The Wise Mind Balances the Abstract and the Concrete

Abstract

We explored how individuals' mental representations of complex and uncertain situations impact their ability to reason wisely. To this end, we introduce situated methods to capture abstract and concrete mental representations and the switching between them when reflecting on social challenges. Using these methods, we evaluated the alignment of abstractness and concreteness with four integral facets of wisdom: intellectual humility, open-mindedness, perspective-taking, and compromise-seeking. Data from North American and UK participants (N = 1,151) revealed that both abstract and concrete construals significantly contribute to wise reasoning, even when controlling for a host of relevant covariates and potential response bias. Natural language processing of unstructured texts among high (top 25%) and low (bottom 25%) wisdom participants corroborated these results: semantic networks of the high wisdom group reveal greater use of both abstract and concrete themes compared to the low wisdom group. Finally, employing a repeated strategy-choice method as an additional measure, our findings demonstrated that individuals who showed a greater balance and switching between these construal types exhibited higher wisdom. Our findings advance understanding of individual differences in mental representations and how construals shape reasoning across contexts in everyday life.

Keywords: construal; measurement; mental representations; perspective-taking; wisdom.

Figure 1.

Path diagram of the bifactor model with 18 items (a = items from the abstract pool; c = items from the concrete pool) in Study 1. Top panel –North American sample data. Bottom panel –UK sample data. G. Factor = general factor. Item coloring and line thickness correspond to strength of association with respective construal factors and the general factor in a given sample. Dotted line represents an item with unstandardized factor loading fixed to 1 (a requirement for structural equation modelling analyses). For ease of interpretation, we present standardized parameter estimates. For wording of each item, refer to Table 1.

Figure 2.

Linguistic analyses of 50 most frequent adjectives, nouns, and verbs in participants’ open-ended reflections on the most recent interpersonal conflict. Visual representation in the network based on strength of cooccurrences (as indicated by thickness of edges in the graph and their spatial position on the graph), standardized across corpora of high and low wisdom performers (indexed by method-factor-adjusted latent score of wisdom). Overlapping words in orange indicate that participants in both groups mentioned concrete feelings involving another person. Distinct words for the high wisdom group indicate that participants in this group simultaneously mentioned the positive outlook on life, an indicator of abstract reframing of the experience in terms of bigger picture (also evidenced by mentioning of wonder, mean, mind, program, action).

Figure 3.

Wisdom scores as a function of number of switches between abstract and concrete construal strategies in Study 2. Box-and-dot-plot depicting distribution and central tendency (median) in each group. Only two participants switched seven times and were binned with the last group. Participants who switched at least once reported greater wisdom compared to those who did not, 2.57 < ts ≤ 3.69, .010 < p ≤ .001. Also, participants who switched six times reported greater wisdom than participants who switched only once, t = 2.05, p = .041, or trice, t = 1.82, p = .069.