Situational Obstacles to Professional Wisdom

Most of us can remember a few instances in their life in which we did something very wise but in many other instances we acted much less wisely. Why are we so often unable to utilize our wisdom when it is most needed? Previous research has mostly assumed that wisdom is a largely stable characteristic that some people have more than others, but recently a growing body of evidence has suggested that the same individuals can behave wiser and less wise depending on the situation they are in. This project breaks new ground for psychological wisdom research by systematically investigating characteristics of situations that make it more difficult for people to utilize their own wisdom. The project is also novel in that it investigates wisdom in professional contexts specifically, the wisdom of teachers and managers, two professions that are often perceived as requiring wisdom and indeed face many wisdom-requiring challenges. Based on theoretical and empirical work on wise leadership and personal and general wisdom, we propose five preliminary characteristics of professional wisdom: (1) a focus on ethical considerations, (2) complex thinking about complex issues, (3) balancing control and uncontrollability, (4) openness and self-reflectivity, and (5) a balance of empathy and emotion regulation. The project comprises three empirical studies: In Study 1, managers and teachers who have been nominated for their professional wisdom will be interviewed about situations in which they think they did something particularly wise and something particularly unwise. We will use their reports to identify relevant characteristics of those situations and participants behavior in them. Study 2 builds upon these results in developing and evaluating a new approach for measuring professional wisdom. Study 3 will consist of a series of experiments in which we directly test how certain situational conditions affect wisdom. Two conditions that will definitely be included are overconfidence and competition; additional conditions may be identified in Study 1. We expect participants who are experimentally induced to be overconfident and participants who want to win a reward for the best response to give less wise responses than participants under standard conditions. Confirmation of our hypotheses about situational obstacles to wisdom would have important implications concerning the often-heard claims for wisdom in professional fields such as political, juridical, or medical decision-making: perhaps it would be easier to increase the wisdom of decision- makers by changing characteristics of their situational contexts than by trying to recruit highly wise individuals, who are generally rare and may not be particularly interested in such positions. Our approach to measuring professional wisdom should also be useful for researchers in many applied areas of psychology. Judith Glück, the principal investigator, is professor of developmental psychology at Alpen-Adria- Universität Klagenfurt. She has held several FWF grants and published several papers on the real-life development and manifestation of wisdom.

This project explored characteristics of professional wisdom by studying how wisdom manifests itself in the work of teachers and managers. We also looked at how characteristics of systems and organizations can influence wise behavior. In the first part of the project, we interviewed managers and teachers who had been nominated for wisdom about professional situations where they did something particularly wise and something particularly unwise. We also collected stories about wise teachers online from a larger sample of former students. We analyzed the data to identify characteristics of wise behavior in the two fields and reasons why the teachers and managers were able to act wisely on some occasions but not on others. For example, typical characteristics of wise teachers were authenticity, passion for their fields, being attentive to and accepting of students, critical self-reflection, and sometimes bending or even breaking rules for the sake of students' needs. Our findings paint a rich picture of real-life manifestations of wisdom in professional contexts. In the second phase of the project, we used the stories we had collected to develop a new measure of professional wisdom. The measure consists of four text vignettes that describe problem situations in the professional life of a teacher or manager. After reading each vignette, participants are asked what the protagonist could consider and do. In an interview study, we presented 93 participants with the new problem vignettes and with other measures of wisdom and related qualities. We found that the responses can be scored for professional wisdom quite well. In the third phase, we used the new vignettes to investigate how certain experimental conditions affect the wisdom of participants' responses. The experimental conditions were constructed to represent real-life obstacles or boosters to wisdom. In one condition, participants got very positive feedback about an earlier problem response, which we expected to induce overconfidence and reduce wisdom. In another condition, they were put under time pressure, which we also expected to reduce wisdom. The other two conditions were expected to increase wisdom: participants were asked to imagine talking about the problem with either their partner (condition 3) or a very wise person (condition 4). Results showed that time pressure, but not overconfidence, reduced wisdom and that imagining to discuss a problem with one's partner, but not with a wise person, increased wisdom. The project has broken new ground by opening up the field of professional wisdom. We have identified characteristics of professional wisdom in two occupational fields and concrete factors that foster or reduce wise behavior on both the individual and the systemic level. Our findings open up some new ways to foster wise behavior in professional and organizational contexts.