This article was originally featured on Knowable Magazine.
Emily Swanson was under pressure — not the end-of-the-world variety, but definitely stressful: prepping for her PhD qualifying exams. She fully expected the process to be grueling.
But then, like a character from a heroic tale, she had an encounter that changed her path.
Swanson took a job as a teaching assistant with Monika Ardelt, a leader in the scientific study of wisdom. Ardelt, a University of Florida sociologist, teaches an undergraduate course called The Quest for Wisdom and Human Flourishing. It asks students to spend a week at a time living by, and reflecting on, traditions associated with wisdom — among them Buddhism, Christianity and Greek Stoicism.
The weeks dedicated to Buddhism and Stoicism proved transformative for Swanson.
Through practice — think Luke Skywalker harnessing the Force to master his lightsaber — she learned to observe her thoughts and emotions in a more detached, nonjudgmental way. And she began to see her qualifying exams in a new light: “What is the worst-case scenario? If you fail, you don’t get a PhD. Is that as life-altering as I think it is? Well, no.”
Now, rather than seeing the exams as a threat, Swanson approached them as an opportunity to grow — a shift that enabled her to take intellectual risks that made the essays required for her doctoral advancement better than they otherwise would have been.
Ardelt says that Swanson’s shift in perspective is an example of how practicing things like reflection, humility, compassion and listening to other points of view can make someone wiser — that is, more able to adopt a larger view, especially when relating to others, and work toward the best outcome for everyone involved.
Ardelt is part of a growing group of researchers — among them psychologists, psychiatrists, sociologists and philosophers — applying scientific methods to understand wisdom in hopes of increasing the capacity of individuals to act wisely, and perhaps nudging a world beset by violent conflicts, unchecked human-caused climate change and other problems onto a more sensible path. Although they lack a single shared definition of wisdom, many are optimistic that the capacity can be cultivated.
“Not everyone will become a super wisdom guru,” says Judith Glück, a developmental psychologist at the University of Klagenfurt in Austria, “but I think there’s some space for everyone to grow.”
Bringing wisdom into the lab
The study of wisdom dates to antiquity, but only in the past 40 years have researchers begun to apply the scientific method to probe what wisdom is and how it develops.
The late psychologist Paul Baltes of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin launched the field in the 1980s. He designed studies that asked people of all ages to muse aloud about invented dilemmas, such as what they’d say to a close friend who had decided to end their life, or how to counsel a 15-year-old girl who wanted to get married immediately.
Baltes and his team scored responses on a scale from 0 to 7, using five criteria — now known as the Berlin Wisdom Paradigm — that they had posited were critical to wisdom: knowledge about life and human nature, strategies for navigating various circumstances and challenges, understanding that not everyone holds the same values, awareness that people’s priorities can shift with context, and the ability to tolerate uncertainty.
Individuals who scored higher on these tests had a better understanding of the larger issues at stake in the scenarios, identified more than one potential response, and raised questions to help the fictional characters understand the possible outcomes of their decisions rather than simply telling them what to do. Baltes “was the first to come up with what arguably is a relatively objective test about wisdom,” says Howard Nusbaum, a cognitive psychologist and neuroscientist at the University of Chicago and director of the Chicago Center for Practical Wisdom.
Crucially, Baltes distinguished wisdom from intelligence, showing that analytical skill alone doesn’t make a person wise. As geriatric psychiatrist Dilip Jeste, director of the Social Determinants of Health Network and coauthor of a 2025 article in the Annual Review of Clinical Psychology on wisdom’s benefits in older age, puts it: “Some of the smartest people … are the worst people they can be.”
Baltes also showed that simply getting older doesn’t guarantee getting wiser. In a 1990 study of young adults, middle-aged people and older adults, for example, he found that wise responses were equally likely across age groups.
Glück, who did her postdoctoral work with Baltes, says there are limitations to Baltes’ approach of measuring wisdom through scenarios: For one thing, a person might not act as wisely in real life as they do in a hypothetical situation. She has tried to measure wisdom a different way, by asking people to describe a difficult event they experienced, then reflect on it. What did they learn from it, and what would they do differently? In a 2017 study, wisdom researcher Nic Weststrate, now at the University of Illinois Chicago, and Glück reported that people who engaged in what’s known as “redemptive” processing — believing that what had happened was all for the best — tended to be happier, but not necessarily wiser. By contrast, “exploratory” processing — reflecting on the situation for the express purpose of self-understanding — was associated with higher wisdom scores.
But this approach has its own weaknesses, Glück says, because people choose such varied experiences to recount. While many of her subjects raise objectively serious issues such as shattered relationships, some focus on minor ones, like a dispute with a neighbor over an overhanging branch. “You cannot really compare people’s stories when they are talking about totally different things,” she says.
Other experts, notably Ardelt, measure wisdom using questionnaires that ask people to respond to statements like “I can be comfortable with all kinds of people” and “When I look back on what has happened to me, I can’t help feeling resentful.” (You can try answering the 21 questions in the sidebar to score your own level of wisdom.) The downside to this self-report approach is that wisdom entails humility, so wise people may score themselves too low, whereas foolish people, blind to their own weaknesses, may give themselves inflated scores.
If measuring wisdom remains tricky, so does defining it. One point of contention is whether wisdom is a set of qualities, or the process of how we evaluate situations. Computational social scientist Igor Grossmann at the University of Waterloo in Canada defines wisdom as mental processes that afford greater awareness and ability to regulate thoughts, goals and emotions in complex social situations. To measure it, his team, led by then-student Justin Brienza, developed the Situated Wise Reasoning Scale, which assesses a person’s intellectual humility, recognition of uncertainty and change, consideration of multiple viewpoints, and ability to search for compromise.
Ardelt, by contrast, believes that Grossmann, and Baltes before him, left out something important by excluding emotional skills from the definition of wisdom. Her own Three-Dimensional Wisdom Scale, one of the most widely used wisdom measures, incorporates measures of compassion.
The real-life path to wisdom
When wisdom comes naturally, it often derives from lessons learned through intense experiences or dilemmas. These experiences may be painful, like breakups or illnesses, but wisdom can also be gained from experiences that are simply challenging, like moving to a new city or having a baby, Glück says. Yet plenty of people who get cancer or become parents never gain much wisdom. Why?
By reviewing wisdom research and interviewing wise and less-wise people using varied measures, Glück has identified five prerequisites for extracting wisdom from experience. These include the ability to manage uncertainty, to maintain an openness to change and new perspectives, to reflect on one’s experiences, to regulate emotional ups and downs, and to practice empathy.
Some people naturally possess these characteristics or learn them as children. For those who don’t, Glück is experimenting with ways to help develop them. Her lab is running a multiyear study in which participants will play character-based video games akin to The Last of Us that vividly simulate lived experiences and immerse players in moral and emotional decision-making. These games might be a shortcut to wisdom, if it turns out that we can gain it not only from our own experiences but also from other people’s and even fictionalized ones, she hypothesizes.
Grossmann is taking a different approach. He asks study participants to distance themselves from their own difficulties by writing about them in the third person, or from political events by imagining living in a far-off country. People who use these techniques score higher on Grossmann’s wise reasoning scale than when they recount experiences straightforwardly. “You’re approaching it from this different vantage point,” he proposes. “So that keeps you flexible.” These wisdom boosts are modest, but Grossmann’s research suggests that practicing self-distancing over time can have cumulative effects. People may, in turn, become more skillful in situations such as solving relationship conflicts.
Ardelt, for her part, has seen some success with her University of Florida course, the one that helped Swanson ace her PhD qualifying exams. In a 2020 study, she compared 165 students who took courses that involved practicing various wisdom-enhancing methods to 153 students who completed more typical academic courses on sociology or religion. All the students took Ardelt’s Three-Dimensional Wisdom Scale test at the beginning and end of the semester. Students in the practice-based classes showed wisdom gains — 2.5 percent overall, and 3.6 percent in the reflective dimension — whereas wisdom levels decreased for those in the more theoretical classes.
There are many ways one might become wiser, experts say — among them engaging in meditation, spending time in nature, volunteering to help people in need, or adopting Stoic modes of thinking. The important thing is to move beyond self-preoccupation, they say. Anything that fosters self-awareness, openness to divergent points of view, emotional regulation and humility is a step toward gaining wisdom.
Few people will be wise all the time, however. From Nusbaum’s cognitive psychologist perspective, the mind is too state-dependent — too easily derailed by stress, fatigue or frustration. “You’re going to get grumpy and pissed off and forget,” he says. But, he adds, with time and practice, we can increase the number of moments when we make wise choices — for the benefit of ourselves and everyone around us.
How wise are you?
The Brief Wisdom Screening Scale, below, created by developmental psychologist Judith Glück and colleagues, distills criteria common to three well-regarded and widely used wisdom assessment tools.
Glück cautions that this test is less an objective measure of wisdom than a barometer of how wise people believe themselves to be. Which can be problematic, because wiser people tend to recognize their own fallibility and may score themselves lower than people who, to paraphrase Socrates, don’t know that they don’t know.
To the extent that you answer honestly, though, the results can be enlightening.
— Emily Laber-Warren
Indicate how much you agree with the statements below on a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 representing “disagree completely” and 5 “agree completely.”
1. My peace of mind is not easily upset.
2. I have a good sense of humor about myself.
3. I have dealt with a great many different kinds of people during my lifetime.
4. I’ve learned valuable life lessons from others.
5. At this point in my life, I find it easy to laugh at my mistakes.
6. My happiness is not dependent on other people and things.
7. I can accept the impermanence of things.
8. I like to read books that challenge me to think differently about issues.
9. I am “tuned in” to my own emotions.
10. I get either very angry or depressed if things go wrong.
11. I am able to integrate the different aspects of my life.
12. I often have a sense of oneness with nature.
13. It seems I have a talent for reading other people’s emotions.
14. I feel that my individual life is a part of a greater whole.
15. There are some people I know I would never like.
16. I have grown as a result of losses I have suffered.
17. I can freely express my emotions without feeling like I might lose control.
18. I’m very curious about other religious and/or philosophical belief systems.
19. I don’t worry about other people’s opinions of me.
20. Sometimes I get so charged up emotionally that I am unable to consider all ways of dealing with my problems.
21. I always try to look at all sides of a problem.
Scoring: First, invert your number for items 10, 15 and 20 (for these three questions ONLY, change a score of 1 to 5, 2 to 4, 4 to 2 and 5 to 1. A score of 3 remains unchanged.)
Next, add these three inverted scores to your scores on the other 18 questions.
Divide that number by 21 to obtain your average.
Note: The rating scale below is based on a data set that included only 769 people, and so should be understood as only a guide, not a standardized norm.
Below 3.59 = You scored at or below the median, which places you in the bottom half of wisdom self-raters.
3.6 to 3.99 = Your score puts you in the top 50 percent of wisdom self-raters.
4.0 to 4.39 = You scored in the top 20 percent, making you very wise.
4.4 or higher = You scored in the top 5 percent, making you extraordinarily wise.
