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So, you think you can determine my infinite wisdom with 7 questions?!
Not me, but a group of researchers around Michael Thomas and Dilip Jeste from the University of California and collaborators at Colorado State University. And sorry to say, I don’t think you have infinite wisdom!
The cheek! But how can you measure wisdom?
Well, I have reported on wisdom in previous articles such as the connections between the microbiome with wisdom but also loneliness. There are standardised questionnaires and these researchers had already developed the San Diego Wisdom Scale (SD-WISE-28) with 28 questions in the categories of:
Decisiveness, Emotional Regulation, Self-Reflection, Pro-Social Behaviours, Social Advising, Acceptance of Divergent Perspectives, and Spirituality.
And have they whittled this down to only seven questions?
Precisely — they identified the most predictive items and tested these seven against the whole 28 items. They found seven questions was almost as accurate as the full 28 and comparably reliable.
So I’m itching to know what these seven items are!
I should refer you to the original research here. But as it is open source, the items of the Abbreviated San Diego Wisdom Scale (SD-WISE-7) are:
