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《想要更有智慧？请化身第三者》
How to Be Wiser?
Wisdom is something that’s hard to define and yet somehow we know it when we see it. The wise people stay calm in a crisis. They can step back and see the bigger picture. They’re thoughtful and self-reflective. They recognise the limits of their own knowledge, consider alternative perspectives, and remember that the world is always changing.
Wisdom mustn’t be confused with intelligence. Although intelligence helps, you can be intelligent without being wise. The wise people tolerate uncertainty and remain optimistic that even tricky problems do have solutions. They can judge what is true or right. It’s quite a list.
So, how do you become wiser? Psychologists have been studying wisdom for decades, and they have good news for us. We can all make efforts to be wiser and we might even succeed.
The reasons that we might want to follow their advice go beyond the obvious benefit of gaining wisdom to make good decisions. Wise reasoning is associated with a whole lot of1) positives: higher life satisfaction, fewer negative feelings, better relationships and less depressive rumination2), according to Igor Grossman of the University of Waterloo in Canada.
He and his colleagues even found evidence that the wisest people might live longer. The wiser people were, the higher their levels of well-being, particularly as they got older. Intelligence made no difference to well-being, probably because IQ levels don’t reflect a person’s ability to foster good relationships or make decisions in everyday life.
Grossman is convinced that wisdom is not simply a stable trait that you either possess or don’t. If true, this is good news. It means that at least we’re wise some of the time.
Think back to yesterday. What was the most challenging situation you faced in your day? And how did you work out what to do? Grossman put questions like this to the participants in his recent study.
People wrote about being late for meetings because of the traffic or the arguments they had with families and colleagues. The researchers examined their styles of reasoning in order to assess their wisdom. Did they recognise that their knowledge was limited? Did they see any positives in what seemed on the face of it to be a negative situation? He found that some people appeared to be wise sages in one situation, but not in another.
So why the difference in different situations? People were wiser when they were with their friends. It made them more likely to consider the bigger picture, to think of other perspectives and to recognise the limits of their own knowledge. When people were alone they seemed to get so involved in a situation that they didn’t even think about alternatives.
This means wisdom might be more common than we think. “We are possibly all capable of some aspect of wisdom. It’s just not all the time,” says Grossman.
Some people still displayed more wisdom than others and some were more foolish, but not across every situation. This provides hope. If we can be wise sometimes, maybe we can learn to be wise more often. And the finding that wise reasoning improves with age suggests we can get better at it.
The question is how to do it. For Cornell University psychologist Robert Sternberg, wisdom is all about balance. A wise person is able to complete a mental juggling3) act—to balance the short-term with the long-term, self-interest with the interests of others, while considering all the options—adapting to the current situation, trying to shape it or looking for a new situation.
Following Sternberg’s model, what you need to do is to remember to work out what all the different interests are in a given dilemma, both in the short and long-term and to pay attention to the changing environment and how it might be shaped.
In a kind of school of wisdom, Grossman has experimented with different strategies in the lab. People were taught to take a different perspective by imagining they were taking a bird’s-eye-view of the situation or as if they were watching events as a fly on the wall. The idea is to try to distance yourself from the immediate experience. Even talking about yourself in the third person can help.
So when I have a dilemma, I should be asking, what would Claudia do?
Sometimes we could take it a step further than speaking in the third person and actually ask someone else what they think we should do.
We are often wiser about other people’s lives than about our own. One of my favourite studies on time perception involves the planning fallacy4), the mistake that many of us make when we think we can finish a job far more quickly than we really can. Whether it’s attempting to redecorate your living room in a day or finishing a work project in an evening, we’re often disappointed when we fail.
We tend to think that in the future we’ll have more time because we’ll be better-organised versions of ourselves. Sadly we probably won’t be.
But although we’re bad at judging our own time-frames, we’re much better at working out other people’s. In one study, students were asked to estimate when they were likely to finish an assignment and when other students would finish theirs. They were far better at guessing other people’s timings, because they took into account unpredictable interruptions such as getting flu or coming home to find the washing machine has flooded the kitchen. When it comes to our own lives, our natural optimism seems to stop us factoring in potential problems.
So can you set out to be wise? Yes, but there are an awful lot of factors to remember. You need to take into account that people will have different goals, priorities and responses to your own, across the short- and long-term. If you can juggle all that, you probably are showing wisdom. But the complexity shouldn’t stop us from trying. As Grossman told me, “It’s not that you suddenly become the next Buddha, but you do become a little bit wiser.”
智慧难以定义，但我们一旦见到，便可确定这就是智慧。智慧之人能在危机关头保持镇定。他们能后退一步，纵览全局。他们考虑周全，自我反思，承认自身学识有限，广纳不同观点，并牢记世界总在变化。
智慧与智力不可混为一谈。尽管智力很有用处，但你可能很聪明，却不一定有智慧。智慧之人可以容忍不确定因素，保持乐观，相信再棘手的问题也总归有解决的办法。他们能明辨是非真假。其优点实在太多。
那么，怎样才能更有智慧呢？几十年来，心理学家们一直在研究智慧，并给我们带来了好消息：我们都可以为更有智慧而努力，或许最终能取得成功。
我们可能想采纳他们的建议，不仅是因为增长智慧明显有助于我们做出好的决定。来自加拿大滑铁卢大学的伊戈尔·格罗斯曼认为，审慎的推理活动与许多积极因素息息相关：生活满意度更高、负面情绪更少、人际关系更好、抑郁沉思更少。格罗斯曼及其同事甚至发现了证据，表明最有智慧的人可能寿命更长。人越是富有智慧，幸福指数越高，年长时尤甚。而智力则无关幸福，或许是因为智商水平并不能反映出人们在日常生活中建立良好人际关系或做出决定的能力。
格罗斯曼认为，智慧并不是一种稳定的特性，不是那种你要么拥有、要么没有的东西。如果真如其所言，这不失为一个好消息——这意味着我们起码在某些时候是有智慧的。
回想昨日，你昨天面对的最具挑战性的情形是什么？你又是如何想到应对办法的？格罗斯曼在其近期的研究中询问了参与者类似问题。参与者写出的情形包括因堵车而开会迟到，或是与家人和同事争吵。研究人员仔细观察了参与者的推理方式以评估其智慧。他们是否意识到自己的知识有限？他们能否从看似不利的处境中发现积极的一面？格罗斯曼发现，有些人在一种处境中好似智者，但在另一种处境中又并非如此。
那么为何在不同处境中会有不同的表现呢？和朋友共处时，人们更有智慧，也更有可能从大局考虑，从其他角度看待问题，并意识到自身学识有限。但独处时，人们似乎过于关注某一种情境，甚至想不到变通。
这意味着智慧或许比我们想象的更为常见。格罗斯曼说：“我们或许都具备某方面的智慧，只是时有时无罢了。”
一些人总会比其他人展露更多的智慧，一些人则更蠢，但也并非在所有情况中都是如此。这就带来了希望。如果我们有时能够有智慧，或许就能在更多时候学着变得有智慧。研究发现年纪越大，审慎推理的能力就越强，这表明我们可以变得更有智慧。
问题是如何实现。在康奈尔大学心理学家罗伯特·斯滕伯格看来，智慧就关乎平衡。智慧之人思考时能兼顾好几个不同的方面：平衡短期利益与长期利益，自身利益与他人利益，同时考虑所有选项——或适应现有环境，或试图改变环境，或寻求新的局面。
按照斯滕伯格的模式，你要记得判断某一困境中所有各方不同的利益，包括短期利益和长期利益，同时留意不断变化的环境，以及如何才可能使环境符合自己的要求
根据某一派有关智慧的学说，格罗斯曼在实验室里对不同策略加以试验。他让人们设想自己像鸟儿般俯瞰事态全局 ，或者像墙上的苍蝇一样静观事态，藉此学会从不同视角看问题。这种想法意在使人们远离直接经验。甚至站在第三者的角度对自己说话都能起到帮助作用。因此，在面对困境时，我应该这样问自己：克劳迪娅会怎么做？
除了以第三人称对自己说话，我们有时还可以更进一步，即直接询问他人，看看他们认为我们应该怎么做。我们往往当局者迷，旁观者清。我尤其喜欢的一项关于时间认知的研究涉及规划谬误，这是我们中的许多人都会犯的错误——我们觉得自己能以比实际快得多的速度完成一项工作。不论是尝试在一天内重新装修起居室，还是在一个晚上完成某个工作项目，当我们完不成时，我们常常感到沮丧。我们往往认为，以后我们会变得更有效率，所以会有更多的时间。可惜的是，我们或许并不会。
不过，我们尽管不擅长评估自己的时间表，却更擅长评估他人的时间表。某项研究要求学生分别估算自己及其他学生可能会在何时完成作业。相比于自己，他们更擅长估计他人的时间安排，因为他们会考虑到一些不可预测的干扰因素，比如感冒，或到家时发现洗衣机水淹厨房。而论及我们自己的生活时，我们天生乐观的态度似乎会妨碍我们考虑一些可能出现的问题。
那么你打算成为智慧之人吗？答案是肯定的，但也不要忘记诸多因素。你要考虑到，不论短期和长期，每个人都有不尽相同的目标、重点和应对方式。你如果能一一协调，或许就会展现出智慧。但我们也不应因情况复杂而不去尝试。就像格罗斯曼告诉我的那样：“你当然不会立马成佛，但确实能变得稍微有点智慧。”
文章摘自：《新东方英语》杂志2017年7月号
