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August 31, 2012

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Does wisdom really come with age? It may
depend on the culture

Aug. 31, 2012

Courtesy of the Association for Psychological Science

and World
Science staff

“Wis­dom comes with win­ters,” Os­car Wilde once said. And it’s cer­tainly com­fort­ing to think that ag­ing ben­e­fits the mind, if not the body. But do we really get wis­er as time passes?

There are many way to de­fine what ex­actly wis­dom is, but past re­search sug­gests hav­ing wis­dom means you are al­so good at re­solv­ing con­flict. But con­flict is­n’t han­dled the same way across cul­tures. Amer­i­cans have been shown to em­pha­size in­di­vid­ual­ity and solve con­flict in a di­rect
way, such as by us­ing di­rect per­sua­sion. In con­trast, the Jap­a­nese
put great­er em­pha­sis on so­cial co­he­sion, and tend to set­tle con­flict more indi­rectly, us­ing avoid­ance strate­gies or re­ly­ing on media­t­ion through an­oth­er per­son.

In a study forth­com­ing in the re­search jour­nal Psy­cho­log­i­cal Sci­ence, Igor Gross­mann of the Uni­vers­ity of Wa­ter­loo, Can­a­da and col­leagues in­ves­t­i­gated how con­flict res­o­lu­tion and, by ex­ten­sion, wis­dom dif­fer be­tween Jap­a­nese and Amer­i­can cul­tures.

The re­search­ers hy­poth­e­sized that Jap­a­nese, who tend to be so­cialized to val­ue interper­sonal har­mo­ny, would be bet­ter at re­solv­ing con­flict and show more wis­dom ear­li­er in life. Amer­i­cans, on the oth­er hand, ex­pe­ri­ence more con­flict over time and this might re­sult in con­tin­ued learn­ing about con­flict res­o­lu­tion across the life­span and great­er wis­dom lat­er in life.

Jap­a­nese par­ti­ci­pants and Amer­i­can par­ti­ci­pants, rang­ing in age from 25 to 75, were asked to read news­pa­per ar­ti­cles that de­scribed a con­flict be­tween two groups and re­spond to sev­er­al ques­tions, in­clud­ing “What do you think will hap­pen af­ter that?” and “Why do you think it will hap­pen this way?” Next, they read sto­ries about con­flict be­tween in­di­vid­uals – in­clud­ing sib­lings, friends, and spouses – and an­swered the same ques­tions.

The re­search­ers meas­ured the ex­tent to which re­sponses il­lus­trat­ed six pre­vi­ously es­tab­lished char­ac­ter­is­tics of wise rea­son­ing: (1) con­sid­er­ing the per­spec­tives of oth­ers, (2) rec­og­niz­ing the like­li­hood of change, (3) rec­og­niz­ing mul­ti­ple pos­si­bil­i­ties, (4) rec­og­niz­ing the lim­its of one’s own knowl­edge, (5) at­tempt­ing to com­pro­mise, and (6) pre­dict­ing the res­o­lu­tion of the con­flict.

As expected, the re­search­ers said, young and mid­dle-aged Jap­a­nese par­ti­ci­pants showed high­er wis­dom scores than same-aged Amer­i­cans for con­flicts be­tween groups. For con­flicts be­tween peo­ple, old­er Jap­a­nese still scored high­er than old­er Amer­i­cans, though this cul­tur­al dif­ference was much smaller than the dif­ference ob­served be­tween the young­er adults.

While old­er age was as­so­ci­at­ed with high­er wis­dom scores for the Amer­i­can par­ti­ci­pants, there was no such rela­t­ion­ship for the Jap­a­nese par­ti­ci­pants.

These find­ings un­der­score the point that cul­ture con­tin­ues to be im­por­tant for hu­man de­vel­op­ment, even in­to old age, Gross­mann and col­leagues said. While wis­dom may come with win­ters for Amer­i­cans, the same may not be true for oth­er cul­tures.

“Cross-cul­tur­al re­search­ers have been very good at sit­u­at­ing their re­sults in a cul­tur­al con­text, but don’t of­ten con­sid­er how life­span de­vel­op­ment may con­trib­ute to cul­tur­al dif­ferences (or lack there­of),” said Gross­mann. This study is one of the few ex­ten­sive cross-cul­tur­al stud­ies in psy­chol­o­gy that in­cludes peo­ple of dif­ferent ages and dif­ferent socio-economic back­grounds, he added.

This re­search al­so sug­gests some abil­i­ties – such as those in­volved in re­solv­ing so­cial con­flicts – re­main in­tact in­to old age. Gross­mann hopes the study may act as an an­ti­dote to “ageism” stereo­types in both West­ern and East Asian so­ci­eties.