For the John Templeton Foundation, I wrote about the universal traits that define wisdom across different cultures.
People have been debating what counts as wisdom for a long, long time. Indeed, arguably the oldest literature we have is wisdom literature, in a baked clay tablet with triangular cuneiform inscriptions, excavated in Iraq and containing the “Instructions of Shuruppak,” the earliest dated copy (c. 2600 BCE) of a well-known ancient list of advice including “Do not buy an ass which brays too much” and “Do not answer back against your father, do not raise a ‘heavy eye.’” Nearly as ancient but more familiar to modern readers is the “Hymn of Wisdom,” from the Biblical book of Job, which laments that wisdom remains utterly hidden from man: “Where can wisdom be found, and where is understanding located? No man can know its value, since it cannot be found in the land of the living.”
In their everyday lives, people are constantly making judgements as to where — and with whom — wisdom might be found. Sociologists have long assumed that the nature of those judgements would vary significantly across cultures, with different groups defining and recognizing wisdom quite differently. That was the starting assumption for a group of social scientists led by Maxim Rudnev, a researcher at the University of Waterloo in Canada, when they set out to survey perceptions of wisdom among people in 12 countries across five continents, representing 13 languages and a range of ages and socioeconomic groups. What they found, though, was a surprising agreement across cultures. A person’s expected wisdom, knowledge and understanding tends to be assessed along two key dimensions — one of which functions in an unexpected manner.