Imrich Ruisel, Ústav experimentálnej psychológie SAV, Bratislava - Between 2870 and 2675 BCE, Ptah Hotep, vizier of pharaoh Issi, wrote the first books on earthly wisdom. The books dedicated to his son contained teachings about appropriate behavior. From these reflections it can be concluded that humanity has registered the first discussions about wisdom for about five thousand years. In general, wisdom is expected to be perfect knowledge of human existential problems, including the meaning of life. This unique approach originated already in antiquity, and according to the Book of Proverbs in the Old Testament, “The person who has found wisdom is happy.” According to Plato, wisdom is the highest human goal. Reflections on wisdom as an expert form of knowledge also follow from philosophy itself being defined as the love of wisdom.
Wisdom has acquired different meanings in various scientific disciplines. For example, in religious literature it was usually associated with specific values, including transcendent ones, while secular aspects of wisdom emphasized uncertainty and diversity of values. Since wisdom is a highly complex concept, experts have at times preferred the complexity of wisdoms over individual quality.
Therefore, defining wisdom as a scientific construct is not simple. As follows from the definition of philosophy as the search for and love of wisdom, it is more a search for an ideal than a permanent state. An individual's benefit and satisfaction does not result as much from the outcome as from the process of searching itself.
Books on wisdom are conceived in various contexts— theological, philosophical, historical, sociological, ethnological, anthropological, and of course psychological. Most works on wisdom are based on religious-theological and philosophical traditions. This orientation likely stems from the fact that the essence of wisdom, including the effort to understand serious problems of human existence, its vulnerability, linked spirituality, morality, and peaks of knowledge, formed the core of religious and philosophical thought from the beginning of human existence, when organized forms of knowledge began to develop.
Psychology only began to take an interest in wisdom in recent decades, first as part of popular psychology, later as a cognitive phenomenon. At the same time, placing wisdom within psychology was not straightforward. As is known, psychology developed gradually over centuries, initially focusing on empirical measurements and applications of knowledge about psychological and motor functions. Complex topics such as wisdom, personality, or motivation were not very popular. Over time, psychology began to become interested in broader aspects of human existence, which appropriately expanded to more complex phenomena. Therefore, it is essential to consider how psychology can contribute to the study of wisdom, especially through the connection between the humanities and natural sciences, which allows both intuitive and experimental approaches to knowledge acquisition.
Everyday belief about wisdom
In improvised discussions about wisdom, most observers respond fairly quickly. The answers most often fall into three groups: 1. names of public or historical figures whose behavior serves as illustrations of wisdom, 2. proverbs and aphorisms about wisdom, and 3. life problems that are assumed to require wisdom because of their complexity and ambiguity.
Wise people
Who are the wise people whose names are mentioned as public prototypes of wisdom? It is clear that their selection depends on cultural, ethnic, professional, or religious background and often provokes lively debate. Why is there no marked agreement among participants when naming them? Primarily for two reasons. First, in discussions about particular nominees, their errors and weaknesses are usually also mentioned, questioning their expected wisdom (for example, Konfucius is often remembered for his lack of kindness, Socrates for his greed, Leonardo da Vinci for unreliability, and so on). Second, observers often form an image of such a high and pure ideal level that no real person can fulfill these exaggerated requirements adequately. Such wisdom in pure form can exist only in an idealized state. The concept of wisdom as an abstraction also appears in some historical texts. For example, Konfucius, in discussions about a wise person, systematically refused to describe his specific bearer. The ideal type is part of speculative theory and therefore does not have to occur in everyday life.
Proverbs and aphorisms
Another everyday example of wisdom in communication is proverbs and sayings, or aphorisms. While some proverbs contain instructions for reflective thinking that could inspire an individual toward certain action, aphorisms usually encourage how to act in concrete situations of everyday life.
The role of proverbs and aphorisms in understanding complex and deeply rooted cultural phenomena has long attracted interest. As F. Bacon (1620/1974) states, in proverbs the magnitude, wit, and spirit of a nation are expressed. It should be noted, however, that aphorisms (or proverbs) are not wisdom in themselves. First, the content of proverbs rarely corresponds to empirical evidence. Second, and more importantly, individual items in these aphorisms regularly highlight particular aspects related to wisdom. Yet wisdom, as we will later state, is fundamentally a dynamic, uncertain state and, in seeking its essence, often offers contradictory tendencies. It is therefore not surprising that individual aphorisms provide examples that sometimes contradict one another. For example, the saying “clothes make the person” is opposed to the claim “do not judge a book by its cover.” Aside from issues of semantic and empirical validity, proverbs can have substantial explanatory power. Their advantage, for example, lies in the fact that they are short and contain highly concentrated statements formulated according to principles of common sense. Another property of good proverbs is that they are semantically and temporally flexible, easily transferable across themes, languages, and historical periods. For a proverb to be effective, it must contain certain historical and semantic generalizations, even if the specific wording and content may differ.
Wisdom as excellent solution to difficult life problems
A significant step in identifying wisdom in everyday life is defining life problems and their solutions. This definition follows from the assumption that wisdom is linked to difficult problems of life and their creative solutions.
Examples of this mode of interpretation resemble King Solomon’s dispute-resolution between two women over motherhood. Solomon proposed a seemingly rational solution: splitting the child with a sword and assigning each woman an exact half. Although Solomon did not know the biological mother, he chose an appropriate strategy to identify her, assuming that the real mother would give up her half so that the child remained alive.
This display of wisdom not only pointed to the fact that wisdom focuses on difficult human existence problems and involves creative ways of solving problems. Solomon’s example also suggested that wisdom is expected to solve complex situations that enable proper self-realization of the individual. Therefore, it was necessary to identify the biological mother and allow her to fulfill her expectations. Contributing to morally legitimate well-being of self and others is an essential part of everyday conceptions of wisdom. If above-average cognitive abilities are used to exploit others or to act for one’s own advantage at their expense, they are not grounded in wisdom.
Other manifestations of wisdom
Besides these apparently universal views of wisdom, one can also consider other contexts. Types of wisdom come to the fore. Since wisdom is highly complex, not all of its components co-occur in one person. Therefore it is useful to define individual types, holding the key to different manifestations of wisdom. These include the full range of theoretical and practical capacities or a specific spectrum of relevant emotions, including melancholy and optimism.
A. Assmann (1991), based on historical analyses, distinguished, for example, parentally authoritative, judicial or royal, magical, and skeptical wisdom. Other types were offered by the sapiential literature of the Old Testament, which captured different ways of thinking about key life problems. A significant aspect of wisdom that can be placed among universal categories is social understanding, which suggests that wisdom is group knowledge. From this follows that wisdom is a characteristic of cultural evolution. Social knowledge includes diverse aspects and styles of knowing and behaving. At the same time, one cannot dismiss the individual sides of wisdom, illustrated especially by the strong emphasis on wise individuals of the Solomon type. Among personality variables regulating wisdom are psychological functions such as reflexivity and skepticism. For example, P.B. Baltes (2005) highlighted the operation of so-called “constructive melancholy.” It is also stated that wisdom transcends extremes and represents a tendency toward optimal performance, to which individual reflexivity contributes. Attention is also given to presenting spiritual topics such as questions about the existence of God. It is known that especially in religious and philosophical traditions, some researchers reserved the concept of wisdom more for spiritual aspects than for practical dimensions of everyday life. From a historical perspective, similarities between theoretical and practical wisdom are discussed. It is also possible to consider how much everyday and scientific conceptions of wisdom require further integration of knowledge and behavior. For example, should wise individuals be limited to demonstrating their above-average knowledge, or is it necessary for them to use it for counseling services, and especially to optimally manage their own lives? And certainly there are historical variations of wisdom depending on cultural regions, in which knowledge and behavior unfold according to an integrated structure.
Practical wisdom in everyday life
Previous reflections on wisdom may seem somewhat elitist. For that reason, it is important to recall that wisdom is not limited only to very high levels of performance (exceptionality), but also to situations involving such major problems of human existence as finding life’s meaning and optimal regulation of everyday problems.
Wisdom is also invoked in broader and looser contexts, especially given the specific experiences of individuals. Hence people often speak about wise doctors, scientists, financial experts, football coaches, teachers, or politicians. Despite this, a “wise” therapist or “wise” scientist can be quite distant from genuine wisdom. A truly wise doctor, teacher, or scientist (or another professional) must demonstrate their special abilities in broader contexts than narrow professional expertise. A “wise” grandmother, because of her more intimate involvement in regulating individual lives, can be closer to wisdom than a “wise” scientist. A high level of professional specialization is not by itself a sufficient criterion of wisdom.
If these specialists want to approach the essence of wisdom, they must demonstrate their specific abilities and knowledge in contexts approaching important and complex problems of human existence. In other words, true wisdom operates by combining a specific form of professional expertise with broad knowledge, especially of broader human-existence issues. The boundaries between experience and wisdom are not sharply defined.
Everyday life of adults and wisdom
It is known that adulthood brings several life problems whose solution requires wisdom or at least wise advice. Although such help is useful for an individual even in earlier life stages, in adulthood its intensity and frequency increase. Along with the growing number of problems, demands for their solution also increase. One must manage requirements and conflicts connected with parenthood and professional engagement, overcome one’s own biological limits, assess issues of generational stability and change, or anticipate one’s approaches to successful ageing despite increasing biological vulnerability. Solving these questions requires a higher level of knowledge about human problems—that is wisdom.
The adult and long-life condition follows from increasing complexity in an individual’s inner world over adulthood, the concentration of responsibilities over the life course, and also the quantity of life history and its psychological consequences. As individual biographies show, people with increasing age gradually store more information in long-term memory and consider, coordinate, and evaluate more. Adult roles in the family and professional life generate various challenges and experiences of increased responsibility. Ageing also leads to a longer and richer past; people live longer and more complex lives. The same considerations can be applied to future planning. In reflections on the future, including shrinking horizons, the shadows of the past progressively lengthen.
Multigenerational dynamics includes families, social networks, and historical rootedness. During adulthood, one encounters expanding vision of generational responsibility and historical belonging. For example, parental roles may expand from concern for one’s own children to responsibility for ageing parents or subordinates. In addition, in middle age prevailing perspectives change—the initial distance from birth moves toward gradually approaching the final limit, that is, death. This transition increases pressure on prioritization and reevaluating the meaning of life.
Another consequence of longer life is the accumulation of unfinished tasks. The past is still unfolding, the list is incomplete, and additional life tasks arrive. Earlier life roles such as parenthood and upbringing are not yet fulfilled. They continue and sometimes seem endless. When roles typical of ageing are added, the individual often faces demands that are more than originally expected. And among them are life situations and plans that the person is not able to realize. With ageing, unfulfilled life parts take new forms of reconstruction and mastery.
Unforeseen life circumstances and social changes arise from experiencing events that were not originally planned. Several are relatively rare, such as winning the lottery or divorce. Sometimes outside observers mistakenly assume that unexpected events such as car accidents or divorces are more the rule than the exception. Individuals gradually accept a reality expressed in declining physical strength. Even unwillingly, they confront their biological limits and health disorders. With advancing age they become more sensitive to illness and the deaths of peers. These unforeseen events place great demands on coping and require a high level of mature thinking.
In line with such negative events, social changes in society also exert their influence. Historical technological development raises heightened demands on intelligence and competence in general, but also on experiencing one’s own effectiveness. Values and cultural norms represented by attitudes toward sexual orientation, health, lifestyle, family, marriage, work, and rest gradually evolve. Their development is often influenced by younger age groups, which regard such changes as a natural part of their generation’s norms. For older people, however, social change often means detachment from the past, and some changes mean confrontation with prior experiences of managing one’s own life.
Longer life and ageing also lead to a deeper experience and understanding of the dynamics between life gains and losses. Gains, whether anticipated or real, are prominent in the focus of younger age groups. As life is prolonged, observers’ attention shifts. The individual strives to maintain current stability and avoid losses. The balance in higher age requires a new quality of reflexivity, which represents growing understanding of the role of suffering, including its positive sides, such as acceptance of one’s own finitude and limitations.
The search for the meaning of life is perhaps the most salient manifestation of striving to achieve life goals. The meaning of life expresses the “holistic” essence and purpose of one’s own existence. Faced with demanding life situations of high complexity, such as balancing gains and losses or considering the future, we focus on creating balance among past, present, and future life. Through reflecting on personal values and life meaning, the individual strives to overcome the limits of ageing. How do these reflections on middle and later adulthood relate to wisdom? First, definitions of wisdom concern a kind of knowledge that handles complex but ambiguous life situations. Even current developments in positive psychology are moving toward finding concepts analogous to wisdom, concepts aimed at expressing peaks of human development.
Wisdom and health
Human health and its preservation, strengthening, or restoration have belonged since the earliest times of human existence and development to its basic needs. The history of health care concerns both the individual and the population as a whole. The earliest beginnings of healing reach back to roughly half a million years ago. Even then, ancestors of modern humans protected themselves from injuries and illnesses with various simple measures within instinctive rudimentary healing.
Already Homo sapiens sapiens, roughly 100,000 years ago, performed purposeful therapeutic interventions, relying on natural resources, plants, and animal instruments. In this way, rational healing was born. At the same time, cultic–magical healing developed as well. Only after several millennia did medicine take shape, gradually becoming increasingly scientifically oriented toward studying the human body and the conditions of life and health. It is assumed that the oldest medical text comes from the 37th century BCE and was written by the Chinese emperor Shen-nung. After him, many outstanding doctors in the ancient empires were active—practitioners, as well as philosophers and ethically and psychologically sensitive personalities.
The history of medicine began not only as a struggle for survival but also as cognitive effort to understand the world. The first inhabitants of Earth seemed to think the world functioned through the whims of powerful forces. So for millennia, humanity used primitive preventive medicine—this was the only thing it could do—to satisfy the gods with rituals and sacrifices. Gradually, over millennia, a stock of knowledge developed, based on random observation, trials, and errors. For people who believed that disease was caused by evil spirits, it was hardly illogical to drill the skull of a person suffering from blinding headache pain. They did not realize that such a procedure could also relieve intracranial pressure, and when accepted that sometimes the procedure helped, they were satisfied.
And slowly, over the centuries, the foundation of medical knowledge was enriched with new findings. First, the ancient Egyptians combined magical spells with psychotherapy, while using animal fat and dung as first-line medicines. Hammurabi in Babylon codified medical practice, even though it was primitive and brutal, and later Jewish law established dietary and hygiene regulations.
The first attempts to treat medicine as a science appeared around the same time in Greece, India, and China. Physicians were often mistaken, but their approach to body and disease was based on a logic derived from tradition. The level of medical knowledge expanded significantly also through writing. Already in ancient Egypt, sorcerers observed relationships between various types of treatment and the course of particular diseases. Later they began recording observation results on papyri. The papyri—the first systematic medical written sources—contain “recipes” for treating certain diseases and their symptoms. For example, the Ebers papyrus contains 21 ways to treat cough, analyzes at least 15 abdominal diseases, 29 eye diseases, and 18 skin diseases.
The medical profession gradually split into three different, interrelated groups. The first were physicians who tried to treat with internal and external remedies. They gradually specialized in certain body areas. The second were surgeons (according to the Ebers papyrus, “priests of the goddess Sachmer”), who mainly treated external wounds and injuries, such as fractures and dislocations. The third branch of Egyptian medicine consisted of sorcerers and spirit expellers, who operated through incantations and amulets.
Likewise, physicians, surgeons, and sorcerers divided diseases into three categories. The statement “this is pain I will treat” expressed confidence in healing. “This is pain with which I will wrestle” indicated that treatment would be arduous, and the conclusion “incurable disease” expressed resignation. Diseases in the last two categories, especially the third, could be cured only through supernatural forces. In some diseases there was a prohibition: “you must not touch this thing.”
In such cases, instead of surgery or active medication, a calming remedy was given and an incantation was recited. The remedy provided the patient with at least some treatment, and the incantation was a small consolation. It is believed that Egyptian physicians (and their sorcerer colleagues) realized the power of positive thinking.
As with Egyptian papyri, Mesopotamian tablets contained descriptions of ailments, remedies, and prognoses. They also described some unusual diseases, such as jaundice, as well as the relationship between disease and transmission routes—for example, the link between the transmission of sexually transmitted diseases and sexual contact. The medical profession was divided into exorcist priests (ašipu) and practitioner priests (asu). Babylonian medicine combined ritual incantations, plant remedies, and physical treatment. The task of healing was to reveal and expel demons of disease from the afflicted body, often represented in statuette form. Medical matters also became part of the first regulator of medicine through law. Hammurabi’s code, through seventeen laws, fairly precisely determined the physician’s fee for particular medical services. Similar patterns, based on a combination of rational and irrational influences, could also be seen in other ancient civilizations. If in ancient China more rational approaches prevailed, in old India more esoteric procedures were preferred. Physicians used incantations and paid attention to unfavorable signs just as often as they administered medicines and performed operations. At the same time, Indians excelled in surgery. Through the discourse of Sushruta, in Ayurvedic medicine requirements were preserved for the psychological traits that young surgeons had to meet—purity of thought, good memory, a delicate tongue and lips, a straight nose, and large, sincere, intelligent eyes. In addition, they also had to master performance tests of surgical skill, which included cutting cucumbers, opening leather bags filled with mucus, and cauterizing pieces of meat.
Scientific “framing” of the psychology of wisdom
In the study of wisdom, at least four conceptual lines can be identified. First, one can infer the cultural and historical significance of wisdom. Wisdom was understood as a kind of standard identifying and symbolizing a deep human desire to highlight higher human qualities. The history of wisdom is therefore endless. It is part of continuous evolution and develops mainly in times of crisis or new challenges. As P.B. Baltes (2005) suggests, interest in wisdom increased in Germany in the 1980s. The public was dissatisfied with the state of German society and sought correction. Similar tendencies are visible in contemporary Slovak society as well. The topic of wisdom came to the fore together with the challenge of broadly reviving the role of the humanities in maintaining the advantages of contemporary civilization and in appropriately guiding cultural evolution. Therefore, one may assume that interest in wisdom is historically conditioned. The second reason for the scientific study of wisdom is that it is an expression of perfection in personal, intellectual, and somatic development. Even if wisdom is not yet actively sought in our culture, we still desire and admire it in others. Progress toward wisdom means progress toward higher developmental levels.
Wisdom as an expression of perfection is applied not only to individual lives but also to social communication. What does it actually mean to appear wise as a therapist, political leader, judge, or professional in public services? Wisdom likely means more than just routine application of rules in the form of medical directives, laws, or social norms. It seems to include a specific ability to identify important factors and place solved problems into broader substantive and temporal contexts. When scholars in different historical epochs and cultures pointed out these issues, they did so in light of the constraints and opportunities their communities allowed. For example, Christian philosophers often linked wisdom with holiness. The historical process of secularization, on the other hand, was often connected more with explicating concepts such as equality, cultural pluralism, and justice. The third reason for scientific study of wisdom is the search for positive indicators of ageing. Over time, increasingly many researchers engage in studies of people at higher ages. While in biological concepts ageing is defined mainly as a period of loss and decline of adaptive capacity, social psychologists increasingly strive to find developmental and progressive aspects of ageing. Higher age does not necessarily mean only losses but also gains. Therefore several medical fields have come into focus as well.
Current empirical research does not yet provide enough evidence of positive changes in older age. In psychology, most available scientific evidence about ageing is focused on losses (for example, intelligence and memory). Similar conclusions are reached in implicit studies of ageing. Higher age is not valued as a period rich in positive aims and outcomes. Better understanding of wisdom can help identify aspects of ageing that allow older adults to gain certain benefits and thereby support more successful ageing. Wisdom also serves as a prototype of goals that can be achieved in later life and for which one can strive. In defining these, the maturity of the individual is also used. Unfortunately, the concept of maturity (nor mature thinking) has not yet been sufficiently developed in psychology.
When developmental cognitive psychologists began to take interest in age-related aspects of thinking, they started comparing older individuals with younger ones through tasks that were characteristic more of adults (such as rapid processing and reproduction of new information). Given age relations, researchers also examined to what extent ageing may bring a new perspective to cognitive and emotional aspects and specialization. By proposing research agendas based on solving tasks emerging from forms of thinking formulated according to the demands of adulthood—such as dialectical and relativistic reasoning—additional arguments were produced for a modern understanding of wisdom as a developmental-psychological topic. Similarly, developmental psychologists study how individuals approach planning and coordinating their lives. The fourth reason for the scientific investigation of wisdom is that it represents a valuable organizational strategy for life reasoning and for linking intelligence and virtues in achieving excellence. Psychologists sought to move beyond the microstructure of information processing and decision-making toward selecting topics suitable for analyses. Some researchers suspect that experimental psychologists avoid analyses of complex aspects of everyday life. However, theoretical and empirical trends are now emerging that combine cognitions and emotions, as well as intelligence and personality, into one “stream of consciousness,” which more validly expresses everyday-life complexity. Another illustration is the effort to use research on rationality to examine tasks and conditions of everyday functioning that reflect high uncertainty.
Is wisdom psychology possible?
It is known that most work on wisdom is more theoretical and speculative than empirical in character. It may be surprising that there are comparatively few empirical studies from this area, even though many intuitive expectations and theoretical arguments suggest that wisdom is a significant phenomenon. On the other hand, one may argue that psychological concepts and methods used so far were simply not adapted to tasks of this level of complexity. Possibly for this reason, research in the psychology of wisdom likely exceeds the limits of what psychological-empirical analyses can achieve.
On the other hand, it is undoubtedly possible to achieve more, even though some observers question the effort to study wisdom. What provokes their skepticism? First, the belief, as discussed above, that wisdom is an idea of high ideals, of a certain utopia. Ideals and utopias are open to evaluation, yet they are not necessarily real facts. Second, even when wisdom appears as reality, it often resists simple analyses. Some individuals see wisdom as a phenomenon hidden from human knowledge, as something sacred that is inaccessible and inexplicable by scientific analyses. As stated in the Buddha dialogue, wisdom is “inconceivable, incomparable, unmeasurable…a thing equal to the immeasurable” (E. Conze, 1975). Efforts toward transparency and scientific understanding can transform its foundations. Such skepticism deserves attention. Even though current research likely does not deserve sharp criticism, as it received from philosopher J. Kekes (1995), who argued that psychological studies of wisdom are only modestly promising, applying scientific method to a given phenomenon does not by itself lead to epistemic gains. For example, failure can already occur at the stage of “operationalization” of wisdom measurement.
Even critical remarks do not necessarily have to limit psychological approaches to wisdom, but in any case they should lead to caution. For example, when distinguishing whether wisdom represents knowledge or virtue. Especially when assessing the cultural-historical contexts of wisdom. It is true that research on wisdom often leads to immediate misunderstandings. Especially because empirical sciences have limits they cannot bridge. Certainly, in psychological assessment of wisdom, the phenomenon is evaluated according to a new set of rules and principles that are part of modern psychology. Therefore researchers’ efforts may fail or lead to distancing the phenomenon studied from everyday convictions or cultural-historical heritage.
These cautions need not evoke strong pessimism. They should rather motivate carefully prepared studies. For example, two approaches are possible for analyzing the assumption that the psychology of wisdom is consistent with cultural-historical knowledge and everyday personal convictions about wisdom. Explicit and implicit theories of wisdom are compared. What do laypeople and experts actually think wisdom is? How can one acquire it? What is wisdom good for? How can this approach determine the degree to which psychologically derived conceptions of wisdom keep in contact with the phenomenon selected for observation? Fortunately, many empirical attempts in psychological studies of wisdom have been focused in this way. Less attention was paid to analyses of the behavior and experience of wise people than to gathering data on what people in general think about wisdom.
Conclusion
It is known that sometimes the variety of terms for wisdom in natural languages generates in observers expectations that a researcher cannot fully meet. For example, how can knowledge of wisdom be used practically in one’s own cognitive development, in finding meaning of life, or even in advocating principles of rational nutrition? This demand was pointed out by several experts (for example, R.M. Restak, 1997). Therefore, interpretations of wisdom as a psychological phenomenon also contain assumptions about the essence of wisdom and its attainability by either individuals or social groups. Appropriate theories should offer procedures through which wisdom can be achieved in an organized manner. Another expectation that cannot always be fulfilled concerns specifying the values to be accepted and deficits to be avoided, with these values constituting the core of wisdom. What important values must an individual accept to achieve wisdom? What values allow finding life meaning? What personality characteristics do wise people have? What motives, dispositions, and solutions are necessary to reject? Answers to these questions are understandably not simple and require substantial cognitive effort. Therefore wisdom understandably presupposes interest in mental representation of an individual’s values, traits, and deficits. It is known that many conceptions of wisdom focus on these questions. Psychology, however, is not a strictly normative science of values and deficits like philosophy, political science, or theology. As is known, the goal of psychology is to specify the conditions under which psychological regulation of behavior and experience occurs, without necessarily defining what is value-wise best or worst. Psychologists, understandably, belong to smaller and larger social groups and as private citizens adopt social norms and expectations. Acceptance of individual and cultural diversity in value experiences is essential for wisdom.
These claims about the lack of normative statements are not accepted unequivocally, because psychological conceptions of wisdom can contain a certain amount of prescriptive information that overlaps with psychological requirements. For example, one can argue that this minimal requirement includes questions of cultural tolerance (democracy, freedom, etc.) and gives attention to bringing together common and personal good.
Finally, the study of wisdom may contribute to organizing a cognitive heuristic linked to wisdom. This heuristic coordinates knowledge and virtues enabling human excellence. By using such an organized wisdom heuristic, one can more critically reflect on judgments we make about ourselves and others, appropriately analyze and organize complex situations, and ultimately better advise people who are in various high-stress situations.
The paper was published in the conference proceedings ,,Health Psychology - Health and Wisdom. Health Psychology and Burnout Syndrome. Gender Differences in Health“. The conference was held in 2009. Editors: PhDr. Dušan Selko, CSc., MPH, Mgr. Róbert Ďurka, PhD. The proceedings were published with financial support from Národný ústav srdcových a cievnych chorôb, a. s., Bratislava Publisher: Národný ústav srdcových a cievnych chorôb, a. s., Bratislava, MAURO Slovakia s.r.o., Bratislava 2010, ISBN 978-80-968092-6-4