Professor of Psychology Howard Nusbaum
On Wisdom, Language and Attention
Howard Nusbaum is Professor of Psychology at the University of Chicago and Director of The Center for Practical Wisdom. He is also the Director of The Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences at the National Science Foundation. Whilst Co-director of the Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience at the University of Chicago, he also co-directed the Defining Wisdom Project which ran from 2007-2011. He was Principal Investigator for the Wisdom Research Project which ran from 2012-2015. His research interests include wisdom, attention, learning and language.
On a recent trip to Oxford, UK for The Jubilee Centre‘s ‘Character, Wisdom and Virtue’ conference, he spoke with evidencebasedwisdom about the origins of Chicago University’s Wisdom Research programme. He also talked about wisdom as a skill, the foreign language effect, wise stock-trading, the relationship between ballet and wisdom and the surprising role of the supreme court in the new field of wisdom research.
On The Birth of The Defining Wisdom Project
On Wisdom and the virtues
On Wisdom as a skill
On the Cognitive Resources necessary for Wisdom
On Wisdom and The Foreign Language Effect
On Wisdom, Trading and The Endowment Effect
On Wisdom and Expertise
On Wisdom and Learning Mathematics
On Wisdom and Ballet
On Wisdom and Attention
On Wisdom and Medical Training
On Wisdom, Nudging and The Supreme Court
On The Birth of The Defining Wisdom Project
Can you tell us how you became interested in the study of wisdom, and how the Defining Wisdom Project got started in the first place?
At the time there was a lot of conversation that was taking place about the importance of social connection, how that plays a role in things that might be having to do with problem solving, like insight, or social connection in service of the way we talk to each other to achieve certain ends. So I started talking about language impact instead of language meaning, so I actually wrote a little piece on language impact in a book that came out of that network, which was long before we started the wisdom project.
Then Barnaby Marsh from The Templeton Foundation came to talk to people in Chicago and talk to me and he basically said ‘So what have you been thinking about wisdom?’ I said ‘Well, I just heard this talk by Bob Sternberg.’ Bob was historically an intelligence researcher but largely a lot of his work was questioning the way people were measuring intelligence and sought to contextualise it. So whereas Howard Gardner looked at it and said ‘So you have this kind of intelligence and that kind of intelligence,’ I think Bob was more interested in the context by which intelligence is manifest. So, in and African village, what counts as intelligence – it’s not like it’s visual intelligence. It’s a different kind of thing there than it is in the city of Chicago.
He started talking about wisdom and he started talking about foolishness, and that intelligence may not really capture the things that we want to understand as human beings in respect of thinking about adaptive and dynamic ways of improving our responses to situations in the world
He started talking about leadership. He started talking about wisdom and he started talking about foolishness, and that intelligence may not really capture the things that we want to understand as human beings in respect of thinking about adaptive and dynamic ways of improving our responses to situations in the world.
And also what we should be optimising education for?
Exactly, and he took that direction. That is when he went to Tufts he tried to ‘wisdomize’ Tufts admissions and he tried to apply it in other subsequent positions, which I’m not sure had the reception that he was hoping for. I think for me, hearing him talk about wisdom, and to talk about it, shall we say, in an organised fashion scientifically, it was different from the way Paul Baltes was talking about it – that made me think, this was something. So I’d been reading research on intelligence for years, but it’s not my game – I’d just been interested in it.
Going back even further, when I went to undergraduate school, I chose the college in part because Abraham Maslow was there. So the notion about improving yourself, changing yourself, transcendence and so forth, I thought were interesting ideas.
I suppose that’s the Seligman idea of looking at the people that are doing well and learning from them rather than always looking at people who aren’t and asking why not?
When Marty (Seligman) was looking at Learned Helplessness and Depression, Maslow was looking at transcendence and self-improvement and so forth, but Maslow didn’t do the science of it. He just wrote the idea of it, so that had no real place in my graduate training at all. When Bob was talking about wisdom that way, I saw that there was potential in it. That’s when I looked at Paul Baltes’ work and Gigerenzer’s work. Gerd Gigerenzer had been a colleague at Chicago for a period of time, and we talked about heuristics and how those can be useful for both adaptive and also smart processing.
So when Barnaby said ‘What do you think about wisdom?’ I had been reading a book called ‘Collapse’ by Jared Diamond. There’s a little anecdote in ‘Collapse’ that really struck me, and the anecdote had to do with the Dominican Republic and Haiti. So they share an Island, there on the same Island, and yet they prosper in different ways. Diamond makes the argument that Haiti essentially mined out all its trees and denuded itself, whereas the Dominican Republic has preserved its trees as a resource.
What’s important about that is that when hurricanes and floods come, Haiti suffers more than the Dominican Republic. So he makes this argument that Haiti suffers a lot more because of this fact, and he makes the point, I think it’s even just in passing, that policy that caused the trees to remain in The Dominican Republic that were protected by the government was not intentional. He doesn’t say exactly how it came about, but he doesn’t say ‘It was the intention to preserve this for purpose of helping the community or some other reason.’ So what’s interesting is that if you looked at that difference, you’d say The Dominican Republic had ‘Wise Policy’ there, but it might not have come from a wise process.
On the one hand he was talking about wise thinking, and yet there are examples that people might call wise in the world that aren’t products of that kind of wise thinking. They’re not planned for. They might lead to flourishing. They might lead to positive outcomes.
So that intrigued me in the context of Sternberg’s talk. On the one hand he was talking about wise thinking, and yet there are examples that people might call wise in the world that aren’t products of that kind of wise thinking. They’re not planned for. They might lead to flourishing. They might lead to positive outcomes.
So, when Barnaby came, I said ‘You know, on the one hand there‘s this idea that there’s something called wisdom – we should study it and find out about it. On the other hand, maybe wisdom’s just a societal judgement ex post – ‘This worked out really well. They had the big view. They had far-sighted thinking.’
Whereas they just got lucky! There is this concept of the Outcome Bias where decisions are judged based on how they turned out, rather than on the information available at the time of the decision. It can of course happen the other way round – a decision could be good based on available information, that turns out to have a bad outcome, but that should still be labelled a good decision.
So that was a point of discussion in my talk today. I pointed out a set of conditions that I’ve talked about with people, where society judges something as being wise. For example, if there’s no risk, people don’t say there’s any wisdom. If there’s no uncertainty, if it’s a sure thing, people say there’s no wisdom. There’s a set of these things, and so ‘outcome’ is one of those things.
I said, you know if Solomon had cut the baby in half, nobody would look back at ‘Wise Solomon.’ We didn’t see the inside of his head while he was doing this, and society judges outcome. Nancy Snow called me on it and said ‘You’re not saying it’s only outcome-based?’, and I was arguing that societies determinations, as a frame, in the media, in public discussion, is on the basis of outcome and these other factors. As scientists, we don’t care about that. As scientists we care about the mechanism or the process. How did we get there? And if the ‘there’ didn’t work out this time, well it was a high-risk, highly uncertain, you know…
I said, you know if Solomon had cut the baby in half, nobody would look back at ‘Wise Solomon.’ We didn’t see the inside of his head while he was doing this, and society judges outcome.
So those were the discussions that I had with Barnaby from Templeton, and he said, ‘Well, we’d like to give you some money to give away to other people to have them study wisdom.’ And I said ‘Oh sure. That sounds like a good idea.’ I thought, ‘This is a good way to learn about the science.’ We ended up supporting people who studied Classics, you know the Classics like ‘Ulysses’, and failures of leadership in the classics, or people who studied History who looked at how people dealt with disasters, people who studied Neuroscience, or Social Neuroscience, for example people, looking at Moral Decision-Making.
So was it your decision to adopt a multidisciplinary approach, or is that the way The Templeton Foundation approaches projects anyway?
It is the way they approach things anyway. I think we were pretty much aware of it anyway when we set out to work on this. I think they didn’t have an idea about process but they did have an idea about content. They definitely wanted untenured faculty. My colleague who did this with me John Cacioppo and I said ‘What untenured faculty is going to risk his career on wisdom?!’ And they said ‘We believe something will happen, so give it a shot.’
My colleague who did this with me John Cacioppo and I said ‘What untenured faculty is going to risk his career on wisdom?!’ And they said ‘We believe something will happen, so give it a shot.’
So we did not restrict the areas. We had people from Music through Computer Science apply. So what we essentially did was we put out a call and we said, ‘Look, anybody who’s interested in studying wisdom in these various ways should send a letter of intent.’ The idea was that it would be a two-year project. They should specify how it’s interdisciplinary. They should specify their approach and so on.
Was it with some trepidation that you stepped into this role? It’s quite an ephemeral topic. Or did you just think that everyone would understand what you were trying to do right away?
I didn’t think that everyone would understand, but I thought it would be fun. One advantage of coming from the University of Chicago is conversations take place across disciplines all the time. The group that I had been in prior to this wisdom project, it had anthropologists, it had MDs, it had sociologists, it had psychologists, it had theologians. It was very broad, and the conversations were incredibly enlightening and thoughtful and I learned an enormous amount, so I just thought, here’s an opportunity to learn about something that I really want to, and frankly nobody else knows much about it either so you don’t have to be embarrassed.
On Wisdom and the virtues
In your research, do you have a definition of wisdom that you find the most helpful?
For my work in my lab, as opposed to the whole centre, I sort of work on a simplified model of ‘prudential judgement in service of human flourishing’, taking that from Aristotle, although I have been informed by my colleague Candace (Vogler) as of yesterday’s talk about Aquinas how wisdom can be thought of as orchestrating the moral virtues, so that illuminates the Aristotelian perspective that human flourishing is not just what makes me happy – human flourishing has to do with human pursuit of the moral virtues. So, the way we think about it is ‘virtuous decision-making’, if you will, in the moral virtue sense.
For my work in my lab, as opposed to the whole centre, I sort of work on a simplified model of ‘prudential judgement in service of human flourishing’
Is virtue the same as “the common good”?
There was a lot of talk about that at the conference. I think that’s a reasonable statement. As a psychologist, I think of it more as ‘prosocially-oriented dispositions’. Valerie Tiberius has a great book ‘The Reflective Life’. As a philosopher, she’s written a kind of theory of wisdom that reads a lot like a psychological theory. Essentially, in her book, what she talks about is that the virtues set value commitments. If you have a virtue of generosity or a virtue of courage, those provide for you guideposts by which you can judge a prospective decision or action and say, ‘So is this courageous? Is this generous? And if those are my goals and my directions, then I want to use those as signposts.’
So, you could be a virtuous person because you hold those yourself, but there are many circumstances where decisions or situations cause some of those virtues to come into conflict. And so from an Aquinas perspective, as I’ve now learned, that’s one way in which wisdom can orchestrate that balance, but from Valerie’s theoretic perspective, she would say, ‘Well look. If you’re trying to look at a situation where different people will have different outcomes for them by your choice or decision, you want to adopt their values, you want to take their perspective.’
… From Valerie’s theoretic perspective, she would say, ‘Well look. If you’re trying to look at a situation where different people will have different outcomes for them by your choice or decision, you want to adopt their values, you want to take their perspective.’
And that’s where the other-centred perspective comes in?
Exactly. So what that does is opens the door to think about other kinds of virtues. So the intellectual virtues are things like epistemic humility or reflection – those are critical to perspective-taking. I can’t really take your perspective in the sense of inhabiting your value commitments unless I can put mine aside and believe yours.
That’s hard to do!
It’s hard to do, but nobody said wisdom’s easy! And I think that’s what the crux of the problem of wisdom is, in large part. All too often we talk about the wise person as that person who can easily do that difficult thing. This is why in the Center for Practical Wisdom we have shifted. We take a narrower definition in the sense of ‘to move in the direction of human flourishing.’
We take a narrower definition in the sense of
‘to move in the direction of human flourishing.’
On Wisdom as a skill
You have written that rather than thinking about achieving some ‘final state of wisdom’, it’s more about ‘becoming a little wiser’…
Or in the next decision, when you consider that decision, could you make the choice between a slightly wiser decision or a less wise decision? Experience may lead you to (1) consider the wiser option and then (2) make that wiser choice.
This brings us onto the question of whether wisdom is a trait vs state – Is wisdom a relatively stable personality trait, or is it more of a state that we sometimes inhabit, depending on the situation we find ourselves in. But you have described wisdom as instead ‘a skill’, which seems like you’re suggesting it’s like a trait that you can develop?
Yes. The problem with trait language, or character language, is that it attributes, as an element of who you are, some attribute. Trait Psychology in the olden days wanted to say ‘Oh, you have the traits of outgoingness, and this-that-and-the-other…’ and it’s fixed. We think about intelligence as inherent in the person and we think about skills as things you develop.
If you were able to make wiser decisions with very high probability across the circumstances of opportunity, you’d look like a wise person. So if you increase the probability of making a wise decision in any opportunity, then you’re moving in the direction of that. A ‘state’ sort of suggests, ‘Well, you’ve done it now, but it doesn’t have any implication for the future.’
If you were able to make wiser decisions with very high probability across the circumstances of opportunity, you’d look like a wise person. So if you increase the probability of making a wise decision in any opportunity, then you’re moving in the direction of that.
Right, implying that you’re starting from scratch each time, and that pulls out the sense of learning from experience?
It doesn’t have to. I think Igor Grossmann (click here to read his Wisdom Profile) would hedge on that, but the state-trait notion is just that ‘state’ suggests this is punctate now, and ‘trait’ means it’s enduring. So I want to move to ‘skills’ language because I think it’s something people can learn, increasing the probability of the state, and when the probability of the state rises high enough, it would look trait-like. Let’s put it that way.
So I want to move to ‘skills’ language because I think it’s something people can learn, increasing the probability of the state, and when the probability of the state rises high enough, it would look trait-like. Let’s put it that way.
On the Cognitive Resources necessary for Wisdom
You have written of wisdom as a skill that can be acquired through experience. What kinds of experience does the research suggest lead to the development of this skill of wisdom?
So I think that the way that we’re thinking about these sort of taxonomically is ‘What do we need to take a wiser decision in the next moment?’ and what you need is certain kinds of cognitive resources. So you need to have control of attention. If you’re distractible by irrelevant things or if you can’t focus on the problem. If you can’t hold multiple things in working memory and consider them – there are things like that.
Those things could be considered divorced from wisdom per se. If you play ‘Call of Duty’ we know some aspects of your attention improve. There are other kinds of games that will improve working memory. There are questions about how much that will transfer to other circumstances, but if some of it does transfer, then you can say ‘Well, there should be some ways you could improve your control of attention, self-regulation, things like that, which may not be so content-bound but may be about how you approach a lot of situations.’
So I think that the way that we’re thinking about these sort of taxonomically is ‘What do we need to take a wiser decision in the next moment?’ and what you need is certain kinds of cognitive resources. So you need to have control of attention.
So then you at least have the resources, but that doesn’t mean you’re necessarily going to bring them together in a wise way, but at least you’ve got the kit.
Exactly, and that’s some of the kit, but then you need social knowledge. So if you look back to Baltes’s kind of social expertise or expertise in living, you clearly have to understand people, and you have to understand people in two ways. One is, you have to understand a lot about the kind of people you’re typically engaged with for these kinds of issues but then you also have to understand what you don’t understand about people, because you have to ask the right questions at the right time. If you think you know everything, then you won’t ask the right questions. That’s where ‘Epistemic Humility’ comes in.
So we move from a set of things like ‘attention’, which may or may not be content-bound and that’s an open scientific question, to things like social knowledge. Social knowledge is very contextually bound and content-related. My social knowledge about the medical world, like if I was a doctor and I wanted to navigate in the medical world, that kind of social knowledge is very different from engineers and very different from lawyers.
So we move from a set of things like ‘attention’, which may or may not be content-bound and that’s an open scientific question, to things like social knowledge. Social knowledge is very contextually bound and content-related.
So there’s a kind of content-rich and specific knowledge one needs also, which suggests that you can be domain-wise and domain-foolish at the same time, which is why some people say Confucius may have given off a lot of wisdom but he was a terrible policy maker or administrator.
Or you could as a politician you could run the country very well but your family life could be in disarray.
Exactly. So I think from our perspective at the Center, there are different kinds of experiences that can operate to promote a wiser decision that may or may not translate into ability.
On Wisdom and The Foreign Language Effect
For example, Boaz Keysar’s work with Albert Costa on moral decision-making in a foreign language. I think there are two aspects to the issue about the foreign language effect. One aspect is, from Igor (Grossmann) and Ethan’s (Kross) manipulation of third-person ego distancing, we know that the use of a pronoun is sufficient to sort of step you back.
What Boaz and Albert are saying is that use of language in a non-habitual way may do that. In some of Albert’s studies, he’s in Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, so he has native Catalan Spanish speakers. So if he puts them in to one language but they’re in the context of a different language then it can serve the same kind of effect. I think that Sayuri Hayakawa and Boaz have got some effects like that, where they simply sort of give instructions in the second language, you don’t have to be using it at the time, and that’ll increase creativity.
One of the arguments that they’re making, and this goes back to something I was saying earlier about language impact, is that linguists have sort of given us a model of language understanding. That model of language understanding sort of says ‘You hear the sounds of speech. You combine them to make words. You put the words into sentential order. You use the syntax to form meaning etc. Then you get pragmatic reasoning at the back-end.’ So you have this process and at the end, what pops out is a kind of distilled meaning of something, and then you look at that meaning and you go ‘What do I want to do with it?’ I think that we have these experiences with language that aren’t about distilling a meaning and then evaluating them. Our experiences with language are, if someone says ‘You’re stupid, ‘ you feel it, even if you don’t know the person. You don’t have to think about it a whole lot.
Then when you switch to a language that you might be very competent in but you don’t use a lot habitually, there’s a little more distance.
So I think this issue about language impact that I mentioned earlier is tied to this notion that, when we use a language everyday, when we use it all the time for communication, the senses of meaning that we imbue utterances with become very tightly coupled. Then when you switch to a language that you might be very competent in but you don’t use a lot habitually, there’s a little more distance. So I think that the foreign language effect or second language effect isn’t sufficient.
Some of that can be due to competence because when you’re less competent you have less-enriched associations and meanings, but some of it may just be context and use. If it’s not the thing you use everyday, for example, there may be a little more distance for you.
Because it doesn’t have the emotional attachments that you build up over a lifetime of use?
Exactly. That’s right.
So the implication is that you then don’t have the ‘emotional cloud’ interfering with your rational thinking?
I think that’s an important point. To call it ‘rational’ is to imply an economic model of rationality. You could call it utilitarian or deontological – one or the other, we don’t really know. You’re less influenced by affective responses, and I think one might question whether that’s always wise.
Right, because many definitions of wisdom refer to the importance of emotional intelligence or integrating intelligence with emotion. Maybe it’s helpful to think of this process more as reducing ‘unhelpful emotion’?
Exactly. ‘Unhelpful emotion’ or ‘distorting emotion,’ or ‘distorting’ in sense with regards to the goals of the decision that you have to make.
On Wisdom, Trading and The Endowment Effect
One of the papers that I talked about today is this work that I did with this economist at The University of Chicago where we looked at the Endowment Effect. What that work shows is that if you have experience doing trading, it reduces the endowment effect and that’s mediated by a reduction in activity in the anterior insula.
What that works shows is that if you have experience doing trading, it reduces the endowment effect and that’s mediated by a reduction in activity in the anterior insula.
So we had a priori hypotheses like ‘Well if you trade a lot, you might enjoy trading, and then objects that you own are less important perhaps than the benefit of the enjoyment of the hunt’. So we would look for nucleus accumbens or striatal activity that’s part of the dopamine reward system if that were true. So we might say ‘Okay, so when you’re doing a trade and you’re an experienced trader, we’ll look for that.’ Or we could say ‘Well, if you’re a trader, you are Homo Economicus .You are exerting through rational analysis control over those affective responses that might be negative.’ So we would look for coupling between areas in prefrontal cortex and anterior insula.
So we didn’t see either one of those two things. What we did see is a reduction in anterior insula activity. The insula is part of the homeostatic self-regulatory network that says ‘I’ve got an upset stomach’ or something and when you’re angry or disgusted or upset, the insula’s also active. So what we saw was that the insula was active in cases of endowment effect and reduced in those people who had the experience of trading. So, by using the neural data we could specifically test between different models of what this is doing.
Does that mean that that is always a better decision? No, we don’t call that wisdom, but what we talk about is this is one thing that experience can do. It can sort of reduce kneejerk affective responses to situations so that you can evaluate them on different grounds. That’s where reflection becomes important because you have to reflect on the virtues as opposed to the affective response.
Does that mean that that is always a better decision? No, we don’t call that wisdom, but what we talk about is this is one thing that experience can do. It can sort of reduce kneejerk affective responses to situations so that you can evaluate them on different grounds.
On Wisdom and Expertise
That’s really interesting. When we talk about an individual gaining ‘experience’, surely there must be some physiological change where that experience is stored in the body. The idea of experience must map onto a physical change…
Right. So there’s a lot of research on expertise. What you see is that when expertise is applied in domains of expertise, there’s an overall reduction in cortical activity. So it’s as if you don’t need to work as hard in your brain when you’re an expert in something than if you’re a novice.
What might be important about that, and I stress the might because I don’t think we really know although people would say that we do, is that, if there’s a lot of metabolic activity, more metabolic activity in your brain, you could sort of say there’s competition for resources.
In other words, that metabolic activity is using up energy from something and somewhere, and so we want to understand whether that’s a drain on your ability to use other kinds of ratio-centric, analytic processes that aren’t drawn in by that. So, if you want to be able to select what you’re doing, you want to have more capacity to do that.
So the novice may just have more overall brain activity engaged as well as affective responses – that may just make a fog of war for them to try to understand things.
So the novice may just have more overall brain activity engaged as well as affective responses – that may just make a fog of war for them to try to understand things.
That makes it very difficult for them to step back from the situation. There’s no capacity left! Like when you’re first learning to drive, there’s a lot to think about and it’s a complete nightmare. A couple of years later, you can drive and carry on an in-depth conversation at the same time.
When you look at work about expertise in golf for example – what you find is that golf experts can’t tell you what they did on any particular putt, and a novice can tell you every little thing – ‘Well I was breathing fast here, and my foot was like this..’. The Golf expert is like ‘Here’s how you do a putt, but I don’t remember this detail,’ but they can break out of that when they’re confronted with a more challenging situation. They have more discretionary control in some sense.
That’s what Margaret Plews-Ogan has said, that experienced Doctors are mostly functioning in an automatic mode. When something doesn’t fit the normal pattern, it pops up as flag, and they switch to a broader, more probabilistic, deliberate way of thinking. It sounds like the Daniel Kahneman ‘Thinking Fast and Slow’ model.
On Wisdom and Learning Mathematics
Daniel Kahneman‘s research suggests people are more successful at solving ‘trick’ Maths questions when the question is scribbled and hard to read. That surprised me, as intuition would suggest that the clearer you present a question, the better chance people would have at solving it. The suggestion was that the unclear presentation forced people to switch into the ‘System 2’ slower, more deliberate thinking mode.
There’s a psychologist’s trick in that, which is really, making it as clear as possible is for a problem that you can’t solve in the way that you’d usually solve a problem of that type. If what you’re doing is running down the lane of habit and habit isn’t going to work in this way, but you signalled that this fits habit, then you’re in trouble. It’s really just a trick to signal that this isn’t the way that things are typically.
It turns out that when you look at the mistakes that kids make in learning Math, how they categorise a problem at the outset is the most predictive determinant of success. Bob Siegler’s research on the development of Math skills really shows that kids, when they’re presented with a problem, they put it in a box, and say ‘This is one of those – this is one of these’ and they know how to deal with those and they know how to deal with these and so that’s how they come up with solutions.
It turns out that when you look at the mistakes that kids make in learning Math, how they categorise a problem at the outset is the most predictive determinant of success.
Jim Stigler for example, years and years ago did work on Math education in the United States and Japan. One of the little studies he did was to give problems of a certain sort to kids – I think it was 3rd graders – and he’d given them like long division, something they hadn’t covered. In the US, the kids would look at it and they’d put down an answer. They had no clue about how to use the operator, they had no clue what the Math was. They would just write an answer. In Japan they would say, ‘I don’t know what this problem is.’
What’s interesting about that is, in many circumstances the way we teach educationally is like an equals sign means ‘write an answer’, not ‘an equals sign means equivalence.’ There’s a fair amount of research on how that kind of concept develops as well, but it reflects this notion that we automatize a lot of things and we don’t teach reflective processing.
So Jim (Stigler) told me this story about sitting in this Math classroom, I think it was about 3rd grade, and the teacher gives the class a problem and everyone’s working hard on it. The teacher asks ‘How many people solved it?’ and they raise their hand. She then puts up an answer, and then the people that got it wrong are the ones that are called to the board. They’re called to the board to demonstrate how to solve the problem. Jim’s watching this – here’s some poor kid who’s worked on the problem and now he has to demonstrate this in front of the class how to solve the problem – and there’s a social concern here, but the class is cheering the kid on at every stage.
There’s a fair amount of research on how that kind of concept develops as well, but it reflects this notion that we automatize a lot of things and we don’t teach reflective processing.
Because of the social support, the kid actually thinks of a different approach to the problem and ends up solving the problem, and the class learns a different way to solve the problem. So in Japanese classrooms, when you solve the problem, you’re not done. The teacher then says ‘Find another way to solve it.’ That kind of approach deepens introspective understanding of what the nature of the problem is as opposed to just writing down an answer.
I have noticed this myself when teaching Maths. When a child presents an alternative method for tackling a problem, it places a great demand on the teacher who has to then check the logic of it to see if it stacks up. If teachers don’t or can’t do that, then the children can quickly lose faith in the internal logic of the subject.
This is one of the thing’s that Stigler grappled with for a long time is exactly that issue – that a lot of teachers that teach Math don’t understand Math. They know how to teach what they know how to teach but they don’t understand the concepts. So when they go from teaching how to calculate the area of a square to a rectangle to a triangle, they’re on solid ground. When they go to the circle, they just give a formula. They don’t understand how to conceive the relationship between those, and then communicate it. What that does is it simply enforces kids learning formulas instead of understanding the concepts.
Do you think it makes sense to place the most experienced Maths teachers in the younger-age group classrooms, so students are presented these big ideas for the first time by teachers who have the deepest understanding of the concepts?
The problem is less about which teachers to put where, as it is to conceive of how it is we’re intending for students to learn the concepts in the first place. I think that, in large part the way we train teachers as a means of ensuring that students get lesson plans as intended, is probably not the best approach in general.
On Wisdom and Ballet
In February 2016, you published the paper ‘The Relationship between Mental and Somatic Practices and Wisdom’ which showed that greater experience in ballet and meditation correlates with greater wisdom. What do you think might be the mechanism by which ballet and meditation are related to wisdom? Is it a matter of practiced self-regulation and self-control?
The nature of the study doesn’t allow us to say any more than the following. We can say that either very wise people stick with ballet, or we can say sticking with ballet makes you wise. It’s just correlational and it’s cross-sectional.
On an introspective basis you might say, ‘Well, nobody who choses to stick with ballet is really going to be wise at the outset, so they must have developed it, only because it’s painful, it’s hard. What kind of foolish person would spend 30 years doing that?!’ But that’s wrong. That’s just introspection.
We can say that either very wise people stick with ballet,
or we can say sticking with ballet makes you wise.
One of the thing’s we’re trying to do is we’re trying to replicate that now – we’re working with a couple of ballet schools in Chicago. The question is, first off ‘Does it replicate?’ It’s an odd study. There are a lot of subjects and the shape of the regression functions look pretty solid.
Actually, what’s interesting is that, compared to meditation, the fit for the ballet dancers is much more linear, but they also start lower so you can expect that they might look linear. It’s just an interesting idea that ballet requires a couple of things. There’s no evidence for what I’m going to say but there’s introspective consideration that you have to be pretty well self-regulated to keep at it because it does hurt, it is painful, it’s hard. You have to learn how to pay attention very well to the things that people do with their bodies other than you and then repeat them yourself. That’s a skill in and of itself. If you watch a dancer who is a dancer demonstrating a move and then you try to do it, unless you’re a dancer, you’re pretty much out of luck. It’s really hard! Even though it looks simple, even though they slow it down.
So what’s interesting to me is indeed that there’s a notion possibly here that attention to people moving is specially honed in these people and that means you’re paying attention to people, and maybe that has other implications. I don’t know. There’s self-regulation, the willingness to work hard and persevere, there’s the willingness to attend to people in ways that other people don’t attend to them, and then there’s this mental demand.
So what’s interesting to me is indeed that there’s a notion possibly here that attention to people moving is specially honed in these people and that means you’re paying attention to people, and maybe that has other implications.
So the way ballet dancers practice is to sort of mentally simulate the moves. So they are also engaged in a kind of mental simulation process.
So they imagine themselves doing the moves and that strengthens the relevant neural connections?
If you look at sports coaches for example, sports coaches actually tell people to do this. You go home and even though you’re not on the field, you run through the moves and you run through them in sequence and you practice them over and over again. So it turns out that when you practice those movements, it actually does activate parts of the motor system. It’s not perfect.
We did a study where we found that variability in the mental practice doesn’t help you as much as variability in the actual physical practice of like hitting golf balls, but it does help you. So I think that the practice which they’re also encouraged to do strengthens the use of working memory, and that’s something that may translate, although it’s debatable, it may translate into other things.
There is this idea of Antonio Damasio’s Somatic Marker hypothesis, which suggests that feelings in the body are associated with emotions, and that these markers influence decision-making. Is it possible that the correlation between ballet and wisdom is something to do with an increased sensitivity to signals from the body that leads to better decision-making?
So it turns out that if you test ballet dancers and you say ‘Put your two fingers in alignment, when you can’t see one hand and you can see the other (above and below a table-top for example),’ ballet dancers are far better at it than non-ballet dancers, but they’re not very good at telling you about their heart rate.
So their interoceptive awareness, that is awareness of the internal bodily states is not as good as their kinaesthetic awareness of the position of their limbs.
So their interoceptive awareness, that is awareness of the internal bodily states is not as good as their kinaesthetic awareness of the position of their limbs. So I’m not entirely convinced that that’s necessarily what’s going on. It could be, but we don’t have any evidence to suggest that at this point
On Wisdom and Attention
You have worked for many years in the field of attention, and you have also written recently about its relationship with wisdom. Can you tell us a little more about the relationship between attention and wise decision-making?
So I think attention is critical to the way we structure our understanding of the world around us. So there’s a lot of stuff going on in the room but we make selections – some are directed and some are just habitual, some are based on expectation, some are based on desire – and that information that we make use of comes out of the direct control of attention.
One of the things about attention that’s interesting is, if you are thinking about something actively – say you’re going to give a lesson and you’re rehearsing the general plan for the lesson in your mind – we think about that as sort of mental rehearsing or memory system but in fact it uses the same mechanism as attention. It’s a kind of control process that we execute serially over a series of pieces of information.
When we engage with the world, we do the same thing externally. That external direction sometimes seems like it’s grabbed, sometimes it’s directed because of what we’re focused on – but the information that we take in and the information that we use depends on that attention system. So why is that important? It turns out that the information we take in determines what kind of decisions we can make.
It turns out that the information we take in
determines what kind of decisions we can make.
This could be an example of attention, it could be an example of something else, but I think it’s probably attention. Doctors are trained to think of themselves as scientists, even though they’re not scientists, so they approach medicine as if it were a scientific process. That’s how they’re trained. That’s how they’re admitted to medical school.
So when they take a patient history, and the patient says ‘Well, you know, I’ve been having heartburn and shortness of breath’ and whatever – when it comes like that – symptom, symptom, symptom, symptom – the doctor has no problem. ‘Here’s a piece of information, information.’ They line that up. But a lot of patients come in, and they tell a little story, and then the doctor has to figure out ‘So, what is this patient telling me? Here’s a clue, here’s a clue, here’s a clue.’ So they’re sorting the story for evidence and they don’t pay attention to the narrative.
Because they think of themselves as scientists…
Right. So they’re looking for scientific evidence. Well in many cases, a person might come in and start talking about their sister, ‘Well my sister’s been complaining about this, this, and this. Doctor I’m really here about this, but my sister’s got this problem.’ So, for the Doctor, everything about the sister is sort of ‘I don’t care. It’s not relevant.’
But I listened to a talk by someone at the Institute for Humanities at the University of Texas Medical branch, and it turns out that a lot of personal history is given by people as a personal narrative and there’s kind of like ‘referred pain’ and ‘referred symptoms’ and so they might be talking about their sister, but they’re actually echoing things about themselves.
So some of the information is displaced in sort of protagonist space and the doctor’s missing it, because they think it’s not about them, and because they have this approach.
So some of the information is displaced in sort of protagonist space and the doctor’s missing it, because they think it’s not about them, and because they have this approach.
So if they thought of themselves more as counsellors or listeners, they might take more of that information in?
Right, so if they’re having a conversation with their spouse and their partner says ‘Why are you talking about your sister? We’re talking about you.’ – then they might reply ‘Well you know, we’re a lot alike.’ So I think the issue is that Doctors don’t attend to the personal history as if it were a personal narrative. They attend to it as if they’re picking the wheat from the chaff. The wheat is defined by symptoms that they can recognise in terms of what their knowledge base is.
They attend to it as if they’re picking the wheat from the chaff. The wheat is defined by symptoms that they can recognise in terms of what their knowledge base is.
On Wisdom and Medical Training
So how should we change how we think of ourselves in order to change what we attend to?
The American Association for Medical Colleges has actually recommended changing medical school curricula. So they’re starting to require for the MCATS, the test to get into medical school, more testing of behavioural science, psychology and social science, and understand the role of SES in health and so forth, and they’re going to incorporate more behavioural, psychological and social sciences in medical school. It’s a small step but it says ‘Let’s not be so oriented towards organic Chemistry and Physics alone. Let’s treat the person as a person.’
It’s a small step but it says ‘Let’s not be so oriented towards organic Chemistry and Physics alone. Let’s treat the person as a person.’
Now it’s not the same thing as hearing the narrative and listening to the person speak, but it moves in the direction of understanding that the Chemistry and the Biology are centred in a human being that has other influences. So it’s a first step in trying to move medical education to a way of saying that Doctors should be treating a person and not a symptom.
Margaret Plews-Ogan has talked about the important role of patients’ stories in helping make doctors more compassionate towards them, which then has an impact on how the patients are treated.
She’s very interested in the role of wisdom in the medical interactions. I think what’s important about that is Doctors often think they have a connection to patients and patients don’t’ understand what that connection is.
There’s something called the Open Notes Project in the US where doctors’ notes were then made available to patients. I think it was a test project and I think it’s ongoing in various places. I heard a talk about some of the events that occurred in that project.
Then what happened was they had open notes, and they both thought ‘ This will be great because we have a good relationship.’ So the patient read in the open notes ‘Patient is a 31-year old, obese, blah-blah-blah’ and he said ‘I thought you liked me.’
So there was case where a doctor and a patient who had HIV were engaged in pretty good personal relationship. Then what happened was they had open notes, and they both thought ‘ This will be great because we have a good relationship.’ So the patient read in the open notes ‘Patient is a 31-year old, obese, blah-blah-blah’ and he said ‘I thought you liked me.’ Of course this is just a clinical description and the term ‘obesity’ depends on your weight in relation to standards. It’s not a judgement, but patients don’t know that.
That’s a language question again isn’t it?
Exactly. So there’s a weird negotiation that still goes on with this notion – ‘Was that language necessary as notes?’ You could put in other information about that, without putting in some of those terms, but doctors don’t think about that impact on patients because they attend to that word not as a pejorative but as a state in relation to standards.
Because they have been trained to think of themselves as scientists..
As objective. And we’re know they’re not. For example there’s work by Farr Curlin who’s a doctor who basically studied the religious beliefs of doctors in the United States. He didn’t study them in respect of the outcomes for the patients. He studied them in regard to the treatment recommendation the doctors made.
If you exclude things like reproductive health and you exclude psychiatric issues, you’ll find religious-based differences in treatment, and they’re done without consideration for the patient’s sensitivity to those considerations. What that means is that doctors don’t think that they’re operating in a space that might be incompatible with the beliefs of the patient. They think they’re doing the right thing by the patient.
That they’re objective scientists.
That’s right.
So it’s been shown that their belief system impacts on their recommendations, and their unaware of it, which is even worse!
Exactly. So in some sense you want to say ‘You should understand how you’re approaching this problem of proscription. You should understand that maybe this patient shouldn’t be your patient, if you understand the patient and you understand yourself and the relationship between you.’
On Wisdom, Nudging and The Supreme Court
After being neglected for so long by the scientific community, why do you think that wisdom has recently started to receive more attention?
I hope it’s happening now because, at the early stages of the Defining Wisdom Project back in 2007, we spent a lot of time putting out information on a website. We built community. I think that for every person that pays attention to the website or reads something on it, they tell somebody about it. I believe that has propagation effects. That’s one level.
I think that there was already a trend building. Before we started the ‘Defining Wisdom Project’ I think there was interest growing but that, with the Obama administration, one of the things that we saw in the US was debate took place about the role of empathy in the Supreme Court. So there’s always been a kind of tension in the Supreme Court between ‘Originalists’ and ‘Living Documentists’ – people who say the constitution is a living document and other people who say ‘No, No. It’s fixed in whatever the founders intended.’
So one of the things that Obama introduced into the discussion as a constitutional scholar, because he taught constitutional law at Chicago, was the notion that we should pick a justice on the basis of her empathy. People were like, ‘That’s ridiculous. She should be objective!’ So he made an argument – I wouldn’t say it was the strongest argument possible – but he made a starting argument that essentially, and these are my words and my interpretation, that said ‘We’re fooling ourselves when we think that justices really put aside all of this stuff and just see the words as words.’ Justices bring their life experiences to bear.
… He made a starting argument that essentially, and these are my words and my interpretation, that said ‘We’re fooling ourselves when we think that justices really put aside all of this stuff and just see the words as words.’ Justices bring their life experiences to bear.
One of the things that you see is that the Supreme Court justices over time become more liberal, well many of them do. So those that were appointed by fairly conservative presidents as conservative justices have moved to the center and some have moved more left. One can infer that it is the kind of experiences they’ve had in making those judgements, because the constitution didn’t change over their tenure.
One of the things that that did is sort of encourage a move away from ‘cleverness’ in the Clinton and Bush administrations, where there was a kind of near-Orwellian treatment of language and government under the Bush administration and Clinton’s way of talking about sexual relations and so forth. So that of course is now blooming in an incredible way under the prospective administration, but in the interim, I think words mattered in a way.
We saw ‘Nudge policy’ emerge in the White House. Cass Sunstein was in the White House. That’s a kind of wisdom fellow traveller in many respects.
We saw ‘Nudge policy’ emerge in the White House. Cass Sunstein was in the White House. That’s a kind of wisdom fellow traveller in many respects. It says ‘People want to do something. How can policies help them achieve their end?’ So Sendhil Mullainathan who’s a behavioural economist at Harvard was one of the ‘Defining Wisdom Project’ recipients. He argued very strongly for the notion of Institutional Wisdom. Institutions, even if not the members of the institution were wise, if none of them were, could still put policies in place that the constituents to whom those policies applied might act more wisely.
So I think that things like ‘Nudge’, things like the ‘Defining Wisdom Project’, things like the president actually having a kind of openness, he was exemplifying wisdom in many respects – all those things coalesced at a certain time to help.
So I think that things like ‘Nudge’, things like the ‘Defining Wisdom Project’, things like the president actually having a kind of openness, he was exemplifying wisdom in many respects – all those things coalesced at a certain time to help.
That’s really interesting because there is a lot in the paper now about how people are going to miss Obama’s maturity and adult behaviour, and what really looks very much like wisdom.
I don’t think until recently I would have termed it ‘wisdom’ per se, and yet his political demeanour is that of wisdom, right? He works for compromise in spite of what some political parties say. He operates in a cooperative way, receiving the prospective president and so forth. So there are a lot of things that he did, and yet he was not afraid to take action, and action in service of policies that he thought were in the good of the country. So those things look like wisdom.
Wisdom doesn’t mean you’re popular and wisdom doesn’t mean that people like you, but it may mean that the choices that you make help the greatest number of people in the greatest way.
There are lots of examples of wisdom exemplars from history who are in fact not treated very well by the communities they find themselves in!
One would hate to use that as the diagnostic criterion of wisdom, but I think that it’s entirely consistent with what we’re seeing.
What are your hopes for the Center for Practical Wisdom over the next few years?
Our goals have always been to support wisdom research wherever we find it, given the means that we have to do so, which means we’ve supported projects in Israel, in Spain, in The Netherlands and other places.
I want to continue that because I think we can sort of slip into places on a small scale where other institutions wouldn’t provide support. I also think that it’s important for us to continue to bring together people working on wisdom on a regular basis, to communicate about their work and then to publicise that work as much as possible.
On the one hand we have a kind of mission to say wisdom is important and it should be studied and it should be taught or conveyed or learned or whatever, but on the other hand I think that wisdom research is necessary to support and we will continue to do wisdom research at the University of Chicago, because it undergirds that kind of message.
It says ‘We need to understand more about wisdom, so that we can help people become wiser and find ways of changing educational institutions.’
It says ‘We need to understand more about wisdom, so that we can help people become wiser and find ways of changing educational institutions.’
Why not have a look at the following papers and articles to read more about Howard Nusbaum’s work?
University of Chicago Center in Beijing: “Wisdom Research at The University of Chicago” Howard C. Nusbaum – Video of Howard Nusbaum presenting an overview of Chicago’s Wisdom Research in December 2012 in China.
The Relationship between Mental and Somatic Practices and Wisdom (Williams, Mangelsdorf, Kontra, Nusbaum, Hoeckner, 2016) – In this paper, Nusbaum and colleagues explore how experience with various mental and physical practices is associated with wisdom.
Big Questions Online Series: What Psychological & Social Factors contribute to the Development of Wisdom? – Howard Nusbaum (2014) – In this article Nusbaum considers the role of emotion in wisdom and indeed if there are different types of wisdom.
7 Days of Genius Series: Wisdom Depends on the Skill of Attention – Howard Nusbaum (2015) – In this article, Nusbaum suggests wisdom is a skill that can be learned and that it depends on your ability to manage your attention
The Huffington Post: What Makes Us Wise (2011) – In this article, Nusbaum discusses work taking place in Chicago at the conclusion of the Defining Wisdom project.
If you have any thoughts about the profile, please get in touch.
You can contact me at charles@evidencebasedwisdom.com, via the about page or find me on twitter @EBasedwisdom.
Charles
evidence-based wisdom 