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I have reported on wisdom in multiple Quick Hits over the last year and the research doesn’t seem to be easing off — this study focused on aspects of wisdom and differences between men and women.
Wisdom is particularly interesting to study because wise people seem to pretty immune to many mental health issues such as loneliness but differences between the sexes have rarely been explored. Wisdom is considered a collection of traits and there are a number of standard validated scales to measure this. In this study 659 community-based participants between 27 and 103(!) completed two scales. What did they find?
An almost clichéd result: women scored higher on compassion-related items and men scored higher on cognitive-related items and also on emotional regulation. But interestingly the average score did not differ and in both men and women higher wisdom scores are related to higher mental wellbeing and lower levels of depression and loneliness.
So, men and women are equally wise but have different strengths which align with stereotypical views of men and women.
Reference:
Emily B. H. Treichler, Barton W. Palmer, Tsung-Chin Wu, Michael L. Thomas, Xin M. Tu, Rebecca Daly, Ellen E. Lee, Dilip V. Jeste.
Women and Men Differ in Relative Strengths in Wisdom Profiles: A Study of 659 Adults Across…
