Reasoning about social conflicts improves into old age

Igor Grossmann; Jinkyung Na; Michael E. W. Varnum; Denise C. Park; Shinobu Kitayama; Richard E. Nisbett

doi:10.1073/pnas.1001715107

New Research In

Contributed by Richard E. Nisbett, February 23, 2010 (sent for review February 2, 2010)

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Fig. 1.
Changes on wisdom-related reasoning across the lifespan. The effect of age on wise thinking (scale of 1–3) for the individual six dimensions in study 1 and study 2. For presentation purposes, age is divided into three categories used during participants’ recruitment: young (25–40 years; n_{study 1} = 89; n_{study 2} = 69; white bars), middle-aged (41–58 years; n_{study 1} = 73; n_{study 2} = 63; striped bars), and older (60–90 years; n_{study 1} = 81; n_{study 2} = 64; black bars). Higher bars indicate higher scores on wisdom-related dimensions. Older participants showed more wisdom than younger (study 1: t = 10.26, P < 0.001; Study 2: t = 3.54, P < 0.001) and middle-aged adults (study 1: t = 7.97, P < 0.001; study 2: t = 3.05, P = 0.003), whereas the contrast between younger and middle-aged adults revealed a marginal trend in the predicted direction in study 1 (t = 1.71, P = 0.09) and no effect in study 2 (t = 0.41, ns.).
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Fig. 2.
Age distribution of top performers on wisdom-related reasoning. The relationship between age and aggregate wisdom score among participants who completed study 1 and study 2. Blue represents the upper 20% in overall wisdom-related performance, whereas red represent the lower 80% in overall wisdom-related performance.

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Table 1.

Topics of the intergroup conflict stories provided in study 1

Topic/country	Summary
Immigration/Tajikistan	Because of the economic growth of Tajikistan, many people from Kyrgyzstan immigrate to the country. Whereas Kyrgyz people try to preserve their customs, Tajiks want Kyrgyz people to assimilate fully and abandon their customs.
Natural resources/Chuuk	Huge crude oil resources have been discovered in the economically disadvantaged Chuuk state. Because of governmental restrictions, many interested firms cannot establish the required infrastructure for production. On the one side, government tries to preserve the ancient laws. On the other side, there are also a huge number of people in Chuuk who would like to eliminate the regulations entirely.
Ethnic tensions/Djibouti	Two ethnic groups in Djibouti, the Issa and the Afari, have completely different perspectives on politics. Whereas one group tries to preserve traditions, the other group wants to alter the society entirely. Both groups are very strong.

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Table 2.

Responses to the immigration story, indicating high/low scores

Wisdom dimension	High score	Low score
Compromise	They might want to let them continue with their ways and maybe at the same time maybe try to do some kind of promotion to encourage them to better assimilate into the culture although, not throw away their own culture, but to try to make the country more unified, maybe bring customs together that might be similar for both cultures, to unify the country.	I'm sure that each, each culture will keep their original customs. It's not likely that someone that's lived a certain way is going to change just because they moved to a new area. (…) People are pretty true to their nature and they're not really big on change so I'm sure that it won't be an easy thing for them to change their culture.
Perspective shifting	I think there'll be friction between those two ideas. People do assimilate eventually but it often takes a couple generations to do that. (…) There'll be influences both ways but people who are in particular countries that receive immigrants, they always see it from their point of view, namely that these immigrants are changing the country. They don't necessarily see it from the other point of view. Also, immigrants might be upset because their children are not the way they would be if they were back in their homeland.	Most likely there are going to be very similar things as going on in the United States: economic drivers are going to want to keep the immigration going and traditionalists (…) are going to want to stem it and make laws like only speaking Tajik, instead of both. It's just like “English only.” So I think there is going to be a lot of pressure on political stage and most likely a new political leader from right or left will come up and try to fight for or against what's going on.
Uncertainty	I don't know, that's a tough one. I guess that's like what's going on here with the Mexicans that are immigrating here. (…) I don't know too much about the Tajiks and their national pride. I don't know how much of that they actually want to keep. And I'm sure when the Kyrgyz come over they're acting and speaking differently and they don't want to assimilate.	I say it's up to them and if you can't speak the language stay at home or get the hell out of there. Same as all of the people coming over here. (…)You got all of the outsiders coming in and they want to change everything. They're welcome to come, but you got to adapt to the ways of their country that's already there. Any immigrants should have to adapt to where they're going, not that country adapting to the immigrants, in my opinion.