HOW TO BE WISER
Wisdom is something that is hard to define and
yet somehow we know it when we see it. Wise people
stay calm in a crisis. They can step back and see the
bigger picture. They are thoughtful and self-reflective.
[5] Although intelligence helps, you can be intelligent
without being wise. Wise people tolerate uncertainty
and remain optimistic that even tricky problems do
have solutions.
Wise reasoning is associated with a whole
[10] lot of positives: higher life satisfaction, fewer
negative feelings, better relationships and less
depressive rumination, according to Igor Grossman
of the University of Waterloo in Canada. He and
his colleagues even found evidence that the wisest
[15] people might live longer. The wiser people were, the
higher their levels of well-being, particularly as they
got older. Intelligence made no difference to well-
being, probably because IQ levels do not reflect a
person’s ability to foster good relationships or make
[20] decisions in everyday life.
Grossman is convinced that wisdom is not simply
a stable trait that you either possess or don’t. It means
that at least we are wise some of the time. Think
back to yesterday. What was the most challenging
[25] situation you faced in your day? And how did you
work out what to do? Grossman put questions like
these to the participants in his recent study. People
wrote about being late for meetings because of the
traffic or the arguments they had with families and
[30] colleagues. The researchers examined their styles of
reasoning in order to assess their wisdom. Did they
recognise that their knowledge was limited? Did they
see any positives in what seemed on the face of it to
be a negative situation? He found that some people
[35] appeared to be wise sages in one situation, but not in
another.
So why the difference in different situations?
People were wiser when they were with their friends. It
made them more likely to consider the bigger picture,
[40] to think of other perspectives and to recognise the
limits of their own knowledge. When people were
alone they seemed to get so involved in a situation,
that they did not even think about alternatives. “We
are possibly all capable of some aspect of wisdom.
[45] It’s just not all the time,” says Grossman. If we can
be wise sometimes, maybe we can learn to be wise
more often.
For Cornell University psychologist Robert
Sternberg, wisdom is all about balance. A wise person
[50] is able to complete a mental juggling act – to balance
the short-term with the long-term, self-interest with the
interests of others, while considering all the options.
Following Sternberg’s model, what you need to do is
to remember to work out what all the different interests
[55] are in a given dilemma, both in the short and long-
term and to pay attention to the changing environment
and how it might be shaped.
In a kind of school of wisdom, Grossman has
experimented with different strategies in the lab.
[60] People were taught to take a different perspective by
imagining they were taking a bird’s-eye-view of the
situation or as if they were watching events as a fly on
the wall. The idea is to try to distance yourself from the
immediate experience. Even talking about yourself in
[65] the third person can help. Sometimes we could take
it a step further than speaking in the third person and
actually ask someone else what they think we should
do. We are often wiser about other people’s lives than
about our own
[70] Although we are bad at judging our own time-
frames, we are much better at working out other
people’s. In one study, students were asked to estimate
when they were likely to finish an assignment and
when other students would finish theirs. They were
[75] far better at guessing other people’s timings, because
they took into account unpredictable interruptions
such as getting the flu or coming home to find the
washing machine has flooded the kitchen. When it
comes to our own lives, our natural optimism seems
[80] to stop us factoring in potential problems.
So can you set out to be wise? Yes, but you need
to take into account that people will have different
goals, priorities and responses to your own, across
the short- and long-term. If you can juggle all that,
[85] you probably are showing wisdom. But the complexity
should not stop us from trying. As Grossman told me,
“It’s not that you suddenly become the next Buddha,
but you do become a little bit wiser.”
Available at: http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20170124-how- -to-be-wiser. Retrieved on: 24 Jan. 2017. Adapted.
The message contained in the fragment “It’s not that you suddenly become the next Buddha, but you do become a little bit wiser.” (lines 87-88) is that people
