More on the MORE Life Experience Model: What We Have Learned (So Far)

Abstract

We have all had difficult times and challenges in our lives, and most of us feel that we learned something from those experiences. At the same time, few people actually become wise in the course of their lives - while most of us become (or remain) well-adapted and happy, generally satisfied, or even bitter or depressed. Why is it that some people, but not others, grow wise over time by learning from life's challenges (Linley & Joseph, 2004)? In the MORE Life Experience Model (Glück & Bluck, 2013), we argued that life challenges are catalysts for the development of wisdom, and that psychological resources crucially influence how people appraise life challenges, how they deal with them, and how they integrate them into their life story as time goes on. Based on the literature on wisdom and growth from challenging experiences, we proposed five resources as important for the development of wisdom: Mastery, Openness, Reflectivity, and Emotion Regulation including Empathy - in short, MORE. Since proposing the model, we have conducted a first empirical test of its predictions. This paper describes our expected and unexpected findings, which provide insights that we integrate to further refine and elaborate the MORE Life Experience Model. First, we describe the theoretical and empirical background of the original model.

Full text

Vol.:(0123456789)
The Journal of Value Inquiry (2019) 53:349–370
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-018-9661-x
1 3
More ontheMORE Life Experience Model: What We Have
Learned (So Far)
JudithGlück1 · SusanBluck2· NicM.Weststrate3
Published online: 28 September 2018
© The Author(s) 2018
We have all had difficult times and challenges in our lives, and most of us feel that
we learned something from those experiences. At the same time, few people actually
become wise in the course of their lives – while most of us become (or remain) well-
adapted and happy, generally satisfied, or even bitter or depressed. Why is it that
some people, but not others, grow wise over time by learning from life’s challenges
(Linley & Joseph, 2004)? In the MORE Life Experience Model (Glück & Bluck,
2013), we argued that life challenges are catalysts for the development of wisdom,
and that psychological resources crucially influence how people appraise life chal-
lenges, how they deal with them, and how they integrate them into their life story as
time goes on. Based on the literature on wisdom and growth from challenging expe-
riences, we proposed five resources as important for the development of wisdom:
Mastery, Openness, Reflectivity, and Emotion Regulation including Empathy – in
short, MORE.
Since proposing the model, we have conducted a first empirical test of its pre-
dictions. This paper describes our expected and unexpected findings, which provide
insights that we integrate to further refine and elaborate the MORE Life Experience
Model. First, we describe the theoretical and empirical background of the original
model.
1 The MORE Life Experience Model
1.1 Life Challenges asCatalysts ofWisdom
Our first proposition was that life experiences that challenge a person’s beliefs
and worldviews are: (a) the main life context in which wisdom manifests, and (b)
* Judith Glück
judith.glueck@aau.at
1 Department ofPsychology, University ofKlagenfurt, 9020Klagenfurt, Austria
2 University ofFlorida, Gainesville, FL, USA
3 University ofKlagenfurt, Klagenfurt, Austria
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necessary for the continual development of wisdom. When people are asked about
situations in their life in which they did something wise, most describe an important,
difficult situation such as a long-term life decision, a complicated social conflict, or
a serious illness (Glück, Bluck, Baron, & McAdams, 2005). That is, wisdom is both
manifest, and has a chance to further grow, when individuals face difficult obstacles
or decisions that force them to question their own priorities and worldviews. We
proposed specifically that use of the MORE resources should help individuals to
manifest wisdom in the face of these challenging situations.
We also suggested that use of the MORE resources in reflecting on life challenges
enables people to grow wiser. Life experience is agreed upon by laypeople and wis-
dom researchers (e.g., Ardelt, 2005; Baltes & Staudinger, 2000; Bluck & Glück,
2005; Glück & Bluck, 2011; Jeste, Ardelt, Blazer, Kraemer, Vaillant, & Meeks,
2010; Sternberg, 1998; Webster, 2003) as playing an important role in the contin-
ued development of wisdom. The MORE Life Experience Model draws specifically
upon work suggesting that crises and obstacles can challenge people’s worldviews
and thereby broaden their perspective (see also Ardelt; 2005; Kinnier, Tribbensee,
Rose, & Vaughan, 2001; Kramer, 2003) and that particular psychological resources
are essential for growth in the wake of adversity (e.g., Aldwin, 2007; Calhoun &
Tedeschi, 2006; Joseph & Linley, 2005).
1.2 The MORE Resources
We identified five resources that were repeatedly mentioned in the literature on life-
span development, the development of wisdom, and growth from adversity, and are
conceptually linked to growth in wisdom from difficult life experiences.
Sense of mastery. Most people have a healthy sense of illusory control that helps
maintain stability and well-being (e.g., Peterson & Bossio, 2001; Taylor & Brown,
1988). Wise individuals, however, are more realistically aware of the uncertainty
and unpredictability of life (Baltes & Staudinger, 2000; McKee & Barber, 1999)
while also feeling that, having learned from experience, they will somehow be able
to master whatever happens. Thus, mastery is a dialectical concept that combines
full awareness of life’s uncontrollability and unpredictability with trust in one’s own
ability to cope. Wise individuals are able to take action on things that they can con-
trol and accept things that they cannot control (Ardelt, 2005).
Openness. Wise individuals are interested in viewing situations from multiple
perspectives (e.g., Staudinger, Lopez, & Baltes, 1997; Webster, 2003). They are
non-judgmental, accept goals and values that differ from their own, and enjoy learn-
ing from others. They seek out new experiences and adapt well to the changes life
inevitably brings. Webster (2003, 2007) considers openness as one of five compo-
nents of wisdom itself. We propose, however, that openness is a precursor to wis-
dom (cf. Ardelt, 2011) because it enables people to learn from experiences and from
others. Openness is certainly also a component of wisdom, and it is an interesting
question in itself how wise individuals are able to maintain their openness to new
ideas and experiences way into old age, where openness usually declines (Glück, in
press). However, we believe that it is there before wisdom is – it paves the way for
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new experiences and new perspectives that become part of an individual’s wisdom-
related knowledge and expertise.
Reflectivity. We define reflectivity as a person’s motivation to think about com-
plex issues in a complex way. Reflective people look back on life experiences and
think deeply about them. They are willing to question their own past and current
views and behavior, as their goal is to develop a deeper understanding and not to
reassure their own views. Reflection is a key ingredient of wisdom in laypeople’s
conceptions (Bluck & Glück, 2005) and a component of Ardelt’s (2003, 2004) and
Webster’s (2003, 2007) definitions of wisdom. We assume that being reflective, like
being open, sets the stage for the development and growth of wisdom (Staudinger,
2001).
Emotion regulation. Wise individuals are attentive to their emotions, tolerant of
ambivalent feelings, and able to manage emotion as fits the situation. Laypeople’s
theories of wisdom often include calm in the face of conflict, which is arguably
the most visible sign of emotion regulation (Bluck & Glück, 2005), and of particu-
lar importance when dealing with negative events (Troy, Wilhelm, Shallcross, &
Mauss, 2010). As their aim is to understand life more fully, wise individuals neither
suppress negative feelings nor dwell on them extensively (Kunzmann, 2004). They
are also able to appreciate the positive things in life (König & Glück, 2014). As
with openness, Webster’s model of wisdom (Webster, 2003, 2007) includes emotion
regulation as a component, while we and Ardelt (2011) view it as a developmental
precursor.
Empathy. We view empathy as an important precondition for the development of
wisdom: those able to take others’ perspectives are more likely to develop a view of
life that takes the needs of others and the common good into account (Jeste etal.,
2010; Sternberg, 1998). Ardelt (2003) proposed compassion as the core of the affec-
tive dimension of wisdom. Such concern for others is also a component of wisdom
in lay theories (Bluck & Glück, 2005): For wise individuals, concern for others is
not limited to family or friends but includes a larger view of those in need of sup-
port, across humanity (Levenson, Jennings, Aldwin, & Shiraishi, 2005). Individuals
popularly cited as wise have often created significant positive change in the world
(Weststrate, Ferrari, & Ardelt, 2016).
2 Testing theMORE Life Experience Model: theFirst Empirical Study
The MORE Life Experience Model argues that people higher in a sense of mastery,
openness, reflectivity, emotion regulation, and empathy are more likely than oth-
ers both to display wisdom in dealing with life challenges and to continue grow-
ing towards greater wisdom across a lifetime. A strict test of these developmental
dynamics would require longitudinal data of individuals before, during and after
naturally-occurring stressful life events. Given the difficulty and duration of that
type of research, as a first step, we empirically tested the hypothesis that the MORE
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resources are statistically correlated with measures of wisdom in a cross-sectional
design. In the following, we describe this study and its main findings.
2.1 Methods
Participants. The fact that wisdom is a rare phenomenon makes it somewhat hard
to investigate – as we have learned, recruiting a general-population sample yields
few highly wise individuals. Therefore, we tried to increase the proportion of wise
individuals in our sample by using a wisdom nomination approach. Through news-
papers and radio programs, community members were invited to nominate any per-
son that they felt was particularly wise. Excluding self-nominations, 82 people were
nominated, and 47 of them agreed to participate. For comparison purposes, 123
other participants were recruited through invitation letters sent to a large population
sample in the same region. Thus, the final sample consisted of 170 participants (90
women, 80 men), most of whom (86.5%) were 40 – 92 years of age. All partici-
pants came to the lab for two interview sessions and filled out some questionnaires
at home (details are described in Glück etal., 2013). They were paid € 70 (about
U.S. $80.00) for participation.
Measures. How wisdom is measured can affect results significantly. Most exist-
ing measures of wisdom are either self-report scales or open-ended responses to life
problems. The two methods are not highly correlated (Glück, 2018; Glück et al.,
2013). Self-report measures present a paradox: people who describe themselves as
wise may lack the self-reflectivity that defines wisdom (Aldwin, 2009; Glück etal.,
2013). Open-ended measures are not subject to such biases, but highly effort-con-
suming to analyze, and may overemphasize intellectual aspects of wisdom (Ardelt,
2004). We thus measured wisdom and the MORE resources using self-report meas-
ures in a relatively large sample and open-ended measures in a subsample, to ensure
our results would not be an artifact of the methods used. The subsample consisted of
the 47 wisdom nominees and 47 control participants parallel to the nominees in age
and gender (for details, see Glück etal., 2013).
Participants completed three self-report measures of wisdom. The Self-Assessed
Wisdom Scale (SAWS; Webster, 2007) measures five components of wisdom:
openness, emotional regulation, humor, critical life experience, and reminiscence
and reflectiveness. The Three-Dimensional Wisdom Scale (3D-WS; Ardelt, 2003)
assesses cognitive, reflective, and compassionate dimensions of wisdom. The
revised Adult Self-Transcendence Inventory (ASTI; Levenson etal., 2005) defines
wisdom as self-transcendence. Reliabilities were satisfactory to excellent for all self-
report measures (see Glück etal., 2013).
The open-ended wisdom measure came from the Berlin Wisdom Paradigm
(BWP; Staudinger, Smith, & Baltes, 1994). After some practice with thinking aloud,
participants were presented with a standard life-review problem: “In reflecting
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over their life, people sometimes realize that they have not achieved what they had
once wanted to achieve. What could a person consider and do in such a situation?”
Response transcripts were evaluated by trained raters following the BWP manual
(Staudinger etal., 1994). There were two independent raters for each criterion: fac-
tual knowledge, procedural knowledge, life-span contextualism, value relativism,
and recognition/management of uncertainty.
As self-report measures of the MORE resources, we used scales or relevant parts
of scales from well-established measures. Sense of Mastery includes eight items
from Wagnild and Young’s (1993) Resilience Scale referring to acceptance of
uncontrollability (e.g., “I do not dwell on things that I can’t do anything about”) and
dealing with hardship (“I can get through difficult times because I’ve experienced
difficulty before”); Cronbach’s α was .76. Openness was assessed with the Openness
scale of the NEO FFI (12 items, α = .78). For Reflectivity, five items were selected
from the Psychological Mindedness Scale (Conte, Plutchik, Jung, Picard, Karasu,
& Lotterman, 1990; e.g., “I often find myself thinking about what made me act in a
certain way”) and the directive-function scale of the Talking About Life Experiences
scale (Bluck & Alea, 2002; e.g., “I think back over my life when I want to learn
from my past mistakes”; α = .77). Emotion regulation was measured using the sub-
scales for perception (9 items, e.g., “I am often uncertain about what I am feeling”)
and regulation (6 items, e.g., “When I am afraid of something, there is little I can
do about it”) of one’s own emotions from the German-language Emotional Com-
petence Questionnaire (Freudenthaler & Neubauer, 2005; α = .83). Empathy was
assessed by the Empathic Concern subscale of the Interpersonal Reactivity Index
(Davis, 1983; α = .68).
Our open-ended measure of the MORE resources was an interview about a dif-
ficult interpersonal conflict from the participants’ past. As explained earlier, we
propose that the MORE resources influence how people reflect upon past life chal-
lenges. Therefore, we assumed that participants’ levels of the MORE resources
should manifest themselves in the way they talked about such experiences. Their
accounts of a conflict should enable us to evaluate their willingness and ability to
question their own position and take the opponent’s perspective in retrospect. In the
interview, they were first asked to make a list of serious interpersonal conflicts they
had encountered. Then, they selected the most difficult conflict they wanted to talk
about. They were asked to freely narrate the event and then answer questions con-
cerning what had happened later, how they and their opponent had felt at the time,
how they felt about the experience now, and whether they had learned something
from it. The interview transcripts were rated by two trained student raters for each
MORE resource using 4-point scales from 0 = “no indication of the resource” to 3
= “extraordinary level of the resource”. Table1 describes the rating criteria for each
MORE resource and illustrates them with quotations from the interviews. Partici-
pants were also interviewed about another difficult event from their past, but those
interviews were difficult to rate in a reliable way. Therefore, we focus on the conflict
interviews in the following.
Table 2 shows inter-rater reliabilities for the BWP criteria and the MORE
resources. Inter-rater reliabilities for the BWP were comparable to other studies
(Glück & Baltes, 2006; Mickler & Staudinger, 2008); the total BWP score had a
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Table 1 Rating Criteria and Sample Quotations for the MORE Resources
Note: Resources were rated on scales from 0 (“no indication of the resource”) to 3 (“high level of the
resource”). Each resource included two aspects, and level 3 was only coded if both aspects were present
in the narrative.
Resource Sample Quotations
Sense of Mastery:
(1) Active engagement: taking control of a situa-
tion, changing what can be changed, and acting in
accordance with one’s convictions.
“There are things in life that cannot be changed, and
then you have to accept them. Sometimes you have
the choice, and sometimes you just don’t.”
(2) Acceptance of uncontrollability: awareness and
acceptance of the fact that many things in life cannot
be changed, being able to let such things happen and
to come to terms with them.
“I cannot make right what happened then, but I can do
it right this time.”
Openness:
(1) Openness and flexibility concerning new experi-
ences and possibilities.
“In no way do I dare to judge how other people would
deal with this, with having a child with special
needs.”
(2) Openness concerning people, i.e. tolerance and
acceptance of different goals and values.
As tolerance is highly socially desirable, a high level
of openness is coded only if the participant makes
no contrary statements in the interview.
“Seeing my son grow up taught me a great number
of things, [including] how accepting one is able to
be – seeing that a child is not one’s property but an
independent human being, and accepting that his
generation is just different from mine.”
Reflectivity:
(1) Complexity: taking contextual, developmental
trajectories, and multi-causality into account and
trying to see the “big picture” as well as the details.
“And I’ve found that fear is permanently present in
our society. All unconsciously, fear is being used
to manipulate people everywhere. The church, the
medical system, they are all relying on people’s fear,
people’s bad conscience…”
(2) Willingness to question one’s own views and
behavior and to see one’s own role in difficulties
without aiming at self-protection or self-enhance-
ment.
“Now I think that those feelings that my father didn’t
appreciate me were just my perception at the time.
He probably did appreciate me, but I didn’t appreci-
ate myself.”
Emotion regulation:
(1) Comprehensive perception and description of
one’s own feelings, including those that are ambiva-
lent or contradictory.
“Well, talking to others is certainly helpful, but you
should not use that to get rid of your feelings. You
have to see them through, live through them – even
if it’s painful, because it will be better later. You can
deal with the issue in a better way later and look at it
from a meta-level, so to speak, if you’ve really been
through the feeling.”
(2) Being able to manage one’s own emotions as is
appropriate and relevant to the situation.
“When I get angry about those little things, I tell
myself, no, I will not let this make me angry. It is just
not worth it.”
Empathy:
(1) Being able to take others’ perspective and perceive
their feelings accurately, and to know how to deal
with them, that is, to “regulate” others’ emotions
well.
“I guess he probably felt that he was losing his daugh-
ter. I think he couldn’t really handle the idea that I
am a different person than he thought I was. Probably
he was also feeling I rejected him somehow. I can
imagine that.”
(2) Prosocial motivation: Willingness to support oth-
ers out of a caring concern for them.
“Sometimes I just feel a deep compassion for that
whole complex system of judging and dismissing one
another that goes on between people, and how they
cannot get themselves out of that”
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Cronbach’s α of .85. Reliabilities for the conflict interview were in the same range,
with a Cronbach’s α of .88.
2.2 Results
We used structural equation models to test our hypothesis that the MORE resources
would be significantly correlated to wisdom. Separate analyses were performed
for the self-report and the open-ended measures. In both cases, we first fit separate
Table 2 Inter-Rater Reliabilities for the MORE Resource and BWP Criterion Ratings
MORE Resources Cronbach’s αICC
Sense of Mastery .86 .76
Openness .70 .51
Reflectivity .90 .77
Emotion Regulation .75 .59
Empathy .73 .53
BWP Criteria
Factual knowledge .80 .67
Procedural knowledge .84 .72
Value relativism .75 .57
Life-span contextualism .64 .46
Uncertainty .68 .52
Table 3 Correlations between Self-report Measures of the MORE Resources and Wisdom (N = 150)
Openness Reflectivity Emotion
Regulation
Empathy 3D-WS SAWS ASTI
Mastery .052 .115 .459 .041 .197 .367 .483
(p = .527) (p = .161) (p < .001) (p = .615) (p = .016) (p < .001) (p < .001)
Openness .117 .358 .364 .573 .429 .427
(p = .153) (p < .001) (p < .001) (p < .001) (p < .001) (p < .001)
Reflectivity −.024 .258 −.057 .376 .264
(p = .771) (p = .001) (p = .489) (p < .001) (p = .001)
Emotion
Regulation
−.020 .617 .304 .473)
(p = .812) (p < .001) (p < .001) (p < .001)
Empathy .261 .414 .296
(p = .001) (p < .001) (p < .001)
3D-WS .258 .474
(p = .001) (p < .001)
SAWS .601
(p < .001)
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measurement models for the resources and the wisdom measures and then combined
the optimized measurement models to test the full structural model.
Self-report measures. Table 3 displays the correlations between the self-report
measures of the MORE resources and wisdom. Interestingly, there was some differ-
entiation among the MORE resources: there were substantial correlations between
mastery and emotion regulation and between empathy and reflectivity, but not across
these two groups except for openness, which had significant correlations with both
emotion regulation and empathy. Consistent with that, a one-factor measurement
model for the self-report MORE measures did not fit the data. A two-factor model
with mastery and emotion regulation on one factor, reflectivity and empathy on the
other, and openness loading on both factors fit the data well. The correlations among
the three wisdom scales were all significant (Glück etal., 2013), and they loaded on
one factor.
Using these measurement models, we next fitted a structural model predicting
the wisdom factor from the two MORE factors. As Table3 shows, the correlations
between the MORE resources and the wisdom scales were all significant except for a
zero correlation between reflectivity and the 3D-WS. However, the model did not fit
the data well, and the fit remained unsatisfactory after a residual negative correlation
between the 3D-WS and SAWS, suggested by modification indices, was permitted,
χ2 (19) = 80.275, p < .001, GFI = .870, CFI = .839, RMSEA = .164. The remaining
modification indices all required correlations between specific MORE resources and
wisdom scales, which would have run against the logic of the model. Therefore, the
structural model was retained as it was (see Figure1). In spite of the problems with
model fit, both resource factors were strong predictors of wisdom with standardized
regression weights of .76 and .69.1
Open-ended measures. Table 4 displays the correlations between the MORE
resource ratings of the conflict interviews and the BWP criteria. Here, the measure-
ment model for the MORE resources did not require differentiation into two factors:
the one-factor model fit the data very well, and the same was true for the five Berlin
criteria. The structural model showed highly satisfactory fit, χ2 (34) = 38.324, p =
.280, GFI = .915, CFI = .986, RMSEA = .040. It is displayed in Figure2. As the
figure shows, all paths were significant and substantial. The MORE resource rat-
ings from the conflict interview predicted performance criteria in the Berlin wisdom
paradigm with a significant regression weight of .45.
1 A potential problem with this analysis was the high degree of conceptual overlap between the MORE
Life Experience Model and the subscales of the 3D-WS and the SAWS. The 3D-WS includes a compas-
sionate and a reflective dimension, and the SAWS includes subscales labeled openness, emotional regula-
tion, and reminiscence and reflectiveness. Therefore, we also ran a model that only included the ASTI,
which conceptualizes wisdom as self-transcendence and assesses aspects that are relatively distant from
the MORE resources (see Koller, Levenson, & Glück, 2017). To have more than one indicator, separate
ASTI scores were computed for even and uneven item numbers (r = . 78, p < .001). This model had a far
better fit than the first model, χ2 (12) = 33.199, p = .001, GFI = .946, CFI = .933, RMSEA = .109. The
standardized regression weights were .82 for the “crystallized” and .57 for the “fluid” MORE resources.
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More ontheMORE Life Experience Model: What We Have Learned…
Mastery
Emotion
Regulation
Openness
Reflectivity
Empathy
MORE
Factor 1
MORE
Factor 2
3D-WS
Self-Report
Wisdom ASTI
SAWS
.53
.85
.39
.55
.33
.66
.76
.69
.76
.73
.71
-.60
Fig. 1 Structural equation models for the self-report measures of the MORE resources and wisdom. Coefficients are standardized estimates
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Table 4 Correlations between Interview Ratings of the MORE Resources and Criteria of the Berlin Wisdom Paradigm (N = 82)
Openness Reflectivity Emotion Regula-
tion
Empathy Uncertainty Value Relativism Lifespan
Contextual-
ism
Factual Knowledge Procedural Knowl-
edge
Mastery .361 .264 .401 .366 .081 .186 .048 .165 .201
(p = .001) (p = .018) (p < .001) (p = .001 (p = .476) (p = .099) (p = .674) (p = .145) (p = .074)
Openness .635 .473 .499 .179 .254 .256 .301 .301
(p < .001) (p < .001) (p < .001) (p = .112) (p = .023) (p = .022) (p = .007) (p = .007)
Reflectivity .572 .519 .221 .323 .288 .389 .347
(p < .001) (p < .001) (p = .048) (p = .003) (p = .010) (p < .001) (p = .002)
Emotion Regula-
tion
.592 .182 .290 .191 .247 .317
(p < .001) (p = .107) (p = .009) (p = .090) (p = .027) (p = .004)
Empathy .179 .225 .137 .189 .265
(p = .113) (p = .045) (p = .226) (p = .093) (p = .017)
Uncertainty .437 .537 .480 .379
(p < .001) (p < .001) (p < .001) (p = .001)
Value Relativism .590 .520 .525
(p < .001) (p < .001) (p < .001)
Lifespan Contextu-
alism
.734 .470
(p < .001) (p < .001)
Factual Knowledge .684
(p < .001)
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Mastery
Emotion
Re
g
ulation
Openness
Reflectivity
Empathy
MORE
Procedural
Knowled
g
e
BWP Value
Relativism
Lifespan
Contextualism
.45
.79
.74
.45
.88
.58
.66
.81
.74
.70
Factual
Knowled
g
e
Awareness
of Uncertaint
y
.72
Fig. 2 Structural equation models for the open-ended measures of the MORE resources and wisdom. Coefficients are standardized estimates
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2.3 Discussion
This study provided a first, cross-sectional test of the hypothesis that the MORE
resources are related to wisdom across different measurement methods. The models for
both self-report and open-ended narrative measures showed significant and substantial
positive relationships between the MORE resources and wisdom. This is not particu-
larly surprising with respect to the self-report data: in our experience, self-report meas-
ures of positively valued constructs have a general tendency to covary, if only because
they tap into people’s general way of thinking about themselves (Glück, 2018; Glück
etal., 2013). Therefore, we were a bit surprised to find the clear dissociation between
emotion regulation and mastery on the one hand and empathy and reflectivity on the
other. There are at least two explanations for this finding. First, one could argue that
emotion regulation and a sense of mastery are about a person’s “internal” way of deal-
ing with experiences, by controlling emotions and by deciding whether to take action
or to accept a given situation. Empathy and reflectivity are about taking “external” per-
spectives: imagining how another person is feeling and thinking about oneself from a
self-distanced perspective. On the other hand, the two types of resources may have dif-
ferent developmental timelines: empathy and reflectivity may be predecessors of wis-
dom, whereas emotion regulation and mastery are acquired with experience and may
co-develop with wisdom. We will come back to this point later.
Interestingly, no such dissociation was found for the open-ended data: in the auto-
biographical interviews about a difficult conflict, participants’ levels of all MORE
resources were loading on one factor. Thus, the resources that people utilize when they
are reflecting on a concrete event from their past are more closely related than people’s
self-evaluations of those resources as traits. Perhaps this is the case because difficult
conflicts require both perspective-taking and internal regulation capacities.
In sum, we consider our findings as an encouraging first step in our growing
understanding of how wisdom develops. The next step will be to investigate how
the resources longitudinally interact with life experiences: the MORE Life Experi-
ence Model predicts that the resources that individuals bring to a life challenge influ-
ence how they deal with the challenge, but also whether they then grow wiser inits
aftermath.
3 Lessons We Have Learned
We have gained a number of insights from this study and some smaller “side studies”
that we did in connection with it. We will detail these lessons in the following section.
First, we discuss lessons that led us to refine the model, then, lessons that extend the
model in new directions.
3.1 Optimizing theMORE Life Experience Model
Single events vs. life phases. Sometimes, participants had difficulty pinpointing one
specific event that led to an important insight or a change in worldview. They might
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have been struggling with a problem for a long time and then at some point, a rela-
tively minor experience, such as a conversation they had or a book that they read,
gave them a whole new perspective on the issue. In addition, even when people felt
that a single difficult event had led to a major insight, it was often only in the after-
math of the event, when they had the time and nerves to reflect upon what had hap-
pened, that they realized how much they had changed. Thus, we would like to shift
the focus away from life-changing events to life-changing insights – which often but
not always happen in the course of life-changing events. In future studies, we plan
to ask participants more directly about the experiences that had the strongest effect
on their views about life (see, e.g., Weststrate, Ferrari, Fournier, & McLean, 2018)
instead of asking them about difficult events and lessons they derived from them.
Renaming some resources. First, while the acronym “MORE” was well suited to
convey the general idea that wisdom should be related to “more life experience” as
well as to M, O, R, and E/E plus life experience, we may not have chosen the opti-
mal labels for all resources. We would like to change the labels of the “M” and “E”
resources as follows.
Managing uncertainty and uncontrollability. The original label for the “M”
resource, “sense of mastery,” is too closely related to concepts like self-efficacy
and internal control beliefs. It captures the trust that wise individuals have in their
own ability to master whatever may happen in their life, but it may not convey their
above-average awareness of the unpredictability and uncontrollability of human
life. We consider both sides to be equally important: wise individuals neither over-
estimate nor underestimate their control and knowledge about the world. As men-
tioned earlier, the psychological literature suggests that most people overestimate
the control they have over their life and that these control illusions are actually ben-
eficial to their well-being (Peterson & Bossio, 2001; Taylor & Brown, 1988). On
the other hand, underestimating one’s control has been related to learned helpless-
ness and associated with depression (Seligman, 1975); thus, there may also be peo-
ple for whom wisdom comes from realizing that they actually do have control over
important parts of their lives. However, as the majority of people tends to overesti-
mate their control and other conceptions of wisdom have also included awareness of
uncertainty as a criterion (Baltes & Staudinger, 2000; Grossmann, 2017), we prefer
to emphasize in the new “M” that wise individuals are fully aware of the limitations
of their control and knowledge, but able to manage this awareness well.
Emotional sensitivity and regulation. The original labels for the “E”, emotion
regulation and empathy, were somewhat imprecise. Emotion regulation is often used
for all phases of perceiving and managing one’s own feelings (e.g., Gross & Thomp-
son, 2007). Empathy is usually distinguished from sympathy in that it refers to being
aware of others’ emotions without necessarily sharing them. Our conception of the
“E” resource is meant to convey that wisdom involves both an attentiveness and sen-
sitivity to the feelings of oneself and others and the ability to regulate them, so as to
remain (relatively) calm and to calm down others in challenging situations. Thus,
the distinction between the two aspects of the “E” resource is no longer between
the self and others but between (a) sensitivity to emotions, which involves being
attentive to one’s own and others’ feelings and taking them seriously even if they
are unwanted, and (b) regulation of one’s own and others’ emotions as a context
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requires, which includes the ability to maintain one’s calm even in emotionally chal-
lenging situations. As discussed later, sensitivity may actually be an early predeces-
sor of wisdom like openness or empathy, whereas emotion regulation is more of an
acquired competence that is learned with experience over the lifespan.
Differentiating reflectivity. One important step forward in our work has been
specifying more precisely what kind of reflection about experiences can foster wis-
dom. Virtually every theory of wisdom involves some aspect of reflection or reflec-
tivity, and virtually all authors agree that it is not having had certain experiences per
se, but having reflected upon them that leads to wisdom (e.g., Ardelt, 2005; Glück
& Bluck, 2013; Staudinger, 2001; Webster, 2007). However, what authors mean by
reflection varies considerably. For example, Webster (2007) defined his subcompo-
nent of reminiscence and reflectiveness as “seeking to understand and derive insight
from both our mistakes and successes“ (p. 168) whereas Ardelt (2003) defined her
reflective dimension as “looking at phenomena and events from many different per-
spectives to develop self-awareness and self-insight, [a practice that] will gradually
reduce one’s self-centeredness, subjectivity, and projections, and increase one’s
insight into the true nature of things, including the motivations of one’s own and
other people’s behavior” (p. 278). These two conceptions touch upon somewhat dif-
ferent aspects of reflection; in fact, we found a low but significant negative correla-
tion between them (Glück etal., 2013).
How do we understand reflectivity (originally called “reflective attitude”) in the
MORE Life Experience Model? In a way, our conception combines Ardelt’s and
Webster’s ideas: we believe that thinking back upon experiences is necessary but
not sufficient for developing wisdom; how one thinks about them matters as well. In
line with Ardelt’s characterization, wise individuals reflect upon experiences with
the aim of gaining insights and learning more about themselves and life in general.
Weststrate and Glück (2017) distinguished two forms of reflection in the interview
transcripts from the study described earlier. Exploratory processing is an analytical
and interpretive way of reflecting about life events that emphasizes meaning-mak-
ing (i.e., extracting lessons and insights), complexity, and growth from the past. For
example, a participant in our study who had a son born with severe mental disabili-
ties said, “I learned trust and acceptance. I am still learning. I am learning the whole
time. I very often say that my oldest son is my greatest teacher. […] I just realize
that accompanying my son’s life, I am in a constant learning process… I think this
has given me strength.” Redemptive processing, on the other hand, describes the ten-
dency to transform an initially negative experience into an emotionally positive one,
leading to sense of emotional closure and event resolution. A participant who had
survived cancer said, “I have a very positive attitude. I thank my organs every day
for working well. […] in retrospect, I am glad that I had cancer. […] Feelings of
gratitude… I do not think about the cancer itself anymore. That is done. It is in the
past. It doesn’t make sense to give in to the fear that it could come back.”(Weststrate
& Glück, 2017, p. 807)
Studies have shown that exploratory processing of negative experiences is related
to psychological maturity, while redemptive processing is related to happiness and
well-being (e.g., King, Scollon, Ramsey, & Williams, 2000; Lilgendahl & McAd-
ams, 2011; Pals, 2006). In our data, exploratory processing was correlated with
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wisdom, whereas redemptive processing was associated with well-being (Weststrate
& Glück, 2017). Thus, wisdom-fostering reflectivity is exploratory in focus, aimed
at learning about life in its complexity, and not redemptive, aimed at achieving clo-
sure and feeling better.
Manifestational vs. developmental resources and their different develop-
mental timelines. In our original model, we assumed that the same resources foster
the manifestation of wisdom during life challenges and the development of wisdom
from life experiences: a person higher in the MORE resources would deal with a dif-
ficult situation in a wiser way and would also be more likely to grow even wiser from
that experience. We still believe in the first assumption: a person dealing wisely with
a difficult situation will be able to manage uncertainty and uncontrollability, open to
alternative views, reflective of his or her views and behaviors, and sensitive to his
or her own emotions and those of others involved and able to regulate them as the
situation requires. The idea that these same resources also foster the development of
wisdom, however, needs some differentiation. Both theoretical considerations and
the dissociation we found for the self-report measures suggest that the resources
have different developmental trajectories and different ways of interacting with wis-
dom in the course of development. Some of the resources – especially openness and
emotional sensitivity – may be relatively early predecessors of wisdom, already pre-
sent to individually different degrees in children. Reflectivity is probably learned
from experience, starting early on – parents and caregivers can be models of critical
self-reflection (or of defensiveness and denial). On the other hand, learning to man-
age uncertainty and uncontrollability probably requires relevant life experiences. It
is therefore most likely to develop as people move from the growth-oriented, self-
confident, expansive mindset of adolescence and young adulthood towards a more
balanced view of their own power and its limitations in middle adulthood, by which
point most individuals have experienced many life challenges. Similarly, while most
people learn the “basics” of emotion regulation in childhood, extraordinary levels of
this resource may develop in the course of adulthood as people are faced with more
difficult emotional challenges such as divorce or serious illness. There are certainly
individual differences in the developmental trajectories of all the resources depend-
ing on people’s individual experiences. But generally, people at different ages are
likely to show somewhat different constellations of the MORE resources.
Importantly, we also believe that the resources interact dynamically with one
another. Ideally, they foster each other’s development over time (Glück & Bluck,
2013). For example, if a child who is highly empathetic and emotionally perceptive
also has the cognitive resources and environmental modelling and support necessary
to acquire reflectivity, he or she is likely to develop effective emotion-regulation
skills and an awareness of the limitations of his or her control. These skills, in turn,
may enable him or her to become an extraordinary source of support and advice for
people in need without burning out emotionally in the process.
Optimal vs. maximal levels of the resources. We have also found that for all
five MORE resources, the optimal level may not be the maximum possible. It is pos-
sible to be so aware of uncertainty and uncontrollability that one becomes helpless,
so open to others’ views that one cannot hold one’s own positions, so self-critical
that one loses any self-confidence, so sensitive to others’ feelings and concerned
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364
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about acquiescing them that one sacrifices one’s own well-being. Thus, while for
most people becoming wiser means gaining a bit more distance from themselves
and learning to take others’ perspectives, for others it may mean building trust in
their own feelings, standing by their own values, and taking care of their own needs
as well as those of others. Wisdom is a matter of balance more than extremes, and
it manifests itself in the way individuals deal with specific, contextualized problems
where optimal solutions may not always be possible (Sternberg, 1998).
3.2 Extending theMORE Life Experience Model
Other potential resources. One question that we have repeatedly discussed is
whether the original five MORE resources are really the most important possible
ones. Even if, as we showed earlier, the relationships between them differ some-
what by method of assessment, they are related both empirically and conceptually.
In fact, we believe that in their dynamic developmental interaction they form a kind
of “self-reinforcing syndrome”. For example, openness and empathy are likely to
reinforce a self-reflective attitude, and such an attitude is likely to foster the devel-
opment of emotion regulation skills, which may again help people remain open to
others’ perspectives. It is an interesting question whether this “wisdom syndrome,”
which we imagine as a kind of general mindset, includes other attitudes and capaci-
ties as well, some of which may even be more specific to wisdom than the ones we
have described.
In her master’s thesis, our project member Lara Dorner drew upon the literature
on growth in psychological and psychotherapeutic contexts to identify other growth-
fostering resources that would also seem relevant to wisdom (Christopher, 2004;
Curnow, 1999; Deci & Ryan, 2008; Joseph & Linley, 2005; Jung, 1971; Kramer,
1990; Labouvie-Vief, 1990; Levenson, 2009; Linley, 2003; Pascual-Leone, 1990;
Rathunde, 2010; Rogers, 1964; Tedeschi & Calhoun, 2004). She identified six
resources that came up across various conceptions of growth (Dorner, 2012). The
arguably most important ones are process orientation and self-integration. Process
orientation is a view of life as continuous learning and growth. Process-oriented
individuals know that change is inherent in life and that negative experiences are
unavoidable; rather than avoiding these challenges and contradictions, they are open
to them and embrace the insights they bring with them Self-integration is percep-
tiveness to and acceptance of one’s own emotions, intuitions, and physical sensa-
tions. Self-integrative individuals do not suppress or ignore these perceptions, but
are attentive to and accepting of them, even if they run against their ideal of how
they would like to be. They aim at integrating even complex and contradictory fac-
ets into their own self-concept, which leads to a continually more complex view of
the self. Acceptance and trust is a general attitude toward life that is able to look at
things and let them happen, trusting that things will be okay, or if they are not, one
will be able to deal with them, instead of constantly needing to take action and con-
trol. Self-determination is a way of living one’s life that takes one’s own individual
needs and personality into account, follows one’s intrinsic motivations, and does not
care about external evaluations or reinforcements. Self-determined individuals take
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responsibility for their actions as they act in accordance with their own self, and
value the autonomy and authenticity of others as well. Self-transcendence is a way
of experiencing the world that is not centered on one’s own self. Self-transcendent
individuals do not feel the need to evaluate others, do not feel threatened when oth-
ers disagree with them or prove them wrong, and do not depend on the admiration of
others. They are compassionate and unselfish as they feel deeply connected to others
and the world at large.
These six resources have been shown to be characteristic of growth processes that
happen as individuals grow from difficult experiences both inside and outside psy-
chotherapeutic contexts. They have some obvious conceptual relations to the MORE
resources (for example, self-integration is related to emotional sensitivity, and pro-
cess orientation to managing uncertainty), and we find indications of them in our
interview transcripts. Thus, they are likely to be facets of the “wisdom-resource syn-
drome” as well. We selected the original five MORE resources because they were
relatively close to established psychological concepts, which made it easier to con-
ceptualize and measure them. It is an open question for future conceptual and empir-
ical work whether additional resources might be added to the model.
Situational variability of wisdom. One of our most important insights concerns
the question whether wisdom is a stable personal trait or a more fluctuating phe-
nomenon. The idea that people’s wisdom varies across situational contexts has been
supported by experimental research (overview in Grossmann, 2017) as well as by
studies showing that most people can recall situations in which they did something
wise (Bluck & Glück, 2004; Glück etal., 2005). Our research suggests, however,
that there is variation not just in how wisely people act across different situations,
but also in how wisely they reflect upon past experiences. As described earlier, par-
ticipants in our study were interviewed about two different experiences: a conflict
and a difficult event. We did not only have raters who evaluated the interview tran-
scripts for the MORE resources, but also raters for wisdom, as we thought that it
might be possible to measure wisdom by interviewing participants about life chal-
lenges. Trained student raters evaluated each transcript concerning the components
of three different wisdom models: the Three-Dimensional Wisdom Model (Ardelt,
2003), the Berlin wisdom paradigm (Baltes & Staudinger, 2000), and the Bremen
wisdom paradigm (Mickler & Staudinger, 2008). A fourth group of so-called “lay
raters” rated the transcripts for wisdom using their own understanding of wisdom.
Interestingly, the correlations within each interview suggested that the different wis-
dom conceptions tap rather similar characteristics: the average correlation was .73
within the conflict interview and .69 within the difficult-event interview. However,
the correlations across the interviews suggest much less commonality with an aver-
age of .31 (Glück, 2018). Thus, a participant might well have talked very wisely
about a conflict from her past but much less wisely about the other difficult event
and vice versa.
Much recent research has shown that wisdom varies by situations – the same per-
son may act very wisely in one situation and much less wisely in another. In other
words, wisdom is not only determined by a person’s stable personality, but also by
situational context (Grossmann, 2017). Our findings suggest that wisdom varies
even when the external context of life reflection is held constant: people who are
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talking about two different situations in the same interview room, with the same
interviewer, may still be far wiser about one situation than about the other. Thus,
how wisely we are able to think about a past experience varies as well. Different
experiences have different meanings for us, they happened in different life phases
and taught us different lessons. How wisely we think about them may also depend
on how much we have thought about the event before, who we talked to about it,
what kind of responses got from others as we talked about it. The stories we make of
our past experiences are often constructed in close contact with others; thus, others
may have a strong influence on how much wisdom we can gain from an experience.
This insight, together with some others, has led us to think more generally about the
role of interpersonal resources for wisdom.
The important role of interpersonal resources. We began to notice the impor-
tance of external resources early on in our study. In particular, Susanne König, a
doctoral student and interviewer in the research project, noticed that wisdom nomi-
nees seemed to be talking about gratitude far more often than other participants did.
Eventually she wrote her dissertation on the relationship between wisdom and grati-
tude, demonstrating that, indeed, wisdom nominees far more often mentioned spon-
taneously that they were grateful for something or someone (König & Glück, 2014).
Asking the participants what they were most grateful for, she found four categories
that were mentioned more often by wisdom nominees: life in general with all its ups
and downs, their health, their faith, and their partners. Given that most of them were
middle-aged and older adults who had been in their relationships for a long time,
one would not necessarily expect them to still feel gratitude for having their partner.
One participant described her relationship as the best “event” in her life: “… he feels
it when I’m not feeling good, and I can talk to him about it, and yes, I am very grate-
ful that I have such a wonderful relationship. I am happy and grateful that I have
him.”
Beyond intimate relationships, we also saw the importance of other people
for wise individuals in an ethnographic study that another project member, Katja
Naschenweng, carried out (for other ethnographic work on wisdom see Edmond-
son, 2005, 2013). She wanted to study the small tribe of wise individuals just as
one would an indigenous people in a distant corner of the world: by observing how
they live their lives. She did so with five particularly wise participants of our study.
Among several interesting commonalities she found between those quite different
people, one was that while they lived somewhat contemplative lives in quiet places,
they had not at all turned away from the outside world: they used media actively
and selectively, they were very interested in art, literature, and philosophy, and they
valued their active social lives. They considered their partners, family, and friends as
important sources of not just happiness, but also insight. One participant said, “You
need people with whom you can discuss issues, not just the usual blah-blah. We talk
about things that are really important to us. I grow through my friendships and rela-
tionships. Sometimes I really want to be challenged in those conversations” (see also
Weststrate & Glück, 2017).
In sum, these findings drew our attention to the importance of external, especially
interpersonal resources for wisdom. How much and with whom we talk about our
experiences and what we make of them may be as important as our internal ways
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of reflecting upon them. There may be different ways of telling stories that parallel
the different forms of reflection that we have identified. Sometimes we talk about
an experience for redemption: we know exactly what we want the listener to say to
make us feel better, and we choose our audience and tell the story so as to elicit that
reaction. At other times, we want to explore, to get to see a viewpoint, to perhaps
gain a new understanding. This form of storytelling is clearly more likely to lead to
new insights. Perhaps wise people are less reluctant to explore their own experiences
by talking about them in this exploratory way than most of us are. This idea may
suggest a Vygotskyan perspective (e.g., Kozulin, 2014) on the development of wis-
dom.2 Perhaps there is a “zone of proximal development” for wisdom in the sense
that people’s previous life experiences and internal resources determine the extent to
which they can grow towards wisdom if they get the right external feedback. A men-
tor, psychotherapist, or simply a wise friend may be able to open up new perspec-
tives on an experience or situation that may not only help them to resolve a problem
but also to grow wiser (Igarashi, Levenson, & Aldwin, 2018).
3.3 Conclusion: The MORE Life Experience Model 2.0
What have we learned so far? A lot, we believe. First of all, our general idea that
wisdom develops through a dynamic interaction between experiences and resources
has remained unchanged. We have refined some aspects, such as the labels of some
resources or our understanding of reflectivity, and broadened our perspective in
some ways by including longer life phases and external resources. Thinking about
the MORE Life Experience Model has also helped us gain a better understanding
of what wisdom itself may be. Some researchers have argued that wisdom is essen-
tially a form of complex, deep and broad knowledge (Baltes & Staudinger, 2000;
Sternberg, 1998). Others believe that wisdom is not knowledge but a personality
type (Ardelt, 2003). Both these conceptualizations are rendered somewhat incom-
plete by recent findings that wisdom varies by situation (Grossmann, 2017). Think-
ing about our model, we have come to believe that wisdom is both: deep, personal,
experience-based knowledge about life that is acquired through and goes along with
a certain mindset: the willingness and ability to take a broad, non-self-centered per-
spective on life with the goal of understanding it in all its complexity. People who
have this mindset are more likely than others to learn more about life and accumu-
late wisdom-related knowledge over time, and they are more often able to deal with
difficult situations wisely. How we can foster this mindset in human beings may be
one of the most crucial questions for humanity at this point.
Acknowledgements This research was funded by the Austrian Research Fund FWF (grant number
P21011) and the University of Chicago’s Defining Wisdom Initiative (John Templeton Foundation). We
would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for very insightful and constructive comments. Open access
funding provided by University of Klagenfurt.
2 We are grateful to an anonymous reviewer for pointing this out!
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Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Interna-
tional License (http://creat iveco mmons .org/licen ses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution,
and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the
source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
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