The Examined Life is Wise Living: The Relationship Between Mindfulness, Wisdom, and the Moral Foundations
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The Examined Life is Wise Living: The Relationship Between Mindfulness, Wisdom, and the Moral Foundations Paul Verhaeghen1
© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2019
Abstract This correlational study of two independent samples (260 college students and 173 Mechanical Turk workers aged 21–74) examined whether and how mindfulness (broadly construed as a manifold of self-awareness, self-regulation, and selftranscendence), influences wisdom about the self (Adult Self-Transcendence Inventory and Self-Assessed Wisdom Scale) and wisdom about the (social) world (Three-Dimensional Wisdom Scale), and how mindfulness and wisdom impact ethical sensitivities (the five moral foundations). Mindfulness predicted wisdom about the self, and wisdom about the self was linked to an emphasis on the individualizing moral foundations of care/harm avoidance and fairness and, to a lesser degree, on the binding moral foundations of loyalty, authority, and purity. Wisdom about the (social) world was not associated with either mindfulness or the moral foundations. Age was a significant positive predictor for wisdom about the self once the self-awareness component of mindfulness was taken into account. Keywords Wisdom · Mindfulness · Moral foundations · Ethics This paper investigates the links between trait mindfulness, wisdom, and ethical sensitivities (operationalized as sensitivity to the five moral foundations) in two independent samples, one of college students and one of adults spanning ages 21–74. Two principal ideas guided the study. The first idea is that wisdom, whether one conceptualizes it as a form of expertise or as a virtue or personality characteristic, might be well served by the specific quality or qualities of attention the individual brings to their experiences. It makes sense to expect that a habitual mindful attitude (i.e., taking an open, non-judgmental, reflective, self-regulatory, and sometimes self-transcendent stance towards life) might be a good indicator or exemplifier of such qualities. The second idea is that most, if not all, current adult-developmental theories consider wisdom to be of practical consequence, in the sense that wise people are expected to generally display prosocial attitudes and behavior (for a review, see Bangen et al. 2013). Consequentially, one might expect this wise stance to give rise to ethical sensitivities that are compatible with the characteristics of wisdom (as defined within these theories). * Paul Verhaeghen [email protected] 1
School of Psychology, Georgia Institute of Technology, 654 Cherry Street NW, Atlanta, GA 30320, USA
Wisdom It is probably fair to say that within the field of psychology the study of wisdom started from an adult development perspective (e.g., Clayton and Birren 1980; Erikson 1959; Kramer 1990; Pascual-Leone 1983). Initial conceptualizations tended to view wisdom primarily from a cognitive angle, that is, as an advanced form of postformal thought. For instance, Baltes and Staudinger (2000) define wisdom as ‘expertise in th
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