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15 - The Development of Wisdom during Adulthood

from Part IV - The Development of Wisdom

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 March 2019

Robert J. Sternberg
Affiliation:
Cornell University, New York
Judith Glück
Affiliation:
Universität Klagenfurt, Austria
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Summary

How does wisdom develop? Why do some people become wiser over the course of their lives, while most of us do not, or, at least, not by much? Researchers largely agree that wisdom develops through life experience – but not everyone who accumulates experience becomes wiser, so it either has to be something about the experiences or about the way people deal with them that leads to wisdom. This chapter first demonstrates that empirical findings on the relationship between wisdom and chronological age are quite inconsistent and highly dependent on how wisdom was measured. I try to make sense of these divergent findings by discussing which components of wisdom might be driving the various relationships. The second part of the chapter attempts to integrate and explain the empirical findings by relating them to conceptual models of the development of wisdom over adulthood.
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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

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