Three fresh takes on wisdom to help you become wiser

There’s something extremely odd about wisdom: nearly all of us aspire to have more of it, but few people agree on what it is. Many view wisdom as something beyond pure intelligence, and this is expressed well by an old joke that goes something like:

Intelligence is knowing that Frankenstein was the doctor.

Wisdom is knowing that Frankenstein was the monster.

And also by another quip in the same vein, which goes:

Intelligence is knowing how to get out of sticky situations.

Wisdom is not getting into them in the first place.

If we aspire to be wise it seems like we should know what it is. So, how do we understand the concept of wisdom more deeply?

Psychologists, philosophers, and cognitive scientists have proposed many models for understanding wisdom. This week, we’re going to walk you through some of them so that you can get a better understanding of what it means to you and how you can get more of it.

In this article, we'll discuss 3 definitions of wisdom, including:

1. Wisdom as pragmatic expertise

2. Wisdom as self-consistency

3. Wisdom as a virtue

Let's begin.

Definition 1: Wisdom as Pragmatic Expertise

The Berlin Wisdom Paradigm is a research project by psychologists that set out to understand wisdom. They define wisdom as a form of expertise: wise people are experts in what the Paradigm calls the “fundamental pragmatics of life” and they propose 5 criteria for determining whether someone is such an expert:

1. Deep Knowledge About Life 

Wise people have a broad understanding of human nature, relationships, society, and how life works.

To improve this aspect of your wisdom, you could try reading widely about psychology, philosophy, and history, to deepen your understanding of humanity. We’ve also written this article that covers some great ways to think more rationally as you encounter new information.

2. Knowing How to Handle Life’s Challenges

Wisdom is not just about knowing facts — it’s also about knowing how to apply them. Wise people can use their deep knowledge about life to solve problems, mediate conflicts, and adapt to new situations.

To improve in this aspect of your wisdom, you could check out our tools for kind and effective communication, conflict resolution, or active listening. 

3. Understanding Life’s Bigger Picture

Wise people recognize that life looks different at various ages and in different circumstances. They can see things in a broader context rather than focusing only on the present.

To improve in this aspect, you could try to zoom out when making decisions or reflecting on things that have happened — consider long-term consequences instead of just short-term gains. Our Quarterly Life Review tool might help you with this.

4. Respecting Different Values and Priorities

Wise people understand that there’s no single “right way” to live. Instead, they appreciate that people have different goals, cultures, and values.

To improve in this aspect, you could:

• Practice withholding judgment when you encounter views different from your own in situations where it's not actually necessary to pass judgement.

• Learn about different cultures and philosophies to expand your horizons.

• Engage in discussions with an open mind: aim to understand the people you’re talking with, rather than to ‘win’ the interaction. For help with this, you could try our Productive Disagreements tool.

5. Accepting and Managing Uncertainty

Life is unpredictable, and wisdom involves acknowledging that we don’t always know what’s going to happen. Wise people make the best decisions they can while staying flexible.

To improve in this aspect, you could try to cultivate probabilistic thinking in yourself, rather than binary thinking. This means letting go of absolute certainty regarding whether any claim is true or not, and instead thinking in terms of confidence levels. For example, instead of thinking:

“This person is definitely lying to me.”

You might think:

“I suspect they might not be telling the full truth — I’d estimate I’m 60% sure they’re lying, but I could be wrong.”

By shifting from black-and-white thinking to a more nuanced, probability-based mindset, you are less likely to be blindsided when things don’t go as expected.

If you want to explore this style of thinking in more detail, check out our Nuanced Thinking tool - probabilistic thinking is the first type of nuanced thinking explored in the tool.

If this conception of wisdom speaks to you, then you have many paths to becoming wiser: each of the five criteria above is a skill you can hone with intention, practice, and experience. Why not ask yourself which of the criteria above you think you’d get the biggest returns on, if you were to invest time working on them?

But that's just the first way of looking at wisdom. Let's explore some others.

Definition 2: Wisdom as self-consistency

Justin Shovelain and Elliot Mckernon, who are working on making AI safer, have come up with a definition of wisdom, which they think will be useful for aligning AI’s objectives with humanity’s. This interesting perspective on wisdom can be applied to humans too. In their view, an agent (this could be a person, or an organization, or an artificial intelligence) is wise insofar as they are ‘self-consistent’. That might sound easy, but they’ve broken down self-consistency into a handful of factors that each needs to be consistent within itself and consistent with all the others. So, for example, your plans need to not conflict with each other, but they also need to not be in conflict with your values, beliefs, and so on. Here are the factors, in simple terms:

Values

Do you have clear and consistent values? If you value different things in contradictory ways, you may struggle to make decisions. For example, if you prefer A over B, B over C, but then also prefer C over A, you risk creating a logical loop that makes decision-making impossible.

Evidence

Do you interpret information about the world in a consistent way? Even if the data you collect isn’t perfectly accurate, you should at least avoid contradictions in how you understand that data.

Beliefs

Do you avoid believing contradictory things? If you hold conflicting beliefs (such as "the sky is blue" and "the sky is not blue") you may struggle to make sense of reality.

Plans

Do your plans make sense together? If you make plans that work against each other, you won’t be able to follow through effectively. Imagine someone planning a road trip but also deciding they’ll never leave their house - these two goals obviously can’t coexist coherently.

Actions

Do your actions support your goals? If you act in ways that contradict what you’re trying to achieve, you won’t make progress. It’s like someone trying to save money while also spending recklessly — they’d be working against themself.

Communication

Are you consistent in how you interact with others? If you give mixed messages or contradicts yourself, you may lose trust or cause confusion. Clear, reliable communication is key to cooperating with others and achieving shared goals.

They also write that these things need to be consistent with the agent’s environment and humanity’s values as a whole.

To put it most simply, this definition of wisdom says that wisdom is about aligning your values, beliefs, plans, actions, and so on in a coherent way. A person who is wise according to this definition seeks to enact their values in their day-to-day life as much as possible, and is steadfast in their avoidance of hypocrisy. For example, they might profess concern about climate change and actually act in a way that is consistent with this (by recycling, using public transport etc). 

The authors of this model offer the following table that illustrates some (but not all) of the ways that these factors can be inconsistent with each other.

Consequences of inconsistency between different factors of wisdom

	Evidence	Beliefs	Values	Actions
Evidence	Failure to identify patterns
Beliefs	Failure to infer correct patterns from evidence	Cognitive dissonance (& deductive explosion)
Values	Failure to recognise valued states or distinguish the value of two states	Failure to recognise valued states, or distinguish the value of two states	May follow incoherent strategies (e.g., dutch booking)
Actions	Failure of actions to achieve plans	Failure of actions to achieve plans / goals.	Failure to achieve movement towards your ideals	Actions undermine each other: goals not achieved
Environment	Failure of sensory input or mapping	Failure of data processing	Irrelevant values: caring about things you can’t influence	Failure to influence the environment

If this concept of wisdom resonates with you, here are some practical ways you can work on increasing your self-consistency:

• Align your actions with your values. For help with this, you might want to check out this article of ours (by Professor Emerita of psychology at McGill University, Marilyn Fitzpatrick) about how you can live more in line with your values.

  
  

• Make plans that support your goals. You may want to check out our tool for effective goal setting, to help with this.

  
  

• Reflect on other inconsistencies you might have, between the various factors listed above, and how you might resolve them.

Definition 3: Wisdom as a virtue

Another way to think about wisdom is as a virtue. That is to say, as a character trait that enables a person to live a good and flourishing life. This conception of wisdom comes from virtue ethics, a branch of moral philosophy that goes all the way back to Aristotle. Of course, there is more than one virtue-theoretic account of wisdom out there, but we’re going to stick with the original: Aristotle.

It is common to interpret Aristotle as having thought of wisdom in several ways: 

• Theoretical wisdom (in ancient Greek, sophia)

• Practical wisdom (phronesis) 

• Productive wisdom / skill in producing things (techne)

In this view, you can obtain more of the different kinds of wisdom in different ways. 

Theoretical wisdom (sophia) is defined by Aristotle as a combination of intellectual insight (nous) and scientific understanding (epistêmê) of the “most honorable” matters, which involves understanding of ultimate explanations of things, particularly in fields such as philosophy, science, mathematics, and theology.

This explanation clearly suggests a path to cultivate more theoretical wisdom: learn about philosophy and science; study abstract ideas, and refine your reasoning skills. 

If you want more productive wisdom, you could practice a craft or skill, gaining hands-on experience and improving through trial and error.

But, the methods one would employ to obtain more practical wisdom are more complicated. In part, this is because the concept of practical wisdom is, itself, “densely thicketed with controversy” (so says Aristotle scholar, Sarah Brodie). Aristotle does not explain the concept in great detail and does not offer advice on how it could be cultivated (except saying that it comes from teaching and experience).

That being said, scholars at the Aretai Centre on Virtues have developed the following model that may be helpful for understanding Aristotle’s practical wisdom. They say that it is a kind of ethical expertise that guides the development of ethical virtues (such as justice, honesty, temperance, generosity, courage, and humility) and enables people to act in ways that promote their own flourishing and the flourishing of others. On their view, its components are:

• Intuition: A deep, almost instinctive understanding of moral and practical situations. A person with well-developed intuition can quickly grasp the ethical stakes of a situation and sense what the right course of action might be.

• Deliberation: The ability to think through a situation carefully, weighing different options and considering potential consequences. A practically wise person doesn’t just act on impulse; they pause, reflect, and make thoughtful choices.

• Emotional awareness: understanding and managing emotions. Emotional awareness helps people navigate social interactions, avoid rash decisions, and act with compassion.

(Image from: “Phronesis (Practical Wisdom) as a Key to Moral Decision-Making”)

This means that, in order to cultivate practical wisdom, one would need to cultivate intuitive skills, deliberative skills, and emotional skills. You might do this by:

• Improving intuition: Learn from experience, pay attention to moral role models, and engage in moral reflection on things like biases that affect your intuitions. We have a tool for reflecting on some biases that might be at play in your moral reasoning: try it here.

• Improving deliberation: Practice ethical reasoning and seek additional perspectives. Both of these can be done by doing things like reading moral philosophy or discussing ethics with people in your life.

• Improving emotional awareness: Reflect on your emotions, regularly, to understand them more deeply. Engage in active listening to others, to facilitate understanding their emotions.

So, which meaning is correct?

Given that wisdom is an attribute that operates across multiple domains (cognitive, emotional, practical, ethical…), varies across historical and cultural contexts, and is hugely context dependent (an action that is wise in one situation may be foolish in another!), we expect it might be useful to consider several forms of wisdom that you can apply to your daily life - not just one!

We've discussed 3 definitions here:

1. Wisdom as pragmatic expertise:  Wisdom is expertise in the “fundamental pragmatics of life”, which involve: deep knowledge about life; knowing how to handle life’s challenges; understanding life’s bigger picture; respecting different values and priorities; and accepting and managing uncertainty.

2. Wisdom as self-consistency: wisdom is about aligning your values, beliefs, plans, actions, and so on in a coherent way.

3. Wisdom as a virtue:  Wisdom is a character trait that enables a person to live a good and flourishing life. It comes in three forms (theoretical wisdom, practical wisdom, productive wisdom).

Becoming wiser is a multifaceted process. You might excel along one or more of the axes discussed above and still have room for growth in others. It’s also your choice which definition resonates most with you! 

We suggest you pick one or more to prioritise, in your quest to become the wisest version of yourself.

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As mentioned above, wisdom and intelligence aren’t quite the same thing. But if you’re curious about your intelligence, why not try our new Clearer Thinking Cognitive Assessment? It will help you to uncover your cognitive strengths and understand and where your intellectual strengths and weaknesses lie, across seven domains of intelligence:

Launch the Cognitive Assessment

And if you want to know more about the science behind it, you can read this article that dives deep into how it was made.