Are old people really wise?

By Robin Lloyd

updated 12:32 p.m. ET Dec. 15, 2008

There is more information than ever at our fingertips, yet we’re none the wiser it seems.

And many old people are wise, as most of them will tell you, but sometimes they can’t remember your name, so how smart is that?

It’s paradoxes like these that lie at the heart of a new $2 million research project called Defining Wisdom. Based at the University of Chicago, the four-year initiative, supported by the Templeton Foundation, has enlisted 23 scholars ranging from historians to economists to psychologists to computer scientists to examine the idea of wisdom, with the aim of cultivating it and better understanding its nature.

Definitions of wisdom are all over the map, even among the funded scholars interviewed for this story. The communications scientist says wisdom involves intelligence that is sensitive to the needs of others and makes a good use of judgment. The computer scientist says wisdom involves being able to quickly access information from compressed datasets. And the historian refuses to impose a definition and prefers to draw it out of the historical contexts she studies.

None of these three researchers seems to be willing to state whether wisdom today is greater or less than it used to be, but each is taking a stab at seeing how wisdom can be understood and measured.  

Shaking things up
Earthquakes, of all things, have offered significant opportunities for society to figure out what constitutes wisdom, says Barnard College’s Deborah Coen, who studies the history of science and is interested in wisdom as the capacity to navigate the rough waters between technical expertise and what the rest of us know and experience. As such, wisdom is more than commanding facts, aka knowledge.

Coen’s new research will focus on how lay people’s observations helped scholars and others make sense of earthquakes during a period from 1857 to 1914. This era was the "hey-day of human observation of earthquakes," Coen said, in a time before mechanical detectors of earthquakes were reliable.

Scholars of the time thought it was imperative to observe earthquakes scientifically, and relied on eyewitnesses to answer questions about an earthquake’s duration. At the same time, though, some thinkers ironically believed that people who experienced earthquakes repeatedly had their rationality destroyed, leaving them desensitized to the experience and, in a way, incapable of contributing to higher science or culture.

So a "science of the lay people" flew in the face of one's fear of the natural world. A contradiction emerged between common sense and scientific experts who redefined a modern form of wisdom — in this case about earthquakes.

Nowadays, lay people are mostly excluded from the scientific process, but in the late 19th century, there was a "moment of opportunity for collaboration, negotiation and communication between experts and lay people. Experts needed lay people’s eyes ears and hands," Coen said.

There is no more or less wisdom today about earthquakes than before, but we have missed an opportunity, she said, (although a scientist today would surely claim there is a lot more knowledge about temblors).

"We have cut off options for ourselves," Coen said. "The technocratic age has limited the modes of communication between experts and lay people."

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