[00:00:02.450] - Wesley
You're listening to journal entries, a podcast about philosophy and cognitive science, where researchers open up about the articles they publish, I'm Wesley Buckwalter.

[00:00:11.630] 
In this episode, Igor Grossmann talks about his collaborative paper with the wisdom task force called The Science of Wisdom in a Polarized World Knowns and Unknowns, which was published in psychological inquiry in 2020. Igor is an associate professor of psychology and the director of the Wisdom and Research Lab at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. He also hosts the On Wisdom podcast with Charles Cassidy, discussing the latest empirical science regarding the nature of wisdom.

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You know, across the cognitive sciences, psychology, education, philosophy, there's been this growing interest in studying wisdom, but sometimes when this happens, there can be a lot of disagreements and talking past each other between researchers about constructs. So it was definitely exciting to talk to Igor about his and his collaborators efforts to come together and try and build some consensus about ways, the conceptual framework, its measurement and where researchers should go next.

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The main point of this science of wisdom paper is to establish a common position on key features of wisdom as viewed from the psychological perspective.

[00:01:23.970] - Igor
The paper has six sections and in many ways it was inspired by a paper, a common position, a framework that was established in psychology in the 90s after the bell curve was published, where they got together, a task force by the American Psychological Association of Leading Intelligence researchers to say what is actually the scientific consensus on intelligence research, in contrast to some extent as an antidote to the bell curve. So they have multiple sections. And so, you know, used as an example where we want to have multiple sections in this paper. And so basically we start with six sections. And first we review sort of main conceptualizations of wisdom. And here we review sort of survey results because we conducted the largest survey.

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So it's not just like the 15 people that were in the room at the time of the conference, but we also conducted the survey on a much larger group of researchers, and we'll talk about that in a second. And so basically what is in common across this conceptualization? So that's part one. And the reason we start with that is because we want to establish this kind of common position in order to evaluate all the other aspects of all the other questions in the paper.

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For instance, the question the next question was about measurement. Well, measurement depends on what you're measuring. And so you need kind of composition first. And so in the second section and we then talk about measurement, testing, limitations of different testing methods, and then we move on to individual differences.

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I think that many people are interested in who is wiser, who is less wise to individual differences and processes that are characterized by this common method approach and possible reasons for differences in individual differences.

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And then we continues like with questions about development, cultural differences, group differences, and and then discuss the major unresolved mysteries of wisdom research, at least from the psychological perspective.

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When I started doing research on the topic of wisdom, which is more than a decade ago, I noticed that there was quite a bit of. Everybody's using language in their own way and they mean different things. And so it's like almost like a Babylonian type of perspective on this. And they feel like, well, if everybody is talking about different things or they use different terms to mean the same things, like in psychology, we describe that as a jingle jangle fallacies, then the science cannot really advance any further because everybody's in their own ecosystem and very happy in there.

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But it doesn't really lead to some kind of an advancement. And so I thought, like, I really want to do something about it, like I get to the common position. But what happened at the same time is like, you know, everybody knows that and nobody's doing anything. And it's like, OK, fine. I mean, I have my position and others. Others have their positions. We can continue this way.

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But then there was this event last year. That's really changed my mind and to some extent, what happened was that I was planning to organize a conference in Sri Lanka and I invited people from philosophy, from psychology to bring together different perspectives.

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But also I'd like to really get a diverse range of perspectives from Asia. So that's why Sri Lanka to really get at people from the Asian region who have their different perspectives on wisdom that we do. And after we finalize the conference set up literally the week we finished the program, then this horrible Easter bombing attack happened as it's like the world's most fatal coordinated terrorist attack in the last decade. And that's exactly in Colombo, where we're supposed to have the conference exactly like just a month thereafter.

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And that to some extent sort of changed my perspective on this. I mean, you know, like I said, thinking about, well, first of all, kind of sucked personally. I organized the conference.

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Of course, we had to cancel it and what they do about this, but also like what kind of wisdom do we need to really live in a society in which this type of animosities can take place that lead to such deadly tragedies?

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And the topic of wisdom often comes up when you talk about those topics, when you talk about uncertainty, when you talk about terrorism, when you talk about all sorts of things along these lines. And I really felt motivated on the one hand to do something about it because like, we can all sort of like sort of have a philosophical discussion about wisdom, but more actionable discussion on this topic would also be necessary. I think that was before the pandemic, of course.

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And now everybody's talking about uncertainty. But at the same time, I was like, well, OK, I guess the next two months I don't have anything to do because the conference was canceled.

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I guess, like everybody's reservations and so on is like, well, why don't they just bring people together in Toronto, which is where I live? And so I invited a bunch of people serendipitously because first of all, the terrorist attack happened.

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And secondly, I knew that at that moment in that summer last year, there were more people who studied wisdom from a psychological perspective in Toronto, even though they were not professors in Toronto.

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One of them was a professor in Australia. The other one is in Chicago. But they just spent some time with Toronto before they embarked back on the scientific careers or whatever.

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And so I knew, like, I could just bring them together.

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So we had the critical mass that was just luck and luck that I had time to do that. And of course, the tragedy is all those two things together. They brought us to the wisdom task force.

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And so I just invited people and many agreed. I did not anticipate that so many people agreed to participate either remotely like the two participants from China or in person. And that's how it came together.

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I anticipate a lot of disagreements at the start because I do see it as like similar to you, I do see quite a lot of disagreement in this field, sort of at the intersection of moral psychology, moral philosophy, and sort of like social psychology, personality, psychology and stuff like that.

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But, you know, a lot of people agreed to participate. And even those like wisdom scientists, they may be kind of disagreeable, but, you know, at the same time they kind of want to cooperate because it's sort of the mantra of the wise person is not the one who would just say, no, they would be willing at least to listen. So there was at least some some interest from that perspective and then the disagreements that they revealed themselves more when you started to finalize some kind of a common position.

[00:08:28.670] 
So because in addition to the conference, we ended up my goal was to write this big paper with a lot of co-authors where we would say, OK, so this is how we all jointly agree. And it's not like that. This represents position of everybody that everybody agrees with, every single word, every single sentence in this paper. But it's kind of the consensus among us.

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And working on that consensus turned out to be very hard.

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So while one topic, for instance, was to what extent do you need to be a moral person or show moral action, can you label something as wise if the person is actually not showing the actions or like is the motivation, for instance, to to do something good enough to label the person who is embracing this motivation a moral person? Or does the person really need to show the action? And some of us, like I disagree with the position that you need to show the action, because sometimes you just can't if circumstances prevented to do it from doing it and others thought that I don't go far enough. And so we had like a lot of back and forth over a month on this topic. And another one is about emotions. So with some of the reactions that we got, because this was published in Psychological Inquiry, which solicits commentaries and a lot of commentaries that we got like had this idea was like, yeah, that's great that you're talking about and will go through X, Y and Z, but you forget the emotions. The wise first and focuses the emotions. So what's up with that? It's like, well, we're not talking about that.

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The emotions can play a role, but they're not either neither sufficient nor potentially necessary as a part of the construct that maybe is like an additional process that may facilitate under some circumstances and inhibit wisdom under other circumstances, at least from the psychological perspective. But yeah, so that was the second contentious point of emotions and affective processes, intuitions. Can you have wise intuitions and so on? 

[00:10:32.630] 
It's interesting, like, how do researchers conceptualized wisdom? There are all sorts of different strings that have different historical roots. Some of them are focusing more on cognitive processes and everything that's related to cognitive process.

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How do people reflect on challenging dilemmas, often sort of like hypothetical stories that you present to a person and then you record their answer and see in their answer well, whether they start recognizing limits of their knowledge or some forms of open mindedness, consider different viewpoints, blah, blah, blah.

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And that tradition comes from cognitive psychology, where in the 80s, cognitive psychologists used this type of methods that were then borrowed by the initial cognitively oriented wisdom researchers, especially the Berlin group in the 90s, led by Paul Balthus, did that a lot.

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And there's just a different tradition coming from personality and specifically sort of ego development, if you want. And personality psychologists are mostly interested in individual differences they assume that individual differences quite often are stable.

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At least they used to assume that not necessarily anymore and the way to measure stable things is to give people a questionnaire, for instance. So you give them a list of adjectives and ask them to evaluate which adjectives are more like them. Or you give them a set of statements and ask them to evaluate whether the statement is applicable to them. To what extent do they agree with the statement and then make an inference based on the scores from this type of questionnaire, whether they're wise or not, and all of these different traditions.

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On the one hand, you have this more cognitively oriented, reflective processes, often also linked to autobiographical memory, and others are more about the individual differences through questionnaires.

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And there's another group that completely separate emerged completely separate from this as well, sort of like post-modern approach, narrative approach, I would say, where you really just look at the reflections and narratives of individuals and try to categorize maybe individuals in terms of like common themes that you see in the narratives ofte then you focus on the narratives of people who would be nominated by somebody as wise.

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So those are the different approaches. And so when we did the survey, the reason we did the survey, because like the approaches are very different. But is this something in common in terms of the underlying structure, in terms of the underlying concepts?

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And so what we did was I first designed a survey so several of us, not just me, several of my colleagues, and it was very important for us to have both open ended questions where we don't constrain the parameter space, the type of set of responses we can receive, as well as force choice questions.

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The force choice questions are easier to analyze, as everybody knows whoever conducted the survey.

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But open ended questions can allow you to capture something that otherwise people would not mention. So, for instance, if I would ask you to conceptualize what is the definition of wisdom that you use in your research or how do you measure wisdom in your research?

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If I just give you a list of five different approaches, then it will potentially not be satisfactory that if I ask you to write it out, so we ask people to write it out, maybe send it out to a bunch of mailing lists.

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So like psychological community, society, personality and social psychology, association for Research and Personality, but also at the intersection of philosophy and psychology, for instance, Moral Science Network and some others, cognitive sciences and a good number of people who claim to study something related to wisdom.

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Because the idea was like if you study something related to wisdom, have anything to say about this, please fill this out and to say, well, I have nothing to say about this, but let me fill it out anyways. But the majority of the people were actually had something to say about it. And then we looked at the responses.

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By the way, they came from all over the world. So there were some responses from South America, some responses from East Asia, some responses from Russia, some responses from Europe, and then, of course, from North America as well.

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Then we did the content analysis and got our results and turned out that there was actually more in common among the different positions, given that they use very different methods than even I assumed. I was pretty surprised. 

[00:15:07.580] 
We found that the most common characteristics that people described as measuring, but also in conceptualizations, even if they didn't measure them, were moral aspirations. On the one hand, sort of like things like sociality often things like compassion and sympathy and so on, and something that we ended up describing as perspectival metacognition. Now that sort of like is a complex term, but what you really mean is the ideas that allow you to think more deeply about your knowledge, more deeply about a given situation. And it's metacognition because it's not just a cognitive process like thinking. It's more about what is guiding your thinking in a given situation. For instance, do you recognize that your knowledge is limited. What philosophers sometimes would describe as intellectual humility?

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Do you focus on on just your perspective to view it through your through your own eyes, or do you try to sort of different viewpoints on a given situation? You're facing a challenge. How do you approach this challenge? What perspectives do look at it from?

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Do you consider the context or do you realize that whatever you're doing, whatever the challenge is or whatever the issues that you're facing is taking place in a particular context? So there's not necessarily aspects of cognition per say. It's like this sort of almost like like characteristics that guide your cognitive, your thinking process, therefore the metacognitive and their perspectival, because they allow you to shift your perspective from what is habitual to you whenever you encounter something difficult to do to something that would allow you to get sort of a wider range of perspectives in the given moment.

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So, like, imagine you're facing an issue where your partner tells you that she just cheated on you. And your initial knee jerk reaction, of course, is that's it. Leaving the house, a bit hard to do right now because we're all stuck potentially. Good luck moving out. 

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I heard that, you know, people are finding the joy in marriages these days. Like, apparently they're just, I guess, on the rise anyways.

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So you're facing this dilemma and your initial knee jerk reaction may be the one where you would just separate. You don't want you don't want to listen. You don't want to hear anything. You don't understand where it's coming from. So this perspective, metacognition was like, OK, hold on a second.

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What do I know about the situation? What happened here? Where does this person come from?

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Why is this if this is new, if this if there's no if it was just maybe she was just drunk, maybe I insulted her, maybe something else happened, sort of like starts to inquire about additional possible reasons for the situation.

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Then how would somebody else look at it like, OK, I am really upset about it, but things happen. I'm not saying to justify infidelity here, but I'm just saying that things happen. And so we need to consider how would another person look at this situation then?

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What is the context in which it happened? Was it like that we had a conflict and then she went to the sort of circus of revenge, slept with somebody else or he slept with somebody else. And instead of to be one directional or was it just out of the blue?

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So all those processes that ask you to think more deeply about the situation, taking different pieces of information into account, they sort of offered you getting a bigger picture sort of perspective on the issue at hand that you would otherwise not get and therefore there would be described as perspectival.

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The other thing that was very common is this idea of moral aspiration. So basically and that was a very contentious issue, by the way, because some people did not think that in our definition we went far enough. So what is moral aspirations? Well, things like, you know, pursuit of truth. It's actually interesting because that's one that I thought, like will not be very high on people's list, but turns out to be very hard people, to be honest, but also to pursue that truth. Intellectual humility is maybe facilitating that. But the ideal is different from just like the cognitive process.

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So therefore, this is about moral aspirations, not about metacognition, other things that would be under the umbrella of moral aspirations, maybe things like just be cooperative with others, cooperative either with your group or cooperative with others in your society, sort of like being oriented towards the common good.

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So to say, even though that's also an opaque term, turns out if you ask people and they did that well, how do you define the common good, then end up defining it in terms of the other characteristics, such as prosociality, such as self, like in group, a corporation within your group, or understanding of some kind of a sense of a shared humanity like right now during the pandemic is sort of becomes very salient for some people. So we and somehow in this together, it doesn't matter where we are from.

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We are suffering through probably kind of similar processes. Well, of course, some of us have it harder, much harder, because we have less money than others, so can't afford not staying at home.

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So the idea of the shared humanity is another aspect of it and and then some kind of general sense of being compassionate towards others.

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So, roughly speaking, when researchers look at this set of processes, the approaches that they take, either the approach of self report or an observer rating and the observer rating of often open ended reflections or narratives created by somebody, and then they would have independent traders of those narratives for themes that emerge in the narratives. So those are the typical ways it's measured and they're not measured very well. So there are two issues.

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Number one, when you have the self report issue, self report measures where you just ask somebody to indicate, well, how humble are you? Well, you have this dilemma, I call it the Trump effect, where Trump claimed to be the humblest man and that nobody could even understand and comprehend how humble he is. And that's basically what this dilemma is about, that the person who is scoring high, who may be reporting highest level of humility or highest level of perspective taking, may in fact be the person who is unable to consider others perspectives that recognize that he fails in those domains or unable to show his humility, humility and restraint by claiming that they are very humble.

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So that's one of the inherent problems with the self report approach to measuring some of this highly desirable characteristics. But there are another set of problems, and the problems concern the way how you assess characteristics that you don't have a really good grip on in terms of your own image.

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So you may not know how humble you I mean, like, I have hard times. Some people tell me I'm not very humble. OK, that's a good piece of information. But let's say you have nobody who tells you that because he alienated everybody through your humble bragging.

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OK, in that situation, you will potentially have hard times coming up with an assessment of yourself and you may be remembering some situation. OK, maybe that was this one situation three years ago where I was really, really humble. I'm really proud of it.

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And the problem is that that situation, even though it's salient in your memory, may not necessarily be the most difficult situation for your life. So you may be recalling something that's quite atypical, that sort of feature of our memories. So there is a memory bias going on where you may be distorting the reality often in your favor.

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And the third one is that if you don't have a clue because you don't have a good grasp of a particular way to evaluate yourself, humility is one example, maybe perspectively that I am very good in terms of empathy. I'm not I don't know that. And we're very compassionate as a person. Often those things are not easy to evaluate. So what happens if you don't have a good idea about how to evaluate? So maybe nothing comes to your mind.

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You have no instances in which this type of behavior could be assessed according to your own understanding. Then you will just go with like, OK, how is how would a decent human being evaluate themselves? Oh, that's a good quality. Like, I'm being humble is good. OK, so I'm humble.

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And so basically the way you go about this is like you you have the issues with the the Trump effect, you have the issues with memory biases and you have the issues with social desirability in the absence of anything else.

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So you would think that, OK, so the self report measures are just all bad.

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But here's an issue that turns out that the open ended responses where you just like have somebody else read it also not without limitations. I've done my fair share of open ended sort of metrics for measuring wisdom. And the problem there is that they are often constrained to laboratory situations.

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So where you would create some kind of hypothetical scenario and you would try to ask people like, OK, immerse yourself in the scenario and now imagine this happens to you, you know, infidelity, your partner cheated on you. Good luck imagining that and I'll continue imagining it. Now, tell me, what do you think? And sometimes it works and sometimes it's almost like a joke. I mean, this is hypothetical. It's not real world and often the situations in which you really want to assess wisdom that happen to people in their lives are not the situations that you can assess in the lab. So what do you do, you can't you have this artificial on the one hand and you have this kind of self report dilemma to another hand? So one solution that we found and I personally find probably most satisfactory, it's still a compromise because it's not perfect is you can to some extent have self report measures. But the idea is not to keep them abstract and not ask people to evaluate themselves, but ask people to report what do they actually do in a given situation.

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So don't ask them about their wisdom. Ask them about you have this particular challenge and to what extent did you check for more information in this particular challenging situation? It turns out if you do that, people are much more likely to report, well, first of all, they can recall a most recent experience. You ask them to recall the most recent experience, and then it's much easier for them to come up with something that makes sense and they are not tempted to present themselves in the most positive light.

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So that would be sort of a hybrid measure where you would contextualize, contextualize their reporting on their own wisdom or somebody else's wisdom. It doesn't have to be about the given person. Maybe it's an observation of somebody else's behavior.

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And the trick is that through this contextualising, you avoid some of the issues, including the memory biases, because when you put it in a concrete context and make this context salient, some of the memory biases turns out also diminished to some extent. But again, this is just a hybrid and it doesn't really there's still some self report bias. There is still a desirability bias. It's still on a scale. And it doesn't capture all the nuances that you would otherwise get when you ask people just to either reflect or behave in a spontaneous fashion.

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I have a good friend from Ireland who studies sort of wisdom from a more narrative perspective, and she likes to talk about sort of the big wisdom and the small wisdom. The big wisdom is like this is kind of all or nothing that you either are wise or you're foolish. And it's like the wise. It's like on this pedestal, like sort of like Solomon Quality, King Solomon call it step of wisdom. And then forgetting that, of course, there's even King Solomon was not a perfect human being and and there is no such thing as a perfect human being. So instead of that, instead of this kind of big wisdom, what may be more plausible from the psychological perspective is to look at the small wisdom, like the incremental wisdom from one situation to the next. It may accumulate or maybe not accumulate. I like that distinction.

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And what we try to make a point about in this section on individual differences is that in order to really get at the question of individual differences, you need to measure people multiple times and then see if there is a certain profile across multiple situations. Because, look, obviously the extent to which you show intellectual humility may vary from one situation to the next, but it's more about like this kind of do you on average show more of it in different situations in your lives, or are you more of a person who shows that maybe in one situation and in that situation you always humble? You're always inquisitive of your knowledge, you always seek more information and in all other situations like I'm fine, I don't care. Don't even don't even come with those type of additional information not down me like I would be very uncomfortable about.

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And so, like to really get at the question of intellectual humility together at the individual differences in that or any other constructs perspective, take empathy, sort kind of awareness of the context, open mindedness about your knowledge, appreciation of diversity, of opinions, all this kind of metacognitive process.

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You really need to measure people across multiple time points. Ideally, this type would also get a different situations in which people find themselves in this time point.

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And what we find is that if you do that and only a few studies have done that, that there is both a little bit of stability and the stability is not much lower than actually established individual differences in personality when they're measured in the same way.

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So there is a stable component, but also substantial variability from one situation to the next. And that's great because if there is substantial variability, you can potentially capitalize on it.

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And cultivated through some may be habitual practices, as Aristotle would have said, or situational nudges. As some social psychologists and economists like to say.

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Even though I kind of doubt about the nudges thing, I think you really need to have a tendency, willingness to engage in certain practices and consciously cultivate them in order to really get the result. But ultimately, it's both. It's both the situation and the what some people call the disposition that contributes towards wisdom.

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And that, by the way, is almost always the case. If you look at like on average, how people are different from each other in their average tendencies, those differences would be smaller than how much you are different from your typical average.

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You know, in some ways, like it's not a surprise because you operate with different levels of analysis, one is divided into individual differences, typical tendencies of a person A versus person B, and those individual differences, inter individual differences, don't necessarily have much to say in terms of differences for the inter individual differences. So how much you differ from one situation to the next, and that's like is a classic logical fallacy that even Aristotle was talking about.

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Then in the statistics we talk about it when we talk about ecological fallacies or Simpson's paradox and so on.

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So it's a known thing. It just like we often forget about it and then we are surprised why the difference within the group and in this case the group is the individual is larger than the difference between groups, the kind of say I also study cultural differences and in cultural differences, almost like a mantra.

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You study cultural differences, but then you end up saying, but by the way, keep in mind, dear reader, that the differences within the United States or within the UK are much larger than the differences between the UK and the United States. And so the same thing applies to an individual. So the differences between Person A and Person B would be smaller than the differences of first they versus the across different stations in their lives. 

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Some researchers would actually talk about age, gender and cultures, context, sexual age is your context that you carry with you, your cultures, your context in which you grew up, your gender is your to some extent, your identity, how you identify yourself, how you have been socialized, what you are and so on.

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And and then, of course, we look like, well, what is the role of context? It's a very big role. You know, like depending on how you've been socialized, you may or may not be more prone to focus on perspective taking or recognize your humility in our society, especially now when you have this tendency to try to pretend to be very confident about your answers, like a doctor or a group of teachers once in Italy a few years ago.

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And they tried to communicate to them the value of intellectual humility and recognizing limits of your knowledge. And that's part of wisdom, blah, blah, blah.

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And then a teacher raises her hand and she is like, but wait a second, those students are not doing that. And in fact, if they would do that on an exam and we have oral exams, then they would get a fail.

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They want to pretend like they are super confident because even if they fake it and and that's the thing, it's a problem where in many societies we emphasize this confidence that we are supposed to project as leaders supposed to project as mean as any normal human being.

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And you don't like somebody who is constantly uncertain, of course, as a matter of degree. But but there are cultural differences in that then. So, for instance, we did one study where we compared Japanese to Americans.

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And we know that in Japan, people are, since early age, are cultivated to take perspectives of others, like you see it in elementary school textbooks where they really cultivate this ideas of perspective, taking of being empathetic, being considerate of others, being concerned, others opinions, maybe too much.

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Some somebody may say, a social critic may say, but then contrast that you have the American approach where you just focus on yourself and you think you're the leader in the best and so on.

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And again, this exaggeration, once again, cultural differences.

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There is a lot of variability in each of those countries, probably more than just between Japan and the United States.

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But when you look at these basic responses then and what what are those implications, you get college students who then do this wisdom tasks where they are supposed to provide Open-Ended responses.

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And you see that the college kids from Japan or young adults from Japan in general are more likely to spontaneously mention perspective taking when they think about in a dilemma that they never heard of before, context that they never heard of before as compared to American counterparts. So you have a little bit of the effect of context in there. 

[00:36:16.460] 
Gender. That one is a bit tricky. I would not. I'm not sure I would be able to tell you exactly what's going on, depends on the culture, depends on the situation. We find to some extent in some studies that if somebody talks, if the conflict is with a person of the opposite gender, then the person seems to be more likely to engage in perspective, taking intellectual humility and consideration of diverse opinions then if the if the conflict is with the person of the same gender. So that's interesting. But that's like this is really to talk about your gender for say.

[00:36:54.850] 
Right. Like it seems like it's almost like an interactive effect. And for age there we have exactly this type of a weird brew of apples and oranges put together and cooking it for a while. Because if you do that, you end up finding that for instance overall, there seems to be that older adults perform worse on some of these tasks than young and middle aged adults, but there is a quite stability across middle age. But then you look specifically at different tasks and you see that the majority of it is for self report measures.

[00:37:33.750] 
And then you take a step back and you realize, hey, wait a second. So this age differences, are this really about age or different cohorts? When people grow up in different cultures because it's something that track the same person over time, those studies almost don't exist.

[00:37:49.620] 
Instead of that, you just take people who are young and old and compare them to each other. And once again, you may be confusing differences between groups within inter individual change over time. And so I have yet to see a good, solid study that would look at inter individual change in age over time and wisdom. Instead of that, all studies, including my own studies, are that concerned aging are about group differences. And that may be about aging, that maybe about culture that people grew up in.

[00:38:21.990] 
You know, like in the 60s, people talked about what is important values in their lives, moral aspirations and so on, differently from maybe the millennial generation or some weird combination of those two. So there I'm not so sure. 

[00:38:38.970] 
My best recommendation for wisdom nowadays is probably to some extent disengagement, and by that I mean turn off your social media, maybe delete social media from your phone, maybe just try to be mindful about it. And in some ways, it's a form of social distancing because we are constantly in this kind of immersed state of being where you constantly fed information.

[00:39:03.430] 
You don't know enough time to process it yet. So disengaging the self, distancing especially from social media. It's a challenging question, you know, because that's, of course, the one that people mostly care about when they hear about wisdom. It's like you study oh how do I get how do I become wiser? And yet, in reality, there's not that many ways that people have actually done this empirically because you need rigorous, randomized control trial interventions in order to really test that.

[00:39:32.290] 
So far in my lab, we have done a few. And one tendency that seems to be helping is like when you sort of like self distance, you engage in sort of exercises where you try to look at yourself from a third person perspective of right in the third person language repeatedly over time, then it has some kind of carryover effect.

[00:39:51.580] 
But those are just baby steps. And in fact, the fact of this kind of social distancing intervention is not such that you would suddenly make a fool into a wise person. It's more like a very small, incremental effect.

[00:40:06.730] 
The issue is that whenever you are in the heat of the moment, it's harder to remind yourself in that moment what the what the best strategies are, even if you know what the best strategies are, if you are, like, so immersed in the situation that you really want to tear the world apart or whatever because you are so angry, something like that.

[00:40:26.200] 
Right. Good luck reminding yourself. And I need to be mindful and now I need to self distance and now I just need to breathe like, you know, you train yourself in those moments and it's often very hard to do well. So and that's another sort of like frontier for both wisdom research, but also in general emotion, regulation, research.

[00:40:46.150] 
How do you get to better regulation of yourself to better sort of like application of this cognitive metacognitive tools in the heat of the moment? 

[00:41:00.990] 
Yes, so there is a number of different things that would be interesting to explore from the perspective of wisdom science. One like to really clear up the mess about like different construct that seem to be coming up, that become fashionable, such as humility.

[00:41:17.480] 
Are there other constructs such as consciousness and all of them, like tapped into some of these components of wisdom, either the metacognitive process or just like the intellectual humility being part of the of the wisdom construct.

[00:41:34.180] 
So try to really figure out the relationship and the common language that can be used across different subdisciplines and cognitive science. I think it would be fascinating and very challenging task.

[00:41:48.730] 
The other frontier for wisdom, in my opinion, is to figure out if wisdom is uniquely human and if wisdom can be applied to non-human agents such as artificial intelligence. So, you know, like when we talk about artificial intelligence, we talk about some kind of rational, hyper rational agent. And some humans have the some of us have issues with that.

[00:42:13.630] 
Right. Like, oh, hyper rational is the one that compassion without the moral compass, the one that will just enslave us all and create this totalitarian will just be some kind of cells in the Matrix.

[00:42:26.800] 
Or maybe it will just be crushed like in a Terminator type of analogy. And it's all interesting because it comes down to this path of a rational A.I. But is there a possibility of a wise AI?

[00:42:45.220] 
If you look at this set of psychological model where it's on the one hand, some kind of moral principles, almost like Asimov's law, sort of like laws of robotics, and at the same time, you have this metacognitive process that are kind of like human consciousness, like can I simulate that and learn through that and be potentially more appealing to humans?

[00:43:14.090] 
So that's another thing that I find fascinating. Just to think about these ideas, can they be a wise robot and would we be more accepting of a wise robot? So I guess I would pick those two.

[00:43:25.150] 
And then, of course, there is a question of interventions and how can you improve wisdom in people's lives, especially during the time the pandemic, during the time of various societal crises that we are facing these days.

[00:43:43.030] - Wesley
That's it for today's episode. Visit our website at journal entries, dot fireside dot fm for more information about Igor Grossmann, his work and some of the resources mentioned in this episode.