Exam 6: Thinking

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Divergent thinking is a mental approach that takes many paths to solutions, as opposed to a single logical path to one best solution (which characterizes convergent thinking), and it is a key feature of creativity (Runco & Acar, 2012). For example, the scoring for the alternate uses task rewards divergent thinking with points for generating many different and original answers across various categories of use (Silvia et al., 2008). Divergent thought is helpful for creative solutions, and contrasts with the convergent thinking needed to solve problems with straightforward or single best answers.
For example, divergent thinking might help an architect consider novel designs for a new bridge. Later these designs might be tested with convergent thinking that applies formulas for calculating how much weight each bridge design can handle before collapsing. Recall that truly creative works must be both novel and useful. Divergent thinking is needed for the novelty, but some 'solutions' will later be dismissed for the bad ideas they are.

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In essence, there are not clear and consistent age differences in wisdom measures across adulthood (Baltes & Staudinger, 2000; Brienza et al., 2017; Grossmann, 2017; Staudinger & Glück, 2011). To be clear, individual studies sometimes find age differences, but they tend to be small, both increasing and decreasing over the life span, or vary by topic and culture.
On the other hand, if we compare wisdom to other kinds of cognitive processes, older people do seem especially resilient with wisdom. That is, memory and processing speed tend to decline with age; thus, the lack of similar decline in wisdom is telling. Wisdom likely suffers too with serious cognitive decline, and among older people there may be a mix of both the exceptionally wise and others who are losing that capacity. In addition, before making too much of small age effects in wisdom, we should mind the gap between real world wisdom and the artificial tasks used to assess it (Baltes & Staudinger, 2000). Despite these cautions, most agree that wisdom requires more than the mere accumulation of years, and some older adults still lack wisdom.
Beyond age, are there other individual differences more associated with wisdom? Of the big five traits, openness is most consistently correlated with various measures of wisdom (Brienza et al., 2017; Staudinger & Glück, 2011). Narrower personality characteristics such as emotion regulation, social intelligence, mindfulness, perspective taking, etc. also correlate with wisdom, though some of these characteristics begin to overlap with self-report measures of wisdom itself.
General intelligence is also positively correlated with wisdom (Staudinger, Lopez, & Baltes, 1997). Although wisdom is seen as going beyond raw intellect-particularly in terms of practical applications-intelligence is often seen as a pre-condition of wisdom. Yet, intelligence and wisdom differ in important ways. For example, unlike intelligence, wisdom is typically associated with psychological well-being. The link goes back to Aristotle who saw practical wisdom as a master virtue and eudaimonia as about living a virtuous life. Contemporary research supports this notion by linking measures of wisdom and well-being, especially a sense of personal growth (Wink & Staudinger, 2016).
Self-focus or ego-centric perspectives may impair wisdom. Hints of this are found when comparing cultural differences in individualism or power; wise reasoning seems more prevalent when these are lower (Grossmann, 2017).