Brienza et al., 2018; Grossmann et al., 2021). And it seems likely that this variation depends on situation-specific motives and emotional states that influence how willing and able people are to engage cognitively and compassionately with particular situations (Glück & Weststrate, 2022). I also agree with her that most wisdom research has been conducted in WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) parts of the world (Henrich et al., 2010), which may skew our empirical evidence about wisdom. The very idea that wisdom draws on accumulated life experience is a WEIRD idea.

Even if wisdom helps in living a good life (Grimm, 2014; Kekes, 1983), which Bob Sternberg disputes, there is no consensus on what such a life entails. Indeed, even if wisdom involves contributing to something bigger and more important than oneself and achieving balance (Sternberg, 1998, 2019, 2024a)—or perhaps harmony, as he suggests, what counts, and how broadly does that consideration extend? This remains unresolved. Likewise, there are many ways to imagine and therefore master “the basic dialectics shaping human existence.” However, while wisdom is always a person x task x situation interaction (Sternberg, 2024b), and while we all agree that wisdom is time and context-dependent, I think our conceptions of wisdom itself, its manifestations, and its development, vary by culture, domain, task, and (sometimes tacit) knowledge (e.g., Ferrari & Weststrate, 2013; Glück & Weststrate, 2022; Grossmann, 2021; Staudinger, 2019). And yet I continue to believe that some transcendent aspects of wisdom remain integral to appraisals of wisdom across contexts, like those identified by the elephant and TOP models.

It seems equally important to recognize the distinction made by Judith Glück that developing wisdom can refer to either situational short-term activation of state-level wisdom or to long-term development of traits associated with wisdom. Clearly, whether people grow wiser depends on their own and others’ experiences and how people reflect on those experiences (Auer-Spath & Glück, 2019; Glück et al., 2019; Igarashi et al., 2018; Weststrate & Glück, 2017). Beyond this informal “natural” development, wisdom traits can be intentionally cultivated (Hadot’s spiritual exercises, or Foucault’s technologies of self), whether in nonformal religious or self-help contexts or psychosocial interventions (including psychotherapy) (Flynn, 2005).

All these approaches foster wisdom-related qualities like self-reflection, emotion regulation, or perspective-taking, sometimes through formal exercises. However, Sternberg et al. (2024) are right to say that whatever knowledge and skills schools are developing, they are not necessarily those that lead to wisdom. It is troubling to find that basal readers in the United States placed between 1900 and 2000 place less and less emphasis on teaching for wisdom (Sternberg, 2019a, 2019b). But although, in principle, there are ways of teaching for wisdom that schools could use (Ferrari et al., 2022), I am not convinced the TOP model is directly useful here, except perhaps as a way to analyze or categorize wisdom-fostering exercises and identify gaps among them. Nor do I agree with Judith Glück that the hardest wisdom trait to train in adulthood is a motivation to work toward a greater good—rather, I think people need to achieve a level of “ego development” in which they understand that contributing to the greater good is to their direct benefit—what the Dalai Lama (2026) calls “wise self-interest.”

Although decades of wisdom research have produced well-established measures, Judith Glück proposes that a main challenge is item content validity, and the need to assess people in those challenging situations (Glück, 2018); however, while open-ended wisdom problems presented in narrative vignettes (e.g., Baltes & Staudinger, 2000; Grossmann et al., 2010) offer insights into people’s ability to reason wisely, I agree with Bob Sternberg that they may not capture the people's real-life performance. The only study I know that addressed wisdom in real-life performance was that of Eghbali et al. (2022), who showed a direct impact of the perceived situation on wisdom. In a different vein, while artificial intelligence may help create virtual wisdom-requiring situations, or evaluate people’s behaviors in more naturalistic ways, because wisdom is a situation-specific appraisal, I continue to think it will remain hard to measure (Glück, 2018, 2022), if it can be measured instrumentally it at all.

Additionally, we all agree that wisdom can be a characteristic of a system or collective at least as much as a characteristic of a particular person, and that situational and contextual factors can positively or negatively impact how wisely people behave. Systems or structures for how groups of people work or live together can enable, elicit or sometimes block wisdom. Surowiecki (2004) argued that groups can make wiser decisions than their wisest individual members, but only if the group members vary in the knowledge they bring to the task, and if the group values and aims to integrate different perspectives. Thus, many systems for how people live and work together have features designed to foster elements of wisdom, even if wisdom was not explicitly considered in building them. Examples include the systems for institutional learning from errors in medical institutions, and political and corporate governance structures designed to consider the needs of citizens and workers. Indeed, to ensure our long-term survival, we need to think beyond teaching wisdom to individuals. I agree with Judith Glück that we need to design stable, wisdom-fostering systems of collaboration and governance. But Bob Sternberg is right to note several common group dynamics that can make it difficult for larger entities to be or remain wise (some specifically noted by Surowiecki), including: groupthink, fear of punishment; peer pressure; dominance of high-status or vocal members; unequal information sharing; polarization; diffusion of responsibility; emotional contagion; conflict of interest; and even sabotage.

Finally, I agree with the obstacles to developing wisdom Bob Sternberg identifies, beyond those at the group level just mentioned: Students are not taught to think wisely because many find it too complex, taxing, or uncomfortable, and simple memes and slogans offer easy closure that requires no personal reasonability or action. But I think Judith Glück has a more comprehensive answer in saying that, because wisdom is a complex construct that involves many cognitive and non-cognitive aspects, and because any subset these components can be compromised in any given situation, the obstacles to wisdom are many and varied—perhaps infinite. True, teachers don’t teach for wisdom because teaching for wisdom is hard and might take a lot of classroom time, standardized tests don’t assess for wisdom, and many political systems that set policies that orient the educational curricula do not want a wise population. But I think the wider reason for lack of wisdom is certainly that people often have competing priorities and ill-defined value hierarchies that make situations confusing to them, hindering their ability to act wisely. People may also lack specific attentional or emotional skills or knowledge needed to act wisely in a particular situation. This is what makes attempts to teach for wisdom so difficult and so varied (Ferrari et al., 2022) and why advocacy based on personal experience with similar issues is often so compelling and effective (Habibagahi & Ferrari, 2024).