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13 - Performance-Based Measures of Wisdom

State of the Art and Future Directions

from Part III - Measures 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

Proceeding from the idea that wisdom encompasses both elements, character and knowledge, personality and competence, in this chapter, I argue that an appropriate empirical assessment of wisdom ideally involves two types of measures: self-report questionnaires to assess wisdom as personality and performance-based to assess wisdom as knowledge. Seen from this perspective, two aspects of wisdom research appear troublesome, namely, the one-sided focus of most wisdom studies on either self-report measures or performance-based measures and the increasing exclusive reliance of empirical research on the self-report method in recent years. One reason for the rise of self-report studies could be that performance-based methods are costly in terms of both data collection in the context of individual interviews and data processing via relatively complex coding procedures. As I will argue in this chapter, for both theoretical and method-related reasons, however, we cannot afford to cast aside using and further developing performance-based methods.
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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

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