… and the Wisdom to Know the Difference: Scholarly Success From a Wisdom Perspective

Component 1: wanting to understand, not to win

First, wise researchers are motivated by a desire to truly understand whatever it is they are studying more than by a desire to be right (Ardelt, 2003). They are striving for truth, for broad and deep knowledge of the phenomena they are studying, for comprehending them in as unbiased a way as possible. Wise researchers are aware of the complexity of the human psyche and wary of oversimplifying (Glück & Bluck, 2013). As they know that psychological phenomena can hardly ever be completely explained or predicted, they are fully aware of their uncertainty and context dependence (Baltes & Staudinger, 2000; Glück & Bluck, 2013; Grossmann et al., 2010). Wise researchers know the limitations of what they (can) know, but they also know how to use our empirical and statistical methodologies to establish as much certainty as is possible.

The desire to understand implicates critical self-reflection (Ardelt, 2003; Glück & Bluck, 2013; Grossmann et al., 2010; Webster, 2007); wise individuals are open to new ideas and perspectives, even on issues where they have a strong opinion. They are willing to question their views and change them if convinced, and they are ready to acknowledge and integrate relevant ideas from other researchers. Wise researchers try to design studies so that their hypotheses can be disproved rather than to maximize the likelihood that they are confirmed. They are skeptical concerning the validity of methods for measuring constructs and analyzing data, and they try to replicate and strengthen their own findings before they publish them. In dealing with empirical evidence, wise researchers aim at a broader and deeper understanding rather than at confirmation and closure, just as wise individuals in general learn and grow from reflecting on life experiences (Weststrate & Glück, 2017).

Over time, wise researchers’ desire to thoroughly understand should lead them to develop an extraordinary amount of knowledge: a broad and deep integrative understanding of a subject matter that includes a keen awareness of what they do not (and may never) know. Wisdom-related knowledge is factual as well as procedural (Baltes & Staudinger, 2000), tacit as well as explicit (Sternberg, 1998), and it includes awareness of its own limitations (Brugman, 2006; Grossmann et al., 2010).

Compared with researchers who are mostly focused on their personal success, however, wise researchers may be less motivated to publish their work in highly visible, competitive outlets because their intrinsic motivation is focused on learning and not on external rewards and honors. A combination of both—being driven by a desire to understand and being able to communicate one’s understanding, in all its complexity, to others—would seem optimal. (In fact, having tacit knowledge about how to get one’s stuff published may be part of scholarly wisdom; Sternberg, 1998.)

Component 2: caring about a greater good

In addition to the self-reflective, learning-oriented way of thinking that I just described, wisdom entails a strong ethical orientation (Sternberg, 2013). Wise individuals care about a greater good; their decisions and actions aim at outcomes that balance their own needs with those of others and of society at large (Sternberg, 1998). They are self-transcendent in that their behavior is not guided by a need to reinforce their own ego and is independent of external sources of reward (Levenson, Jennings, Aldwin, & Shiraishi, 2005). Wise individuals show higher levels of moral development than others (Pasupathi & Staudinger, 2001); they consider general ethical principles such as fairness or concern for others in whatever they do. I would also assume, although no research has investigated this question yet, that wise individuals have a high level of moral centrality (Aquino & Reed, 2002); they consider ethical behavior an important aspect of their identity. At the same time, they are aware of the diversity of value systems across individuals and cultures (Baltes & Staudinger, 2000).

In research contexts, an ethical orientation manifests itself on several levels. Wise researchers will be concerned with the well-being of others, ranging from their students to the world at large. Inside the university, wise researchers will care about the quality of their teaching. They will contemplate their teaching goals (probably favoring critical thinking skills over factual knowledge) and the methods they use to achieve them, and they will try to constantly improve their teaching skills. Wise researchers are also caring, generative mentors who seriously work on supporting the career development of their mentees and genuinely enjoy their success (see Luthar, 2017; this issue, p. 1156). In addition, they will do their share of the administrative chores that take away research time from all of us but are necessary to maintain the functioning of our institutions. They also care about the broader implications of their research for humanity and the world. This does not mean that wise researchers always work in fields that are immediately relevant to the world outside; I think it would be very dangerous to start evaluating research by its applicability. However, I would expect wise researchers to care about the directions their larger field takes and to think about where it can achieve something beneficial to a larger part of humanity or the world.

It seems likely that if wise researchers care about societal issues, they would also be inclined to communicate their ideas and findings to a larger public in addition to academia. In doing so, however, they would be highly aware of the risks of oversimplifying complex issues. If someone has found out that about 50% of the variance of human intelligence is determined by “nature” and the other 50% by “nurture,” there are very different ways of communicating this result, ranging from “a large portion of intelligence is innate, so let’s focus on the smart kids” to “a large portion of intelligence is environmental, so you need to train your kids from Day 1 on.” A wise researcher might try to figure out how to communicate the complex way that nature and nurture can interact and to derive reasonable, balanced recommendations.

Wisdom in publications

What makes a manuscript successful? If I knew the answer, my h index would be far higher, but here are a few observations. First, psychology seems to have moved from what Sternberg (2016) called the “big theories” to ever narrower research paradigms. Highly visible journals in cognitive psychology or the neurosciences have a tendency to encourage manuscripts that take a thin slice of reality to the laboratory, where they simplify it until it is experimentally manipulatable enough to yield clear-cut results. Preferably, such a manuscript tests hypotheses from two competing theories and provides a decision for one of them and against the other. In reality, however, most psychological theories seem to be neither completely right nor completely wrong. One difference between psychology and the natural sciences, from which we borrow much of our methodology, is that natural scientists more often (though not always!) study phenomena that really exist, whereas many of us study constructs—theoretical entities that we define and operationalize ourselves. As a wisdom researcher, I know what I am speaking about: If, according to the Berlin wisdom paradigm (Baltes & Staudinger, 2000), wisdom does not change with age across adulthood, and according to Grossmann’s wisdom measure it increases (Grossmann et al., 2010), and according to Ardelt’s measure it decreases (Ardelt, 2003), and according to Webster’s measure the relationship is inverse U-shaped (Webster, Westerhof, & Bohlmeijer, 2014), what does this tell us about wisdom? It probably mostly tells us that psychologists have a lot of leeway to decide how they define and measure a construct. This problem may be less pervasive in other fields of psychology, but I think we generally need more integrative, theory-strong manuscripts that are based on in-depth knowledge and serious thinking—manuscripts that describe and explain contradictory findings and arrive at a broader understanding. Wise empirical research may also use a plurality of methods, such as combining qualitative and quantitative methods, to overcome the influence of methods on results.

It is important to note that the highest ranking journals in psychology publish integrative, theory-strong reviews rather than individual studies, so this part of scientific wisdom may be well rewarded. Wisdom is also encouraged by formats like the thematic symposia in this journal or open peer commentary, formats that communicate the diversity and plurality of a field. Another way to encourage wisdom might be through articles about “Things I have learned (so far)” (Cohen, 1990), in which renowned researchers describe how and why their thinking has changed over time.

In contrast to theoretical journals, many empirical journals tend to favor simplicity. Editors and reviewers seem to like empirical manuscripts that tell a clear-cut, logical story from the hypotheses through the methods and results to the discussion. We all have learned to tell our stories in this linear fashion, even if we actually started out with a different hypothesis and made up the published one post hoc. I believe it would be far wiser to honor unexpected findings! The three most important insights of my own career all resulted from studies that I had designed carefully, based on well-founded, clear hypotheses, but the results were completely different from what I had expected. The fact that reality refused to follow my expectations taught me much more than yet another confirmation would have. An informal survey shows that many of my colleagues have sometimes been completely surprised by the outcome of studies and that they felt they had learned quite a lot from those results even if they did not get them published. I would love to see a Journal of Unexpected Findings that publishes reports of well-designed studies, based on highly convincing theories and hypotheses, that yielded highly unexpected results. (The existing Journal of Articles in Support of the Null Hypothesis is a step in this direction.)

Criteria for academic success

What makes a researcher successful? Metrics such as the h index show how much someone has published and how much what he or she wrote has been cited by others. I have already argued that wisdom may create good science, but it may not create a long publication list. Could we develop a more balanced conception of scientific merit by taking wisdom into account? Here, the ethical aspect of wisdom plays a major role. As described earlier, a greater-good orientation manifests itself both inside and outside the university. Inside academia, good teaching, mentoring, and committee work take time, and our current evaluation systems suggest that this time is better invested in writing manuscripts. At the same time, we do consider such aspects (at least informally) when we are hiring new colleagues for our departments. It would be great to have an e(thicality) index to complement the h index. Although, unfortunately, most other activities in academia are even harder to quantify than publication output, it might be possible to construct an aggregate of weighted ratings of performance in the different ethicality domains of academia. ¹

Wise researchers also care about the implications of their field for the world outside the ivory tower. Psychology in general has a lot of relevance for the world. What does it mean if empirical facts are devalued by large parts of a society, if new media offer not only access to knowledge but also access to hate groups, if established facts such as climate change do not affect world politics because politicians decide to ignore them? Should we as the experts in our fields put more emphasis on carrying our knowledge out into the world, by writing books for a general audience and engaging in civic activities? If we think we should, we need to develop success metrics for such activities. Of course, they should not be allowed to compensate for a weak scientific oeuvre, but if two individuals have comparable publication records, we might want to look at greater-good activities when we decide between them. We could simply start making such activities more visible by asking for them when we advertise positions, by including them in our own curricula vitae and on our websites, and by taking them into account in our evaluations of researchers.

Sternberg (2005, 2007) has argued that even extraordinary levels of intelligence and creativity do not prevent individuals in high-level positions from doing foolish things, but wisdom does, because wise individuals are motivated by a greater good than their own ego. Perhaps it is time to incorporate this idea into our understanding of scholarly merit as well.