By Emily Laber-Warren / Knowable Magazine
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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.
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