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The Need to Distinguish Personal from General Wisdom: A Short History and Empirical Evidence

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The Scientific Study of Personal Wisdom

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Abstract

In this chapter, I aim to demonstrate the usefulness of a rather recent addition to the conceptualization and measurement of wisdom, and that is the notion of “personal or self-related wisdom,” which was first introduced as a concept in the late 1990s (Staudinger UM, Social cognition and a psychological approach to an art of life. In Blanchard-Fields F, Hess T (eds) Social cognition, adult development and aging, Academic Press, New York, pp 343–375, 1999a). I have suggested to distinguish personal from general wisdom as evidence has shown that the covariance patterns, age trajectories, and plasticity patterns of both concepts differ. Folklore and grandmother wisdom captures in a number of sayings that it is easier to give wise advice to others than oneself, let alone following it. Obviously, personal and general wisdom are not independent of each other but carry unique variance. This chapter compiles the evidence underlying the distinction between general and personal wisdom. Most of the approaches to wisdom in the literature to date, however, have not specified whether they are addressing personal or general wisdom or both. Research on personal and general wisdom needs to take into consideration method effects such that identified similarities or differences between the two concepts should not be confounded by a difference in the assessment method. More longitudinal evidence is needed to disentangle the intricate developmental interrelations between general and personal wisdom.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Note that I use the distinction between the first-person and third-person perspective only in loose analogy to the distinction originally introduced by Searle. For my purposes, the major difference concerns the question whether certain life circumstances with relevance to one’s own life have been experienced by oneself or not (i.e., first person). In that sense, my notion of “third person” encompasses all other life experiences including what Varela and others have called the second-person perspective (e.g., Varela & Shear, 1999).

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  1. Jacobs Center on Lifelong Learning and Institutional Development, Jacobs University Bremen, Campusring 1, 28759, Bremen, Germany

    Ursula M. Staudinger

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  1. Ursula M. Staudinger
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Correspondence to Ursula M. Staudinger .

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  1. OISE, Applied Psychology and Human Development, University of Toronto, Bloor Street West 252, Toronto, M5S 1V6, Ontario, Canada

    Michel Ferrari

  2. Ontario Inst. Studies in Education, Dept. Human Development &, University of Toronto, Bloor Street West 252, Toronto, M5S 1V6, Ontario, Canada

    Nicholas Weststrate

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Staudinger, U.M. (2013). The Need to Distinguish Personal from General Wisdom: A Short History and Empirical Evidence. In: Ferrari, M., Weststrate, N. (eds) The Scientific Study of Personal Wisdom. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9231-1_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9231-1_1

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