Wisdom-Related Knowledge and Behavior during Social Conflict
Ute Kunzmann
Short Definition
This study predicts that wisdom will be helpful in dealing with social conflict.
Summary Points
- Interests: focused on access to dissolution access, on-screen emotional development, and the psychology of wisdom.
- Investigate 4 searches for psychological application.
- Predictions As wisdom pervades dialectical conflicts, details required tasks. (using video)
- Future tasks: dissertations interactions using wisdom and emotional reactivity in the form of colorful applications. (empirical reproduction). Assessment at school.
- The purpose of the application is obligatory in a few years' approaches to the roads from the process they have with wisdom to their choice.
Text from Wisdom Institute
This study predicts that wisdom (in this project defined as expert knowledge about real life situations) will be helpful in dealing with social conflicts. New video-based wisdom tasks involving couples discussing a serious conflict in their marriage will allow a third party adviser to assess the situations. These new tasks will be presented together with the more traditional hypothetical text-based wisdom problems to 200 adults between twenty and seventy years old. Future research will address the interactions between wisdom-related knowledge and emotional reactivity in the context of real social conflicts.
Wisdom-Related Knowledge and Behavior during Social Conflict Classical philosophical conceptions have emphasized that wisdom is inherently tied to the creative solving of serious interpersonal conflicts. Kunzmann’s research attempts to provide empirical evidence for this idea. It is predicted that wisdom-related knowledge, as assessed by the Berlin wisdom paradigm, will contribute to the successful management of serious real-life interpersonal conflicts. Conflict management will be assessed by performance-based measures and under standardized laboratory conditions. Participants will be asked to observe couples as they have a conversation about a serious conflict in their marriage and the accuracy of their perceptions of both spouse’s interests and priorities will be assessed. Participants will also be asked to give advice to the couples as to how they might go about solving their conflict. This advice will be evaluated objectively on the basis of theoretically-developed conflict management categories as well as subjectively by the couples concerned with the conflicts. The pursuit of self-interest arguably is one factor that hinders the application of wisdom-related knowledge to concrete real-life problems. The proposed research project will begin to investigate this by experimental manipulation. Half of the participants will observe one of three couples under the instruction to think of themselves as one of the spouses. It is predicted that this partisan view will make wise people’s conflict management strategies resemble those of people low on wisdom. Adopting a life-span developmental view on wisdom, this research project will also investigate the joint effects of wisdom-related knowledge and age on conflict management. It is predicted that older adults will be better able to apply their wisdom-related knowledge when being confronted with a concrete real-life interpersonal conflict than young adults (i.e., the effects of wisdom-related knowledge on conflict management will be more pronounced in old age than in young adulthood). The broader aim of the proposed research project is to contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of the pathways from wisdom-related knowledge to a good life on the individual and social level.
Kunzmann’s group completed the production of 34 videos each depicting a couple having a conversation about a serious conflict in their relationship. In a selection process involving several steps, four videos were chosen for further piloting. These videos were not only evaluated by three independent experts and the spouses themselves, but also by a sample of 60 young and old adults. Analyses of these three sources of data revealed that the four videos are well-suited for the present purposes. There was high consensus that the two couples (a) talk about a long-standing, serious, and complex conflict with unknown solutions, (b) discuss their conflict authentically, (c) experience and express a wide range of negative emotions, and (d) exchange their concerns and interests. Furthermore, the topics discussed by the couples differ in terms of content and structure. In addition to the production and validation of videos, other tasks thus far have included the conduction of interviewer trainings, the development of instructions and answer-formats of newly developed video-based tasks, and the collection of questionnaires to be included in the main study.
https://wisdomcenter.uchicago.edu/about/project-1-defining-wisdom