UF Professor: Self-Reflection More Critical To Wisdom Than Knowledge

June 11, 2003

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Wisdom comes with age if people learn to feel and reflect, but there is little incentive to do so in a hectic American culture that reveres Spock-like logic, a new University of Florida study finds.

“When you think of a wise person – like Jesus Christ, Buddha or Gandhi – they don’t just have book knowledge, they know how to deal with life partly because of deep insight and compassion for others,” said UF sociologist Monika Ardelt.

Unfortunately, our fast-paced and fact-based society emphasizes cognitive skills over elements that round out a person enough for others to say they are wise, she said.

“Wisdom is important because people who have it tend to be much more satisfied in old age. They’re also less likely to be afraid of death,” said Ardelt, who also is affiliated with UF’s Institute on Aging and the Center for Spirituality and Health.

“If older people don’t keep up with the latest advances in computers or other technology, they are considered dead wood. We may pay lip service to the wisdom of the elderly, but when it comes right down to it, we don’t value it.”

Ardelt developed a scale to measure wisdom in the elderly that contains three essential elements: “cognitive,” or a deeper kind of knowledge and the ability to understand life; “affective,” or feelings of sympathy and compassion for others; and “reflective,” or the ability to develop insights by looking at events from many different perspectives.

Her study, published in the May issue of Research on Aging, showed all three characteristics are significant, but the reflective element is the most crucial for wisdom to develop.

“By overcoming egocentricity – basically blaming other people or circumstances for your own situation – it decreases your self-centeredness, and you’re able to see reality in more objective ways,” Ardelt said.

For her study, Ardelt had 180 men and women between the ages of 52 and 87 complete written surveys assessing their cognitive, reflective and affective personality characteristics. The participants were recruited from 18 religious, social and civic groups in North Central Florida contacted through word of mouth and the telephone book. The surveys asked them about their general well-being, purpose in life, subjective health, history of depression and attitudes toward death.

The participants scoring highest on a combination of cognitive, reflective and affective personality characteristics – defined as wisdom by the study – reported the greatest amount of subjective well-being and ability to cope with life and were least likely to fear death, she said.

“To become wise, you must at least have the desire for human development and spiritual growth,” she said. “To simply say, ‘This is the way I am and there’s nothing I can do about it’ doesn’t bode well for wisdom.”

Unlike Western cultures, which stress the cognitive dimension, Eastern philosophies tend to integrate the cognitive, reflective and affective elements, Ardelt said. A recent positive sign in American universities, however, has been the trend to incorporate the role of religion and spirituality in aging studies, she said.

Just as knowledge without self-reflection does not lead to wisdom, neither does sympathy and compassion by themselves, she said.

Someone who is sympathetic and compassionate may be able to help other people, but if they don’t have the reflective component – the ability to look at themselves from different perspectives – they can’t help themselves gain more wisdom, Ardelt said. “They might be very good therapists, but their own marriages might be breaking apart,” she said.

The adage that wisdom comes with age, Ardelt said, is not necessarily true. But older people have a greater chance of being wise than younger people because they have lived longer, and developing wisdom usually takes time, she said.

“Some young people are wise beyond their years, but that is often because they experience some tragic event or suffer from a serious illness early in life,” she said.

Many positive characteristics are associated with wisdom, including the ability to cope with physical and social decline, Ardelt said. Also important is a sense of inner control or mastery over one’s life, she said.

“One thing that wise people do is to accept things as they are and not as they want them to be,” she said. “If you can accept the reality of the present moment without trying to change it according to your wishes, in some ways you feel you are in control.”