Wisdom tends to get treated as something that arrives automatically, a reward for accumulating enough birthdays. Two studies that measured wisdom directly, rather than assuming it tracks with age, suggest it works quite differently, showing up unevenly even among older adults, and depending far more on specific mental habits than on the simple passage of time.
The clearest evidence comes from a 2014 study by Igor Grossmann and Ethan Kross, published in Psychological Science, which examined what the researchers called Solomon’s Paradox, the pattern where people reason more wisely about other people’s problems than their own. Across three studies covering 693 people, participants consistently reasoned with more wisdom, weighing their own limits, searching for compromise, considering multiple perspectives, about a friend’s relationship problem than about an identical problem happening in their own life. Critically, this gap showed up in both younger and older adults, meaning age alone didn’t close it, older participants weren’t automatically wiser about their own struggles just by virtue of having lived longer. What did close the gap was a simple technique taught in two of the three studies, mentally self-distancing, imagining the situation as an outside observer would see it, using third-person language rather than immersing in “I” and “me.” Once given that instruction, people reasoned about their own problems just as wisely as they did about someone else’s.
A second study helps show that wisdom isn’t just about how a person thinks in the moment, it’s also about how they’ve processed the hard things that already happened to them. In a 2017 study by Nic Weststrate and Judith Glück, published in Developmental Psychology, the researchers studied 94 adults ranging from 26 to 92 years old, including 47 people specifically nominated by others as wise and 47 matched comparison participants, assessing wisdom through self-report, a performance task, and outside nomination. How often someone reflected on a difficult past experience didn’t predict their wisdom at all. What did predict it was “exploratory processing,” actively working to make meaning and find personal growth in a hard experience rather than simply revisiting it, which was significantly associated with wisdom on both self-report and performance measures. The nominated wise individuals scored significantly higher on this kind of deep processing of hardship than their matched peers.
Together, these two studies point to wisdom as something built through specific, learnable habits of mind rather than something that simply accrues with time. Grossmann and Kross’s research shows that the wisdom people already have access to when thinking about others can be unlocked for their own problems too, through a simple, teachable shift in perspective. Weststrate and Glück’s research shows that the raw material for wisdom, difficult life experience, only converts into something useful when it’s actively and deeply processed rather than just lived through or occasionally recalled. Between the two, wisdom looks less like a passive byproduct of aging and more like an active skill, made of both a mental technique and a way of relating to one’s own hardest experiences.
It’s worth being honest about what these two studies don’t establish. Grossmann and Kross’s research measured wise reasoning in structured lab and survey scenarios about relationship problems specifically, and while the self-distancing effect has been replicated in related work, it’s not yet clear how far the technique generalizes to every kind of difficult decision. Weststrate and Glück’s study involved a relatively small sample of 94 people and relied partly on nomination by others as a marker of wisdom, which introduces some subjectivity into who counted as “wise” in the first place.
Within those honest limits, the research offers a genuinely useful correction to how wisdom gets talked about. It isn’t guaranteed by age, and it isn’t automatic even for people who’ve lived through plenty. It appears to be built, through the specific habit of stepping outside one’s own perspective when it’s needed most, and through the harder work of actually making sense of difficult experiences rather than simply surviving them.