Berlin, Gemany, home of the Berlin Wisdom Paradigm
(Editor’s Note: The Berlin Wisdom Paradigm was developed by Paul Baltes and Ursula Staudinger at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin, Germany, and is reproduced in edited form here courtesy of the Institute. It is widely considered to be one of the most significant wisdom models of recent years.The following article was originally published in the American Psychologist (55 (1), 122-136) in 2000 entitled “Wisdom: A metaheuristic (pragmatic) to orchestrate mind and virtue toward excellence.” It has been edited for easier reading by the staff of UsingWisdom.com. Unfortunately Dr. Baltes has passed away. Dr. Staudinger is now on the faculty of Columbia University in New York. The original text with all citations may be found here.)
“The primary focus of this article is on the presentation of research on wisdom conducted under the heading of the Berlin wisdom paradigm. Informed by a cultural-historical analysis of the wisdom concept, wisdom in this paradigm is defined as an expert knowledge system concerning the fundamental pragmatics of life. The fundamental pragmatics of life include knowledge and judgment about the meaning and conduct of life and the orchestration of human development towards excellence while attending conjointly to personal and collective well-being.”
The model was based on research using “think-aloud protocols concerning various problems of life associated with life planning, life management, and life review. Responses (were) evaluated with reference to a family of five criteria: rich factual and procedural knowledge, lifespan contextualism, relativism of values and life priorities, and recognition and management of uncertainty. A series of studies is reported that aim at the description, explanation, and optimization of wisdom. We conclude with a new theoretical perspective characterizing wisdom as a cognitive and motivational meta-heuristic (pragmatic) that organizes and orchestrates knowledge towards human excellence in mind and virtue, individually and collectively.” (A metaheuristic is a high-level, problem-independent framework that provides a set of guidelines or strategies to develop heuristic optimization solutions. A heuristic is any approach to problem solving or self-discovery that employs a practical method that is not guaranteed to be optimal, perfect or rational, but instead sufficient for reaching an immediate goal.)
“Wisdom is generally considered the pinnacle of insight into the human condition and about the means and ends of a good life…. In the positive-psychology spirit of this special issue of the American Psychologist, our interest in wisdom has been spurred by a motivation to identify and highlight the best of what society and humans can accomplish concerning their own development and that of others. As has been true several times throughout the millennia…, the current scholarly discourse about the structure and function of wisdom evinces another period of rejuvenation. Occasionally, it is argued that such historical periods of rejuvenation follow the principle of societal need for reflection about its own attainments, status, and future direction.
“The purpose of this article is twofold. First and foremost, we present an overview of our own work on the psychology of wisdom. Proceeding from a general theoretical framework, we have developed an empirical research paradigm to study wisdom…. Second, to embed our own work in a larger context, we begin by summarizing briefly the work of other psychologists interested in the topic of wisdom.
“Historically, it has been mainly the fields of philosophy and religious studies that have served as the central forum for discourse about the concept of wisdom…. For the current historical moment, however, renewed interest in the topic of wisdom is evident in a wide spectrum of disciplines ranging from the traditional mentors of wisdom, philosophy and religious studies, to cultural anthropology, political science, education, and psychology….
“Because of the culturally rich meaning and heritage of wisdom, defining and operationalizing the concept of wisdom as a scientifically grounded psychological construct will not be easy. Wisdom may be beyond what psychological methods and concepts can achieve. The first president of the American Psychological Association, G. Stanley Hall (1922), was one of the first to tackle this task, originally in an anonymous article published in 1921 in the Atlantic Monthly. Subsequently, it was primarily the lifespan model of Erik Erikson … and the emergence of lifespan psychology … that kept wisdom in the domain of psychological analysis.
“It was not until the 1980s that a more diverse group of psychological scholars and researchers began to engage themselves with the topic of wisdom, although most work was theoretical rather than empirical.”
Implicit and Explicit Psychological Theories of Wisdom
“Not surprisingly, because of the multidisciplinary nature of the wisdom concept, including its integrative feature of linking mind to virtue, psychological research on wisdom is multifaceted. Aside from issues such as the nature of methodology applied and the content range that is assigned to the psychological sphere of wisdom…, two major branches can be distinguished: implicit theories and explicit theories of wisdom….
Implicit theories
“The first branch, implicit theories of wisdom, consists of psychological research that is associated with folk-psychological and/or common-sense approaches….. At stake here is the question of how the term wisdom is used in everyday language and how wise persons are characterized.
“In our assessment, results on implicit conceptions of wisdom and wise persons permit five conclusions about the concept of wisdom:
- “Wisdom is a concept that carries specific meaning that is widely shared and understood in its language-based representation. For instance, wisdom is clearly distinct from other wisdom-related psychological concepts such as social intelligence, maturity, or sagacity.
- “Wisdom is judged to be an exceptional level of human functioning. It is related to excellence and ideals of human development.
- “Wisdom identifies a state of mind and behavior that includes the coordinated and balanced interplay of intellectual, affective, and emotional aspects of human functioning.
- “Wisdom is viewed as associated with a high degree of personal and interpersonal competence including the ability to listen, evaluate, and to give advice.
- “Wisdom involves good intentions. It is used for the well-being of oneself and others.
“In many ways, as is true for many achievements of human development…, such implicit and folk psychological characterizations of wisdom are foremost the product of cultural history and its impact on current society…. As a saying states: ‘Cultural memory is the mother of wisdom.’ Individuals partake in this culture-produced concept of wisdom.
“Consistent with this view, a more comprehensive characterization of wisdom can be deduced from cultural-historical and philosophical analyses of the wisdom concept…. To illustrate, Baltes… identified seven properties of wisdom that emerge when analyzing and synthesizing cultural-historical and philosophical work:
- “Wisdom represents a truly superior level of knowledge, judgment, and advice.
- “Wisdom addresses important and difficult questions and strategies about the conduct and meaning of life
- “Wisdom includes knowledge about the limits of knowledge and the uncertainties of the world
- “Wisdom constitutes knowledge with extraordinary scope, depth, measure, and balance
- “Wisdom involves a perfect synergy of mind and virtue; that is, an orchestration of knowledge and character
- “Wisdom represents knowledge used for the good or well-being of oneself and that of others; and
- “Wisdom, though difficult to achieve and to specify, is easily recognized when manifested.”
Explicit theories
“Explicit psychological theories of wisdom go beyond the characterization of wisdom and a wise person in terms of language-based descriptions. They focus on behavioral manifestations or expressions of wisdom. In psychology, such explicit theories of wisdom refer to theoretical constructions of wisdom that lend themselves to empirical inquiry in terms of quantifiable operationalization as well as the identification of relevant antecedents, correlates, and consequences of wisdom and wisdom-related concepts.
“Implicit and explicit psychological theories of wisdom are intertwined of course. For example, the information provided by implicit theories of wisdom and cultural-historical work on wisdom offer a frame within which explicit psychological work can be evaluated. Specifically, one can ask whether explicit and behavior-oriented work on the psychology of wisdom is in sufficient agreement with the language-based construction of wisdom as reflected in cultural history, philosophy, and folk psychology.
“Theoretical and empirical work on explicit psychological theories of wisdom can be roughly divided into three groups:
- “The conceptualization of wisdom as a personal characteristic or constellation of personality dispositions”
- “The conceptualization of wisdom in the neo-piagetian tradition of postformal and dialectical thought” (According to Wikipedia, “Extending developmental psychology [as pioneered by Piaget] to adults, most Neo-Piagetian theories of cognitive development posit one or more postformal stages. … Postformal thought is often described as more flexible, logical, willing to accept moral and intellectual complexities, and dialectical than previous stages in development.”)
- “The conceptualization of wisdom as an expert system dealing with the meaning and conduct of life”
“This third category of explicit theories guides our own empirical work and serves as the basis for the psychological paradigm of wisdom presented in the following. For another well-elaborated psychological theory of wisdom (though largely theoretical rather than empirical), we alert the reader to recent work by Sternberg (1998). Specifically, Sternberg conceptualizes wisdom as the application of tacit knowledge toward the achievement of a common good through a balance among multiple personal (intra-, inter-, and extrapersonal) interests and environmental conditions. There is much similarity between our respective theories.
The Berlin Wisdom Paradigm: Wisdom as Expertise in the Fundamental Pragmatics of Life
“To prevent a possible misunderstanding, we begin by making explicit that our own empirical approach is only one way to operationalize our general perspectives on wisdom (Table 1 and Figure 1 below). We do not argue that this line of empirical operationalization covers the entire meaning space of wisdom. Wisdom as a theoretical and cultural construct is more than any given empirical method can achieve.”
The Berlin Wisdom Paradigm
Figure 1
A Research Framework Describing Antecedent Factors and Mediating Processes for the Acquisition and Maintenance of Wisdom-Related Knowledge and Skills Across the Life Span

“Note. The likelihood of attaining expert levels of performance in this prototypical domain of the cognitive pragmatics of the mind is assumed to depend on an effective coalition of life-context, expertise-specific, and general person-related factors.”
“Because of the emphasis of wisdom on excellence, we define wisdom as an expertise in the conduct and meaning of life. In this vein, wisdom is a key factor in the construction of a ‘good life.’ An important step toward the further explication of this definition of wisdom as expertise was a specification of the content that can properly be said to fall within the category of wisdom…. To this end, we introduced the concept of the fundamental pragmatics of life. With fundamental pragmatics, we mean knowledge and judgment about the essence of the human condition and the ways and means of planning, managing, and understanding a good life.
“Included in the fundamental pragmatics of life are, for example, knowledge about the conditions, variability, ontogenetic changes, and historicity of life development, as well as knowledge of life’s obligations and life goals; understanding of the socially and contextually intertwined nature of human life including its finitude, cultural conditioning and incompleteness, and not least, knowledge about oneself and the limits of one’s own knowledge and the translation of knowledge into overt behavior. Equally central to wisdom-related knowledge and judgment are the ‘spiritual’ incomprehensibilities of life, such as the mind-body dynamics or the existence of a divine being.
“These examples illustrate that the territory of inquiry that we label as the fundamental pragmatics of life is rather different from other domains that have been identified in research on expertise. For the most part, past research on expertise has concentrated on well-defined systems of factual and procedural knowledge such as physics or chess. Wisdom, contrariwise, is an area that in itself represents an open and ill-defined body of knowledge. Nonetheless, we assume that wisdom has a core and that wisdom-related manifestations, if and when they occur, can be evaluated in terms of indicators of quality and quantity. Our empirical research results support this assumption. Many people, after some training, are capable of reaching high consensus in the evaluation of wisdom-related products of performances.
A Family of Five Criteria for Assessing the Quality of Wisdom-related Performance
“In our work, the quality of wisdom and the capacity for judgment in the fundamental pragmatics of life is defined through a set of five criteria listed in the bottom part of Table 1. As described in more detail elsewhere, this set of criteria builds on the theoretical and empirical approaches mentioned above: that is, research on expertise, life-span psychology of cognition and personality, the neo-piagetian tradition of adult cognitive development, as well as cultural-historical analyses of wisdom.
The two general basic wisdom criteria (factual and procedural knowledge) are characteristic of all types of expertise and stem from the tradition of research in expertise: Applied to the present subject area, these criteria are
- “Rich factual (declarative) knowledge about the fundamental pragmatics of life and
- “Rich procedural knowledge about the fundamental pragmatics of life.”
“The factual knowledge part concerns knowledge about such topics as human nature, life-long development, variations in developmental processes and outcomes, interpersonal relations, social norms, critical events in life and their possible constellations, as well as knowledge about the coordination of the well-being of oneself and that of others.
“Procedural knowledge about the fundamental pragmatics of life involves strategies and heuristics for dealing with the meaning and conduct of life; for example, heuristics for giving advice and for the structuring and weighing of life goals, ways to handle life conflicts and life decisions, knowledge about alternative back-up strategies if development were not to proceed as expected.
“In addition to these two basic criteria, we have formulated three meta-criteria that in their separate and joint expression we consider specific for wisdom. These criteria stem primarily (but not entirely) from the lifespan psychology of cognition and personality. The first meta-criterion, lifespan contextualism, is meant to identify knowledge that considers the many themes and contexts of life (e.g., education, family, work, friends, leisure, the public good of society, etc.), their interrelations and cultural variations, and in addition, incorporates a lifetime temporal perspective (past, present, future). Another feature of lifespan contextualism is the historical and social location of individual lifespan development, as well as the idiographic or non-normative events that operate in human development….
“The second wisdom-specific meta-criterion, relativism of values and life priorities, deals with the acknowledgment of and tolerance for value differences and the relativity of the values held by individuals and society. Wisdom, of course, is not meant to imply full-blown relativity of values and value-related priorities. On the contrary, it includes an explicit concern with the topic of virtue and the common good. However, aside from the recognition of certain universal values…, value-relative knowledge, judgment, and advice are part of the essence of wisdom.
“The third meta-criterion, the recognition of and management of uncertainty, is based on the ideas… that (1) the validity of human information processing itself is essentially limited (constrained), (2) individuals have access only to select parts of reality, and (3) that the future cannot be fully known in advance. Wisdom-related knowledge and judgment are expected to offer ways and means to deal with such uncertainty about human insight and the conditions of the world, individually and collectively.”
The Empirical Assessment of Wisdom-related Performance
“The five qualitative criteria for the evaluation of wisdom-related knowledge and judgment are suited for application to a wide array of person-specific as well as social manifestations of wisdom. This topical array ranges from state constitutions or works in the religious sphere on spirituality, to personal documents such as biographies and autobiographies, to the way people assess and respond to tasks of life planning, life management, and life review, whether their own or that of another. Wisdom is located in many sources and to achieve its highest level of manifestation it is likely that these sources need to be interrelated and employed as an ensemble.
“In our work, we have focussed so far primarily on searching for manifestations of wisdom in individual minds by asking people to respond to various problems of life…. Specifically, …,study participants are confronted under standardized conditions with difficult life problems of fictitious people, such as:
- “Someone receives a telephone call from a good friend who says that s/he cannot go on like this and has decided to commit suicide. What might one/ the person take into consideration and do in such a situation?”
- Another example is: “In reflecting over their lives, people sometimes realize that they have not achieved what they had once planned to achieve. What should one/they do and consider?” The participants are then asked to reflect out loud on the presented dilemma.
“The responses are recorded on tape and transcribed. Before the tasks are administered, participants are given practice in thinking aloud … and thinking about a hypothetical person….
“For the purpose of obtaining quantified scores, a select panel of judges, extensively trained and calibrated in applying the criteria, evaluates the protocols of the respondents in light of the five wisdom-related criteria using a seven-point scale….The reliability of this method of rating is very satisfactory. In the empirical research conducted so far, the intercorrelation between the five criteria has always been high approaching values between .50 and .77, test-retest correlations over 12 months range in adults between .65 and .94, and the multidimensional measurement space based on multiple tasks of wisdom conforms to the five-criterion framework outlined…
“In general, we speak of a ‘wise’ protocol only if it has received a high rating in all five areas (e.g., a rating greater than 5 for each on the 7-point scale). As is the case in research on other expert systems, it is an open question to what degree the development of wisdom reflects the accumulation of quantity or also the acquisition of new qualities. Our general approach, consistent with many cultural-historical views of wisdom…, is to view wisdom as a more or less (quantitative) phenomenon without excluding the possibility that its final achievement is a qualitatively new step.
Antecedents, Correlates and Consequences of Wisdom
Treating wisdom as an expert system associated with the fundamental pragmatics of life suggests a number of conditions under which it is likely to develop….
“First, like any expertise, the acquisition and refinement of wisdom involves an extended and intense process of learning, practice, as well as the motivation to strive toward excellence.
“Second, wisdom is a complex and multifaceted phenomenon. Therefore, a variety of micro- and macro-factors and processes need to collaborate in order to generate wisdom.
“Third, because of the integrative aspects of wisdom in linking knowledge with virtue, it is likely that the antecedents of wisdom are grounded in the orchestration of several characteristics: cognitive, personal, social, interpersonal, and spiritual.
“Fourth, as with any other high-level expertise, guidance by mentors or other wisdom-enhancing ‘”voices’ of society, as well as the experience and mastery of critical life experiences are likely necessary.
“Figure 1 (above) summarizes some of our analytic efforts at translating these general theoretical perspectives into a testable framework. The framework describes a series of ontogenetic [development over time] conditions and processes that as distant and proximal factors need to work together ‘synergetically’ so that something like wisdom can develop. Specifically, we distinguish three categories of conditions that are relevant to the development of wisdom: (1) general personal characteristics, (2) characteristics and experiential contexts which are specific to the acquiring of expertise in the area of the fundamental pragmatics of life, and, finally, (3) macro-structural contexts which are linked to certain constellations of wisdom-related experience. Moving towards wisdom requires some orchestrated coalition of these factors. Likely, however, there is not a single pathway. Rather, we proceed in our work with the idea of multiple but constrained pathways to wisdom….
“At the center of the ontogenetic schema (see Figure 1), we highlight some of the processes that we consider as the perpetual and organizing regulators of the development of wisdom. Finally, on the right hand side of Figure 1 there is a schematic presentation of the inferential processes that we engaged in as we translated the general culturally and philosophically legitimated conception of wisdom into our specific psychological operationalization.
“In the lower part of the right column [Figure 1], assumptions about the sequential course of development of the five criteria for wisdom are suggested. In line with the model for the development of expertise suggested by Anderson (1987), for instance, we propose that in the course of development of expertise a shift of emphasis takes place from declarative (factual) to procedural knowledge. From this foundation, we expect the body of wisdom-constitutive knowledge to emerge that is captured with the three meta-criteria: lifespan contextualism, relativism in values and life priorities, and recognition and management of uncertainty.
“We have and are considering adding to this family of five criteria another feature of wisdom. For instance, we now think that it may be important to make more explicit the motivational-emotional orientation associated with the use of wisdom; that is, that wisdom is (a) intended for the well-being of oneself and others and (b) involves an effective coordination of mind and virtue. So far, we had included this motivational-emotional aspect of wisdom as a correlate of practically all criteria. Such an approach, however, may not be explicit enough and, therefore, falsely generate the impression that our model does not consider motivational-emotional dimensions and the notion that wisdom deals with the personal and common good or well-being.”
Summary
“In sum, then, we suggest that adding the concept of wisdom to psychological inquiry is a worthwhile challenge. As a concept and as a heuristic, it highlights the jewels and peaks of cultural evolution and human ontogenesis. In its application to human development, wisdom makes explicit the goal of orchestrating mind and virtue towards human excellence and the common good.
“There are many open questions, of course. Of much interest is the link of wisdom as a knowledge-based expertise in the fundamental pragmatics of life to actual behavior involving oneself and others. Currently, aside from our work on wisdom nominees and the correlative patterns observed when linking wisdom-related performance to facets of intelligence and personality, there is no relevant empirical evidence to make explicit the link between knowledge and behavior. For instance, to what degree do people who excel in our wisdom tasks also demonstrate superior outcomes in their own life management? Is the kind of wisdom-related knowledge and judgment studied by us effective as a life-guiding and life-advancing method? Furthermore, to what degree are people, who display wisdom-like knowledge, sought out as advisors? What is the behavior they display? These are important questions for future research (e.g., concept of art of living in Staudinger, in press).
“In the ancient history of the concept of wisdom, the sage was often invoked as the only carrier of wisdom, and there were few…. At the same time, it was suggested that sages represent guideposts of excellence for the vast majority of people who themselves would never reach the pinnacle of wisdom. On the one hand, we share in this ancient view, as expresssed by Spinoza, that wisdom, like ‘all excellent things, is as difficult as it is rare.’ On the other hand, when thinking of and about wisdom, individuals are offered a sense of directionality and positive agency. By reference to wisdom, we can participate, for a fleeting moment at least, in the personal utopia of an otherwise unreachable level of excellence.
“Elevating the notion of wisdom to an overall life orientation, however, goes beyond the fleeting moment of the present. Making the ensemble of attributes associated with wisdom as explicit as possible, translating it into a more regularly available heuristic (pragmatic), and thereby incorporating it into the construction and optimization of human development, individually and collectively, may be a critical step for reaching higher and higher levels of functioning as the lifespan unfolds. In our view, then, the perennial power of wisdom is its role as a reminder, a source, and a benchmark in our quest for excellence….”
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