Quest for Defining Wisdom in Psychology: A Brief Overview

Every society and every civilization has own storehouse of wisdom which is transmitted through generations from ancestors to help the descendants adapt, survive and lead a successful life. In spite of significance of wisdom in life, it was neglected as a research topic in psychology. This neglect of the concept in psychology may lie in the history of the origin of the subject in the later part of 19th century when empirical science started gaining importance in the mind of people and was fast taking the place previously occupied by philosophy. Perceiving the demand for hard core empericity in society the researchers vehemently shunned all the concepts, ideas and thoughts believed by the philosophers and thinkers of the era gone by. Glancing through existing research in psychology one cannot ignore the fact that another prominent reason for neglect of wisdom as a research topic may be attributed to an overemphasis on disease focus in psychology. This started with Wilmer's establishment of the first psychological clinic in 1896 in the University of Pennsylvania and took enormous proportion in the wake of two World Wars. Myers and Diener (1995) noted that psychological articles examining the negative states exceed the positive states by a ratio of 17 to 1. In his book Authentic Happiness, Seligman wrote: "for the last half century psychology has been consumed with a single topic only - mental illness". Interest in the positive states started with introduction of two schools of personality psychology: humanistic and existential traditions. Another breakthrough came with the emergence of life span developmental perspective and studies on adult psychosocial development. Research on positive states gained a new high when in 1998 Prof. Martin Seligman declared it as the theme for his term as president of the American Psychological Association and a new branch of psychology, viz, Positive psychology came into existence.Situation being thus wisdom started taking up the interest of the psychologists only in the 1970s .So history of wisdom research in psychology is a brief one. But interestingly the first mention of the significance of wisdom in life probably came in the writings of G. Stanley Hall in 1921 (Baltes and Staudiger, 2000). This was followed by works of Carl Gustav Jung and Erik Erikson. Wisdom in Life span development theory of Erikson came as a result of successful resolution of the eighth stage of life: "Ego integrity vs. Despair". Interestingly Erikson's focus was on a particular phase of life and not the wisdom itself. However, empirical research on wisdom started as late as 1980s with works of Clayton, Birren, Baltes, Sternberg and a few others and started evolving gradually in the 1990s. Kunzman and Baltes (2005) noted that since wisdom has always been considered as epitome of human development and related to old age, the first section of researchers to show interest in wisdom research were those who were interested in aging research. Others started research from different perspectives such as personality, intelligence, language and motivation (Kunzman & Baltes 2005). Brugman, (2000) observed that before that period the quest for wisdom was barely restricted to theoretical endevours.From the very beginning it was clear that wisdom is a complex human attribute and tops the list of all human virtues. This position is taken in all cultures across the globe for many centuries. In spite of this, what pioneers in wisdom research found was that the principal obstacle in the path of wisdom research was the difficulty to operationally define the concept 'wisdom1. From this point the wisdom researches mainly focused on their quest to define wisdom. Quest for defining wisdom gave rise to numerous definitions of wisdom. One of the pioneers of psychological wisdom research Clayton (1975) defines wisdom as a way of thinking and is an approach to life typically present in the elderly people. Clayton and Birren (1980) defined wisdom as an integration of cognitive, affective and reflective dimensions. …