Wisdom involves the use of certain types of pragmatic reasoning to navigate important challenges in social life. Grossmann and his colleagues synthesized these facets of cognition in a framework of wise reasoning which is mainly based on the neo-Piagetian scholarship and Berlin Wisdom Paradigm. They include (1) intellectual humility or recognition of limits of own knowledge, (2) appreciation of perspectives broader than the issue at hand, (3) sensitivity to the possibility of change in social relations, and (4) compromise or integration of different opinions. Opposed to abstract reasoning, wise reasoning is influenced by life experiences and situated in a social context. There are some differences between abstract reasoning and wise reasoning. For example, unlike wise reasoning, abstract reasoning is insufficient for solving ill-defined socioemotional problems.
Initially the measurement of wise reasoning includes fictitious conflicts and a structured interview. Here is the process: Firstly, participant finishes reading descriptions of some social conflicts. Then the interviewer asks participants to think out loud about the conflict, with their reflection guided via some questions (e.g., “What do you think will happen after the event you read about?” “Why do you think it will happen this way?” and “What do you think should be done?”) from the interviewer. Now, it can be measured by a Situated Wise Reasoning Scale (SWIS) which is based on event-construction. Firstly, the researcher asks participants to recall a recent interpersonal conflict and answer a number of questions about the situation and their subjective experience, which serves to increase accuracy of their recall. Then, they fill out self-report items measuring to what extent they used wise-reasoning strategies in dealing with the conflict.
Some research results show that wise reasoning is related to some factors, such as age, cultural and situations. Firstly, it is a common lay belief that wisdom improves into old age. Specifically, older people are believed to show better competencies for reasoning about social conflicts. Research shows that relative to young and middle-aged people, older people make more use of wise-reasoning strategies. Secondly, People from different cultures vary in the ways they approach social conflicts, with Japanese being more motivated to maintain interpersonal harmony and avoid conflicts than Americans are. Such cultural differences influence persons’ wise reasoning about social conflict. Japanese showed greater use of wise-reasoning strategies than Americans did for the same age group. Thirdly, Wise reasoning varies from one situation to another, with self-focused contexts inhibiting wise thinking. Experiments can show ways to buffer thinking against bias in cases in which self-interests are unavoidable. Specifically, Researchers use various ways which can promote ego-decentering to improve the ability of participants’ wise reasoning about personally meaningful issues.
The future research should focus on the following aspects: (a) to explore the concept of wise reasoning in natural wisdom and make the concept and structure of it enriched, (b) to develop the face-to-face measurement of wise reasoning, and (c) to explore the neural mechanisms of wise reasoning and compare it with the neural mechanisms of abstract reasoning, especially the deduction reasoning.
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