Sage against the machine

How do we define wisdom? What tells us a person is wise? A global study has revealed that the answers are startlingly similar no matter where one goes or who one asks. How has wisdom changed in the digital era? Read on to see

- Sukanya Datta

The wisdom of the ages is so dinned into us, we now think of it as cliched. Yet these hard-won lessons have shaped people and societies, helping us navigate a shifting world and our changing roles within it.

What is wisdom? Literally, it is a state of knowing (from the Proto-Germanic wis, “to see” or “to know”, and the suffix-dom, denoting a state or condition). As Socrates put it, in the 5th century BCE, it is also crucially the state of knowing what one doesn’t know.

As for what makes a person wise, this is where it gets interesting.

A large-scale study conducted across 2,600 people from 12 countries (including the US, Peru, Japan, India, Morocco, Slovakia and South Korea) indicates that perceptions of wisdom are more or less universal, no matter who you ask.

"This is something we weren't expecting,” says Igor Grossmann, a professor of psychology and computational social sciences at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, who helped lead the study and coauthored the paper on it (published in Nature Communications in August).

The people surveyed included college students in Japan, villagers in South Africa, city-dwellers in the US and tribes such as the Meitei of India. The study offered them a set of 19 characteristics typically associated with wisdom in different cultures.

The traits most commonly associated with wisdom included...