Making Things Better and Learning a Lesson:

Experiencing Wisdom Across the Lifespan

Susan Bluck
University of Florida
Judith Glück
University of Vienna, Austria

ABSTRACT Autobiographical memory narratives concerning times in

which individuals said, thought, or did something wise were collected
from adolescents and young and old adults. This ‘‘wisdom of experience’’
procedure is shown to be a valid means of studying experienced wisdom
in everyday lives across the life span. Results show that all age groups use
experienced wisdom to transform negative to positive life situations and
are equally likely to link these experienced wisdom events to larger
temporal life periods. Young and older adults also relate wisdom
experiences to the life story by explaining how they are connected to
later life consequences or to the direction that their life has taken. Unlike
adolescents, older and, especially, young adults report having learned

Susan Bluck, Center for Gerontological Studies and Department of Psychology,

University of Florida. Judith Glück, Department of Psychology, University of Vienna,
Austria. The order of authors was determined by chance.
We would like to thank Paul Baltes, Center for Lifespan Psychology, Max Planck
Institute for Human Development, for financial support of this research. We are
grateful to Tom Cook, Tilmann Habermas, and Bob Levenson for suggestions during
project development. Sebastian Jentschke and Antje Stange made creative contribu-
tions to the coding system. Thanks also to Gabi Faust, Amy Michèle, Katharina
Behrens, Daniel Grühn, and Stefan Körber for data collection, and to Sylvia Fitting
and Annika Tillmans for coding.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to either Susan Bluck,
PO Box 115911, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA, 32611-5911 or Judith
Glück, Department of Psychology, University of Vienna, Liebegasse 5, A-1010,
Vienna, Austria. Electronic mail may be sent to either bluck@ufl.edu or judith.
[email protected]

Journal of Personality 72:3, June 2004.

Blackwell Publishing 2004
544 Bluck & Glück

lessons about themselves or having gained a life philosophy from the

wisdom-related event. Thus, the wisdom-of-experience procedure high-
lights both similarities and differences in the life span manifestation of
experienced wisdom.

There is no disputing the sociocultural importance of the image of

the wise man, for example, Gandhi, or the Buddha. In considering
individual-level personal identity, however, it is important to ascer-
tain whether the ordinary person also has some sense of self as
capable of wise thought and action, and if so, how such a view of self
is embedded in the life story (Habermas & Bluck, 2000; McAdams,
1990; Randall & Kenyon, 2001). Even if this view of self as wise does
not appear as a trait-like semantic self-representation (Campbell
et al., 1996), it may contribute to identity through autobiographical
memory (Bluck & Levine, 1998; Conway & Pleydell-Pearce, 2001).
In the present study, therefore, our goal is to analyze descriptively
individuals’ narrative accounts of remembered wisdom in their own
lives, which we have termed experienced wisdom. This term is used to
connote that individuals are asked to define wisdom subjectively in
their own lives and to recall events that they see as reflecting their
own wisdom. By collecting narratives from adolescents, younger,
and older adults, we also examine whether these accounts offer a
picture of developmental differences or similarities.

Wisdom and Age

‘‘Older and wiser’’ thrives as a cultural conception. Cognitive
theories of aging suggest growth or at least stability in wisdom
(Smith, Dixon, & Baltes, 1989; Staudinger, 1999). If wisdom is a
matter of experience (Assmann, 1994; Clayton & Birren, 1980),
however, it should not automatically come with age (Webster, 2002),
but age may be one of several facilitative contexts for the develop-
ment of wisdom (Staudinger, Lopez, & Baltes, 1997). The data on
explicit wisdom (the quantitative measurement of how wise one is)
suggest that age is not a satisfactory predictor. In a review of four
studies, stability, but not growth across adulthood (ages 20 to 89
years), was found for level of wisdom-related knowledge (Baltes &
Staudinger, 2000). There is steep growth in wisdom-related knowl-
edge, however, from adolescence into adulthood (Pasupathi, Stau-
dinger, & Baltes, 2001).
Wisdom-of-Experience Narratives 545

The lack of quantitative age differences in explicit wisdom,

however, does not imply that age is not an interesting parameter
by which to examine experienced wisdom. We have pursued a life
span developmental approach in our work because we feel that
although the wisdom literature can benefit by continuing to embrace
the search for age differences in quantified level of wisdom (e.g., also
see Webster, 2002 for a self-assessed wisdom scale), it is equally
valuable (a) to examine qualitative aspects of wisdom, and (b) to
identify both similarities and differences in the nature of wisdom and
wisdom-related events across age groups. Though the life span
development approach is often tantamount to searching for age
differences, life span theory suggests that the assessment of con-
tinuity across the life span, or similarities between age groups, is also
important (Baltes, 1987). Thus, we developed a memory narrative
procedure for qualitatively examining similarities and differences in
experienced wisdom in the context of specific, experienced life events
in adolescence and across adulthood. The data thus collected
allowed us to examine age-related differences and similarities in
wisdom-related events, and qualitative forms of experienced wis-
dom. Age-related hypotheses are introduced as relevant in each of
the sections that follow. First, however, we define wisdom and
introduce our new procedure for the study of experienced wisdom.

Defining Wisdom:
Validity of the Wisdom-of-Experience Procedure
Wisdom has been defined in multiple ways and measured by various
criteria (e.g., Hershey & Farrell, 1997; Smith et al., 1989; Sternberg,
1998). The definition of wisdom that we employ is based on this past
literature, which, in convergence, suggests that wisdom is an adap-
tive form of life judgment (Kramer, 2000) that involves not what but
how one thinks. It is a combination of experiential knowledge,
cognition, affect, and action that sometimes occurs in social context
(e.g., Ardelt, 1997; Clayton & Birren, 1980; Labouvie-Vief, 1990;
Sternberg, 1998). Wisdom is defined as a personal resource that is
used to negotiate fundamental life changes and challenges and is
often directed toward the goals of living a good life or striving for the
common good (Baltes & Staudinger 2000; Kekes, 1983). The
literature shows agreement concerning these features of a basic
definition of wisdom.
546 Bluck & Glück

The characteristics of wisdom just described make the wisdom-of-

experience procedure an ideal method for examining wisdom:
cognitive, affective, social, experiential and behavioral components
play interactive roles in autobiographical narratives. The idea that
anyone can be wise (Randall & Kenyon, 2000), given the right
knowledge, or using knowledge in the correct way (McKee &
Barber, 1999), or through the right person–environment fit (Stern-
berg, 1998, 2000), suggests that individuals should (as we ask them to
in this approach) be able to remember and recount at least one life
situation in which they feel they acted wisely. Similarly, we all have
life expertise (e.g., Baltes, Glück, & Kunzmann, 2002; Baltes &
Smith, 1990) in the parameters and experiences of our own lives, and
thus we are all well suited to nominate events from our own lives that
we consider wise. In short, the wisdom-of-experience procedure is
grounded in past conceptions of wisdom; the collection of autobio-
graphical narratives and their qualitative analysis seems a dynamic
new way to operationalize this old construct.
One issue that arises as a result of this operationalization,
however, is that we do not define explicit criteria for wisdom and
then examine whether individuals measure up to those criteria. Due
to our interest in how wisdom is experienced by individuals and the
meaning making that comes from adaptively negotiating life chal-
lenges, we allow individuals’ subjective definition of wisdom (i.e., use
of their implicit theory of wisdom) to be their guide in nominating
and describing a wise event from their own life. Of course, some
readers may wish to argue that what these individuals report to us is
not actually wise by some externally defined criteria (though who is
able to unwaveringly identify universal, external criteria is an open
question in our view). As our interest is in individuals’ meaning
making from their own subjective experience, however, it is only
fitting that they (not we or other ‘‘experts’’) define what is wise and
what is not. This subjectively defined, or implicit, wisdom is
philosophically parsimonious with our study aims. Also, as it
happens, the differences between lay persons’ and experts’ defini-
tions of wisdom (as described below) vary little, making the issue
rather moot.
Since this is a new procedure, however, and some readers will have
lingering concerns about allowing participants to subjectively define
wisdom, we delineate some external criteria from the wisdom
literature by which to validate the use of the autobiographical
Wisdom-of-Experience Narratives 547

approach to study wisdom. First, participants should be able to list

one or more wisdom-related situations from their lives (i.e., such
events are accessible in memory) and have more than a few words to
say about such wisdom-related events (i.e., be able to produce a
narrative). Second, if our procedure indeed assesses wisdom, the
large majority of remembered events should not be trivial, but
should be related to important life situations, that is, to what has
been termed the ‘‘fundamental pragmatics of life’’ (e.g., Baltes &
Staudinger, 2000). Finally, people should recall types of situations
(e.g., making life decisions) that are consistent with other models of
wisdom (e.g., Smith & Baltes, 1990). Beyond validating the use of
this narrative procedure in which wisdom is subjectively defined, the
study aimed to examine the role that experienced wisdom plays in
resolving life situations (‘‘making things better’’), the relation of the
experienced wisdom event to other events in the life story, and the
lessons that individuals learn about themselves and about life from
such experiences.

Making Things Better: The Eliciting Event and Its Outcome

Based on the literature, our hypothesis is that wisdom is specifically
applied as a reaction to problematic events or situations for which
individuals are striving to produce novel solutions (McKee &
Barber, 1999; Sternberg, 1998), or cope successfully under uncer-
tainty (Brugman, 2000). Thus, we expected that if, as part of their
narrative, people mentioned the event or situation that elicited their
wise thoughts and actions, it would usually be a negative or
challenging one. Additionally, viewing experienced wisdom as a
resource that people can draw on to transform such life situations,
we expected that the narratives should usually end in positive
resolutions to negative life situations. This structure parallels
what have been called ‘‘redemption sequences’’ in the life story
(McAdams, Reynolds, Lewis, Patten, & Bowman, 2001). This
negative to positive transformation should be a general structure
of wisdom-related events that holds for people of all ages. That is, we
saw no reason to hypothesize that older adults might use this
resource, but adolescents would not. To the extent that each has
wisdom, we suggested that they would endeavor to use it as a
resource to resolve negative situations positively in their lives.
548 Bluck & Glück

Due to its transforming property, we view wisdom as a special

coping strategy in which the individual brings together whatever
intellectual and affective strengths (Baltes & Staudinger, 2000) are
available to them to resolve a unique problem. Retrospectively, such
remembered wisdom experiences are important to the life story for
two reasons. First, wisdom may be employed in dealing with
significant experiences that act as turning points in a life. Second,
these experiences are ones in which the self is highly efficacious
(Bandura, 1977) in dealing with change or uncertainty, so recalling
them and integrating them in the life story may be self-enhancing
(Wilson & Ross, 2001). This second point, how memories of
experienced wisdom fit into the life story, was our next area of
interest. Wisdom-related events may not be isolated episodes: to
what extent are these experienced wisdom episodes, in which the self
is viewed as highly efficacious, connected to other life events or
themes, and how might that vary by age?

Unifying Lives: Relation of Experienced Wisdom to the Life Story

Past research on wisdom has focused on the use of tacit knowledge
for specific problem solving in various domains (Sternberg, 2000), or
on hypothetical resolution of specific life scenarios (e.g., Smith &
Baltes, 1990; Staudinger & Baltes, 1996). We expected that wisdom-
related events assessed through the wisdom-of-experience procedure
would frequently be more than just isolated episodes; they would be
unified with other experiences in the person’s life (McAdams, 1990)
or be integrated within the whole life frame (Staudinger, 1999).
Habermas & Bluck (2000) have discussed several types of coherence
that bind together events in the life story (see also Baumeister &
Newman, 1994; Baerger & McAdams, 1999). These include temporal
and causal, or explanatory, coherence.
In terms of temporal coherence, we surmised that although
experienced wisdom may sometimes relate to the handling of
short-term, one-time events, it might also be used to achieve changes
in difficult, long-term situations, and therefore not be connected only
to specific autobiographical events but to more generic memories,
that is, to events that recur or that exist over time in an individual’s
life (Bluck & Habermas, 2001; Brewer, 1986; Singer & Moffit,
1992).
Wisdom-of-Experience Narratives 549

In terms of causal or explanatory coherence, we examined the

extent to which this experienced wisdom event was described as
meaningfully related to later events or to the person’s overall self-
direction, or life story. Our expectation was that, unlike more trivial
autobiographical events, this sort of event would probably be well
linked to other parts of the person’s life (Bluck & Habermas, 2001)
through reasoning and narrative (Singer & Bluck, 2001). In short, we
examined the relation of wisdom-related events to ongoing events
and the life story through assessment of temporal and causal
linkages within the narrative.
How might these forms of coherence that link wisdom-related
events to the life story be likely to vary across different life phases?
Both McAdams (1990) and Habermas and Bluck (2000) have
provided detailed accounts of how coherence in the life story
develops across adolescence due to both the development of cogni-
tive tools across late childhood and adolescence, and the social
imperatives of creating a life story as one enters adulthood. Thus, we
expected differences between the adolescent and adult groups in the
extent to which their experienced wisdom narrative was temporally
and causally linked to other life events.

Discovering Aspects of Self and Life: Lessons Learned

From the Event
We also considered how wisdom-related events may be carried
forward in time, and thereby act as directives for current or future
behavior (Pillemer, 1998), and whether this directive use is equally
likely in individuals of different ages. When people face a challenge
and deal with it wisely, they may not only integrate it into the life
story, but may also extract a lesson (Pillemer, in press). We were
interested in the extent to which individuals of different ages use
remembered examples of their own virtue and efficacy to determine
general guidelines about how to live, or to learn new things about
themselves. Overall, we expected most participants of all ages to
report learning a lesson from the wisdom-related event. We were,
however, also interested in a more stringent test, that is, the extent to
which that lesson would be generalized beyond the given event, to
other events, to self-development, or to a life philosophy. Thus,
while we expected similarities across age groups in the likelihood
of reporting that a lesson had been learned, we also expected age
550 Bluck & Glück

differences in the scope of that lesson. That is, we expected that

adolescents might limit the scope of the lesson learned, focusing
largely on the event at hand. Younger and older adults were expected
to move beyond that, taking full benefit of their wisdom experience,
and, as a result, to report learning a lesson that generalized further,
to one’s self or life.
In sum, the study examined the nature of wisdom-related events in
the lives of ordinary people. It focused on validating the wisdom-of-
experience procedure, mapping the eliciting events and outcomes of
wisdom-related events, examining how the events were temporally
and causally linked to the larger life story, and understanding what,
if any, lessons were learned through experiencing one’s self as wise.
In terms of predictions concerning the role of age, we expected that
all age groups would show the transformative (‘‘making things
better’’) pattern of experienced wisdom, but that in regard to
temporal and causal coherence, as well as generalization of life
lessons, the adolescents would differ from the two adult groups, who
would show a greater likelihood of temporally and causally integrat-
ing the event into their life story and be more likely to learn a
generalizable life lesson. Thus, while individuals of all ages may
exhibit some form of experienced wisdom and use it to improve their
lives, younger and older adults are more fully able to build on
wisdom experiences by integrating them into a coherent life story
and by learning lessons that can be applied in facing future
challenges.

METHOD
Participants
The data were collected in Berlin, Germany, as part of a larger project
(Glück & Baltes, 2002). Participants who were 15 to 20, 30 to 40, or 60 to
70 years old were recruited for the study through newspaper advertise-
ments. Additional adolescents were contacted through flyers distributed
at sports facilities. We obtained a sample that was balanced in profes-
sional status and gender; all participants were Caucasian Germans.
Participants were paid DM 80 (about U.S. $40) for participation. Only
procedures and measures relevant to the present study are described here.
We began interviews with 92 participants. Two adolescents, three
younger adults, and one older adult reported that they could not remember
a wisdom-related event. The final sample included 86 participants:
Wisdom-of-Experience Narratives 551

28 adolescents, 27 younger adults, and 31 older adults. Of these, 44 were

male and 42 were female; 42 were classified into the lower and 44 into the
higher professional status categories which reflect the two German
schooling pathways (one that leads to university and to professional or
‘‘white collar’’ careers and the other that leads to trade and technical or
‘‘blue collar’’ jobs). Gender and professional status were balanced within
age groups.

Procedure
The data come from a semi-structured autobiographical interview per-
formed by one of six trained interviewers. At the beginning of the
wisdom-of-experience interview, the researcher informed participants
that we would like to talk to them about their own lives (the measures
collected for the larger project involved standard assessments with
no autobiographical component). The participant was given a sheet
with 15 numbered lines and asked to ‘‘write down as many situations
as possible from your life in which you said, did, or thought something
that was wise in some way.’’ Participants were given two minutes and
wrote key words for each situation. The interviewer emphasized that most
people reported fewer than 15 situations, but that the participant should
list as many situations as possible. The participant then selected the one
situation in which he or she had been wisest. This procedure was used to
allow the person to review his or her life’s events more carefully, as
opposed to being interviewed about the first wisdom-related event that
came to mind.
With consent, the interviewer switched on a tape recorder saying
‘‘Now let’s talk about this situation. What was it about, and what did you
consider and do?’’ The participant spoke for as long as he or she wanted.
If participants said little or nothing, the interviewer probed by asking,
‘‘What were your considerations in this situation?’’ Unless participants
explicitly said what had been wise, the interviewer asked, ‘‘In what way
would you say you were wise?’’ Next, the interviewer asked whether the
participant had learned a lesson from the event, and if yes, what. Some
participants were quite emotional in retelling their wisdom memories. The
interviewer gave the participant the opportunity to talk informally about
the event when the session was over. Note that this was an open-ended
interview. Thus the emergence of material in the narratives that was
coded is not due to forced responses to individual questions but to
characteristic ways in which individuals recall and retell autobiographical
wisdom experiences.
552 Bluck & Glück

Coded Variables
The 86 tape-recorded interviews were transcribed. Fifty additional inter-
views were collected and transcribed. Twenty of these 50 were used, in
addition to theoretical considerations, in developing the categories of the
coding scheme. The remaining 30 protocols were used to establish inter-
rater reliability before coding the study protocols. The practice protocols
were coded by the second author and two senior psychology students.
Disagreements were used to further refine coding categories. All 50
protocols were then used to train two other senior students who served
as final coders. When the 86 study protocols had been coded indepen-
dently by both coders, disagreements were resolved by discussion. We
only report variables for which the coders reached at least 80% agreement
before discussing disagreements. Other variables not presented here
included coded forms of experienced wisdom, age at wisdom-related
event, and self-ratings of experienced wisdom (see Glück & Bluck, 2002).
The next section is structured in four parts. The first concerns the
validity of our wisdom-of-experience interview. The second concerns the
role of experienced wisdom in ‘‘making things better,’’ that is, transform-
ing proximal aspects of a life situation. The third concerns the relation of
the reported event to the participant’s life story. The fourth concerns
learning a lesson about one’s self or life. Table 1 lists examples of all
coded variables, including both Kappa coefficients and exact percent
agreements as measures of inter-rater reliability.

Validity of the ‘‘Wisdom of Experience’’ Procedure

Number of situations listed and length of narrative. We counted the
number of wisdom situations listed on the initial sheet in a 2-minute
period. Events crossed out by the participants were not counted; events
not readable because of bad handwriting were counted. The length of
narrative variable was a simple word count of the number of words in
each participant’s wisdom narrative.
Fundamentality of wisdom-related memories. We wanted to ensure that
our wisdom-of-experience procedure produced memories that were not
trivial or mundane. Theory suggests that wisdom is employed to deal with
central and important life matters. The ‘‘fundamentality’’ variable
assessed whether the elicited memories concerned the fundamental prag-
matics of life (e.g., Baltes & Smith, 1990; Baltes & Staudinger, 2000). We
developed a list of situations that did or did not refer to fundamental life
pragmatics while being sensitive to life stages. Coders evaluated whether
or not each recalled situation was fundamental.
Type of situation reported. The events nominated by the participant for
the interview were coded into three types of situations derived from the
Wisdom-of-Experience Narratives 553

data: life decisions, strategies of life management, and reactions to

negative events, or coded as unclassifiable. Life decisions refers to
decisions that influence one’s future life. Life management is different in
that it refers to a way of dealing with or managing longer-term situations
or difficulties. Reactions to negative events refers to dealing with a negative
event or situation.

Making Things Better: The Eliciting Event and Its Outcome

Both the event or situation that elicited the wise behavior and the out-
come of the situation were coded as ‘‘positive,’’ ‘‘negative,’’ ‘‘both,’’ or
‘‘neither.’’ If the participant did not explicitly mention the valence of the
outcome, ‘‘neither’’ was coded. If no eliciting event or outcome was men-
tioned, ‘‘no event’’ or ‘‘no outcome’’ was coded. The outcome was defined
only as the reported consequences of the participant’s behavior in the
situation. For example, in one narrative a positive outcome was coded
because a woman talked about how she was able to draw on her own
strength in order to help her husband who had been in a serious accident.
The fact that her husband recovered medically would not be coded as an
outcome.

Unifying Lives: Relation of the Event to the Life Story

Time frame of the narrative. We used the time-frame categories devel-
oped by Singer & Moffit (1992) including (a) a single event, (b) a generic
event: an event that encapsulates, or represents, repeated similar events,
or (c) an extended event that spans a long period of time. Coders chose
the one code that best described the situation or event. If two codes
applied, they used the ‘‘higher’’ code. Participants had been asked to
respond, based on a specific biographical event. Some participants,
however, gave temporally extended narratives. If this occurred, inter-
viewers were trained to ask politely that participants focus on a specific
event. Therefore, extended events were rare in the final data.
Causal coherence in the narrative. Note that participants were not
explicitly asked to relate the reported event to later events, or to life
more generally. Thus, if they mentioned such relations, it was because
they perceived the event as wise in the context of other events or their
larger life story. Based on Habermas and Bluck’s (2000) notion of causal
coherence in the life story, participants were coded as (a) drawing no
relations to other events, (b) relating the event to one or more specific
events that happened later, or (c) relating the event to their life or self-
direction. If participants showed types (b) and (c), the more encompassing
level (c) was coded.
554 Bluck & Glück

Discovering Aspects of Self and Life: Lessons Learned

From the Event
Perception that a lesson was learned. Responses concerning learning a
lesson were assigned ‘‘Yes’’ if participants stated they had learned a
lesson, and ‘‘No’’ if they stated they had not. ‘‘Maybe’’ was coded if the
participant showed uncertainty by making statements like ‘‘Yes, maybe,
buty’’ or ‘‘No, except maybey.’’
Type of lesson learned. Most participants said they had learned a lesson
from the event. We were concerned that this might be due to demand
characteristics. Although interviewers were carefully trained to ask the
question in a nonsuggestive way, it was asked at the end of an in-depth
interview focused on an important life situation. Participants may have
felt a need to say they had learned something, and it is probably not
difficult to generate spontaneously a superficial lesson if one feels pressure
to produce one. Thus, to screen out superficial, glib, cliché lessons, we
additionally coded what participants said about the lesson with respect to
whether it indicated generalizing the lesson beyond the situation in which
it was learned. First, we coded whether participants showed no general-
ization, for example, if they repeated what they had done in the situation
and said they would do that again. These cases may imply a demand
characteristic. Second, lessons could involve gaining factual or procedural
knowledge, that is, knowledge about the world or about ways to deal with
life. Third, lessons could involve discovering things that changed the
participant as a person, or gave him or her a new life philosophy. Fourth,
participants might say that there was a lesson, but that they had learned
that lesson before the event. If more than one category applied, coders
chose the code that described the participant’s response best.

RESULTS
The results are presented in the order followed in the Methods section
(also see Table 1). We present results pertaining to the validity of the
wisdom-of-experience procedure, then those that refer to the events
that elicit experienced wisdom and to their outcomes, how the event
sits in temporal and causal relation to the life story, and finally, if a
lesson was learned from the event, and if so, its nature.
Chi-square tests against theoretical distributions are used to test
questions concerning the study variables. Tests against a uniform
distribution do not make sense in examining the validity criteria
because for these indicators a uniform distribution is not theoreti-
cally justified. Therefore, for the validity variables only, the results
Wisdom-of-Experience Narratives 555

are presented descriptively. With the exceptions of causal coherence

and likelihood of learning a lesson (discussed below), there were no
age or gender differences in any of the reported variables.

Validity of the Wisdom-of-Experience Procedure

Number of situations listed and length of wisdom narrative. On
average, participants listed 4.1 wisdom-related situations
(SD 5 2.2), with a minimum of one and a maximum of 13 situations.
There was no effect of age group, F (2, 83) 5 .08, MSE 5 .39, p 5 .93,
on the number of situations listed.
Participants were able to produce narratives of a reasonable
length concerning their experienced wisdom. In terms of number
of words spoken, experienced wisdom narratives had a M 5 983.1
with SD 5 653.5. There was a significant age difference in narrative
length, F (2,75) 5 6.03, MSE 5 2, 278, 322, po01. On average,
adolescents produced 661.4 words (SD 5 367.0), young adults,
1270.6 (SD 5 858.7), and older adults, 1030.8 (SD 5 553.1). Post-
hoc Scheffe tests showed that only the difference between adoles-
cents and young adults was significant (po.01). Older adults were
intermediate and did not differ significantly from the adolescents
(p 5 .09) or the younger adults (p 5 .38).
Fundamentality of wisdom-related memories. The clear majority
(89.5%) of remembered situations referred to ‘‘fundamental’’ life situa-
tions. Thus, the procedure elicits situations equivalent in importance to
those discussed in the theoretical and explicit wisdom literature.
Types of situations. The large majority of the narratives were about
life decisions (44.2%), reactions to negative events (25.6%), or life
management (18.6%). The procedure elicits the types of situations
that have been discussed in the theoretical literature as requiring
wisdom (Smith & Baltes, 1990).

Making Things Better: The Eliciting Event and Its Outcome

Recall that we did not prompt individuals to define the eliciting event
or situation and its outcome and to rate its valence. Instead, the
elicitors and outcomes were integral parts of the open-ended
narratives that individuals chose to tell us. In six narratives, no
eliciting event was mentioned, and in 13 narratives the eliciting event
was not described as either positive or negative. Of the remaining 67
narratives, 58 were about negative eliciting events or situations, eight
 Table 1
Overview of Coded Variables

Variable Codes Examples

Fundamentality of Event/Situation fundamental deciding on a school or career

Kappa 5 .71 giving advice about dealing with serious depression
% agreement 5 92.4 dealing with family conflicts
not fundamental deciding what type of pet to have
planning a vacation
giving advice about rental contracts

Type of Situation Reported life decisions deciding to give up a dancing career

Kappa 5 .80 strategy of life management dealing with depressive episodes
% agreement 5 86 reaction to a negative event dealing with spouse’s car accident

Valence of Eliciting Event positive finding out that someone is in love with one
Kappa 5 .81 negative having a serious accident
% agreement 5 90.7 both positive and negative falling in love with someone when already married
neither positive nor negative participant does not mention valence
Valence of the Outcome of the Event positive constructively dealing with spouse’s death
Kappa 5 .62 negative marriage breaking up
% agreement 5 82.6 both moving in with a new partner and having to leave the
neither previous partner
participant does not mention valence

Time Frame of The Narrative single event deciding between two jobs
Kappa 5 .82 generic event learning to live with one’s depressive episodes
% agreement 5 91.9 extended event participant describes entire life period

Causal Coherence in the Narrative none no mention of relation to any later events or life path
Kappa 5 .64 specific events ‘‘And one year later, he told me that my decision to
% agreement 5 84.9 just listen to him instead of blaming him was the right
thing to do. He hasn’t stolen anything sincey’’
life in general ‘‘That decision has made it easier for me with other
things in life that are also important, to listen more to
myself, to what I want, not what others do, or what
you ought to do y’’

Subjective Perception of a Lesson yes ‘‘With this situation in my mother’s life, I think I have
Kappa 5 .94 learned something for myself about the human
psyche.’’
 Table 1 (cont.)

Variable Codes Examples

% agreement 5 97.7 no ‘‘No, people don’t learn from experience. I’d make
the same mistake again.’’
maybe ‘‘Well, I didn’t really learn something, but then, given
that I was able to express the main point in two
wordsy’’

Type of Lesson Learned no generalization ‘‘Yes, I’ve learned that in this case a rather drastic
Kappa 5 .72 solution that you would not use normally was really
the best one.’’
% agreement 5 82.1 factual or procedural ‘‘I have learned that you have no idea how much of
knowledge the things that happened to you in your early
childhood come back later because you didn’t get
over them.’’
life philosophy ‘‘Stay calm. That’s what I’ve learned and that helps
me a lot now. Small or big things, no problem
anymore. That has helped me a lot.’’
lesson had been learned ‘‘That I learned something from that situation? I
before don’t think so, I think I would have acted the same
way before.’’
Wisdom-of-Experience Narratives 559

Table 2
Cross-Tabulation of Eliciting Event and Outcome

Outcome

Positive Both Negative

Positive 1 0 0 1
Eliciting Event Both 5 2 0 7
Negative 37 3 1 41
43 5 1 49

mentioned both positive and negative aspects, and one had a positive
event as elicitor. This distribution across the three categories is
clearly not equal, w2 (2, N 5 67) 5 86.54, po.01. Thus, of partici-
pants who included an eliciting event in their experienced wisdom
narrative, most remembered negative situations that required wise
responses. Positive situations are rarely viewed as requiring wisdom.
Outcome of the situation was not mentioned in 16 narratives, and
in eight cases the outcome was not described in terms of its valence.
Of the remaining 62 narratives, 55 had a positive outcome; in six
cases the outcome had both positive and negative aspects, and one
narrative had a negative outcome, w2 (1, N 5 62) 5 86.16, po.01.
Table 2 gives a cross-tabulation of eliciting events and outcomes
for those 49 situations in which both outcome and eliciting event
could be coded as positive, negative, or both. As the table shows, the
most typical pattern (37 of 49 cases) is that of a negative eliciting
event and a positive outcome. The table as a whole is markedly
asymmetrical; there is not a single case in which the outcome is more
negative than the eliciting event. In 91.8% of the cases, the outcome
is more positive than the eliciting event or situation. Four cases show
no change between valence of eliciting event and outcome. In sum,
the stories participants told of autobiographical wisdom-related
events most often involved times in which they viewed their
thoughts, feelings, and actions as having changed negative events
or situations into more positive outcomes.

Unifying Lives: Relation of the Event to the Life Story

Time frame of the narrative. The majority, 67.4% of the partici-
pants, recalled a single event. Generic events were reported by
560 Bluck & Glück

30.2%, and the remaining 2.3% (2 participants) talked about

extended events. Thus, most participants reported one particular
event from their lives. This is unsurprising because participants had
been explicitly asked for single events. Given these instructions,
however, it is remarkable that almost one third of the participants
reported generic events, that is, more general situations that com-
prised several similar or repeated events. The narratives about
generic events mostly concerned the participant’s ability to deal
with chronic problems or life situations.
We assessed the probability of obtaining such a high number of
generic events, assuming that generic events should be mentioned
about as rarely as extended events and assuming a rate of 5% for
each of these ‘‘unexpected’’ time frames. The observed distribution
is significantly different from the expected distribution, w2 (2,
N 5 86) 5 115.60, po.01.
Causal coherence in the narrative. Thirty-five participants (40.7%)
did not draw any causal relations between the event they reported
and events that happened later. A slight, but not significant, w2 (1,
N 5 86) 5 2.98, p 5 .08, majority of participants embedded the event
into the larger life context in their narratives although they were not
explicitly asked to do so. Among those who did mention causal
coherence, relations to specific later events were spontaneously
mentioned by 27.9%, and relations to the protagonist’s later life
and self-direction in general were drawn by 31.4%. By age, however,
we found a significant difference between those who did, and did not,
create causal coherence, w2 (4, N 5 86) 5 15.89, po.01; 67.9% of the
adolescents but only 33.3% of the younger adults and 22.6% of the
older adults showed no causal coherence in their memory narratives.
This suggests that adult participants quite often discussed wisdom-
related events that were interconnected with, and influenced, the
later course of their life or view of self.

Discovering Aspects of Self and Life: Lessons Learned

From the Event
Subjective perception of a lesson learned. Of the 86 participants, 67
(77.9%) said that they had learned a lesson, 8 (9.3%) said that they
had not learned a lesson, and 11 (12.8%) were coded as ‘‘maybe.’’
Thus, the majority said they had learned something from the event.
This implies that autobiographical wisdom-related events often
Wisdom-of-Experience Narratives 561

taught people a lesson about life. The problem with this interpreta-
tion, as mentioned above, is with the demand characteristics of the
interview. To address this, we coded whether participants reported
generalizing the lesson in some way by utilizing it beyond this one
event. We reasoned that if a real lesson had been learned, it would be
one that was not simply specific to the exact situation the participant
had just recalled.
Types of lessons learned. Eight participants said they had not
learned anything from the event. Of the remaining 78 (who had

Table 3
Examples of ‘‘Life Lessons’’ Learned

Well, I think I’ve learned to get along better with my parents. And if possible,
not to let problems arise in the first place. I mean, everybody has problems with
their parents, but after all I’m still living with them and there’s always a way to
compromise, I mean you don’t have to let it escalate so that in the end it erupts.
(Male, 19 years)

Yes, I’ve sworn to myself if I have a partner, I never want to have that typical
roles thing. I don’t want to find myself as a housewife. That’s a terrible concept
for me. I don’t want to be forced into that cliche´. (Female, 19 years)

[y] if somebody somehow has authority over you and tells you something, then
I’ve learned not to follow and to believe that person blindly, but to use my own
head and to ask, ‘‘Do I have to do this, or am I a free person who can do what she
wants?’’ That’s quite an important thing for me. (Female, 32 years)

I’ve also learned to live more in the here and now. Not to be wasteful, but to
sometimes allow myself things that make life more pleasant – to be a little freer
and not delay everything. You never know what the future holds. (Male, 30
years)

Yes, certainly, one learns that one is not the only person with rights. With any
considerations or decisions one has to take into account, to what degree are you
now affecting the interests of the other person? (Male, 70 years)

The moral of the story is, you have to believe in yourself, trust in yourself. And
of course, try to do your job as well as possible, but be realistic. You need to have
a healthy trust in yourself, but you must not overestimate yourself and say you
can do something but then fail. [y] you must know your own limitations.
That’s my conclusion. (Male, 69 years)
562 Bluck & Glück

responded yes or maybe to whether they had learned a lesson), 13

(16.7%) did not show any generalization; they only repeated again
what happened at the event. Twenty-nine (37.2%) described how the
event had taught them factual or procedural knowledge. Thirty-two
(41.0%) said that the event had changed them as a person or had
become a life philosophy. Table 3 gives some examples of adoles-
cents,’ young adults,’ and older adults’ lessons learned from the
wisdom-related life event. Three participants (3.8%) said that they
applied a lesson in the described event that they had learned in a
previous life situation.
We divided participants into two groups. The 21 who did not
seem to have learned a lesson (that is, those who said they had not
learned a lesson plus those who showed no generalization) were
contrasted with the 61 who showed some level of generalization.
Statistically, those who learned a lesson were in the majority, w2 (1,
N 5 82) 5 19.51, po.01. Cross-tabulating this grouping with age
yielded a significant pattern, w2 (2, N 5 82) 5 7.69, p 5 .02. Of the
adolescents, 40.7% showed no indications of having learned a
lesson, of the younger adults, only 7.7%, and of the older adults,
27.7%. Thus, younger adults were more likely to have learned a
lesson and adolescents were less likely to have learned a lesson than
would be expected based on the percentage for the whole sample.
The percentage for the older adults corresponds to the expected
frequency.

DISCUSSION
Under the assumption that almost everyone has the possibility of
being wise at some time in his or her life, even if wisdom is not
necessarily part of one’s semantic self-representation, the study
examined the nature of wisdom-related autobiographical memories
in the lives of ordinary people. After validating the wisdom-of-
experience procedure, we examined the events that elicit experienced
wisdom in relation to the outcomes of those events. Next, wisdom
events were assessed for their temporal and causal links to the larger
life story, and the life lessons learned from such events were
examined. Age differences and similarities across three age groups
were noted, with particular emphasis on how adolescents might
differ from younger and older adults.
Wisdom-of-Experience Narratives 563

The Validity of the Wisdom-of-Experience Procedure

Following Bruner (1990), our interview procedure was fairly open-
ended and allowed individuals to implicitly define wisdom in their
own lives, so as to encourage personal meaning making in the
memory narrative, instead of eliciting categorical responses. We
understood, however, that some readers could be concerned that
allowing individuals to subjectively define, recall, and narrate what
they considered wisdom-related events in their lives may result in
narratives that strayed from traditional parameters of what wisdom
entails. We collected validity criteria to dispel those concerns. The
wisdom memories showed convergence in several validating ways to
theory and methods already being used to study (nonautobiogra-
phical) wisdom.
First, participants of all age groups were able to produce one or
more wisdom-related memory within 2 minutes. Second, upon
choosing one of these events, all participants were able to produce
a narrative of reasonable length about their experienced wisdom in
that situation. Note here, however, that adolescents did not have as
much to say as did younger adults. Next, the majority of the
narratives dealt with significant, not trivial, events (e.g., fundamen-
tality, Smith & Baltes, 1990), and finally, they were consistent with
theoretical views of the situations in which wisdom should be
employed, that is, wisdom is used when facing uncertainty (Brug-
man, 2000), or confronting challenging life situations or manag-
ing life (Smith & Baltes, 1990). Though we look forward to further
refinement of this new method, we feel satisfied with the wisdom-
of-experience procedure, in which individuals subjectively define
wisdom is a valid means of eliciting experienced wisdom narratives.
But were these people truly wise? The above validity criteria
suggest that in various ways the remembered situations are of the
type that would be expected, based on theoretical views of wisdom.
One thing is missing, however. We do not provide validation that
what the person did in the situation was truly wise. We only know
that this individual recalls this as an event in which he or she acted
wisely, given his or her own subjective definition of wisdom. Is this
‘‘real wisdom’’ then? As mentioned in the introduction, laypeople
and experts have quite similar conceptions of what it means to be
wise, so having our participants self-nominate events did not trouble
us. In addition, note that we refer to the wisdom found in these
564 Bluck & Glück

autobiographical narratives as ‘‘experienced wisdom.’’ That term is

used specifically to recognize that individuals recall the event as a
time when they experienced being wise. External observers might
suggest that this individual did not in fact act wisely. People from
different cultures, historical periods, or academic disciplines might,
likewise, not judge the individual as wise. However, we are attempt-
ing to understand how individuals make meaning of life’s events,
how they string them together into a life story, and how and what
lessons they learn. To do this, we must allow individuals to define the
contents of their own experience, for it is their own definitions,
labels, and memories that are employed in autobiographical mean-
ing making.

Making Things Better:

The Eliciting Event and Its Outcome
Personal memories provide an interesting approach to studying
personality because, while trait representations focus on routinized
behavioral tendencies (Thorne, 2000), memories allow us to see the
way that individuals regard and deal with disruptive, emotional
events and situations. The types of life situations in which people
reported experiencing wisdom, regardless of their age, were com-
monly ones in which they coped with challenging events and were
able to transform them and to make things better through their own
personal resources. Some narratives did not refer to eliciting events
or to outcomes at all or mentioned them without reference to
valence. In the majority of narratives, however, the outcome was
more positive than the eliciting event or situation. For example, one
person talked about how her son had been caught stealing. Instead
of being angry and punitive, she saw this as a time to reach out to
him and be open to listening to him and his difficulties. Their
relationship moved to a new level, and the son gave up his illicit
activities. Another example concerned a bad relationship between a
mother and teen-aged daughter. The teen-ager was very angry and
threatening to leave home. The participant told how she acted as a
mediator between the girl and her mother, talking to them both
regularly on the phone over this difficult period. The mother-
daughter relationship improved, and the daughter did not leave
home to live on the street.
Wisdom-of-Experience Narratives 565

This pattern of ‘‘making things better’’ parallels the more general

notion of redemption sequences in the life story (McAdams, Rey-
nolds, Lewis, Patten, & Bowman, 2001) or finding ‘‘happy endings’’
to negative events (King, Scollon, Ramsey, & Williams, 2000). The
experienced wisdom events studied here are important not only due
to the resultant transformations in people’s lives (or those around
them), but also because, through memory, they can be used by the
individual to maintain a positive self view (Wilson & Ross, 2000) and
as directives to encourage and instruct later actions (Pillemer, 2001).
The extent to which individuals recall such events, and do so in a
manner that is self-serving or adaptive, may be related to personality
factors such as optimism and neuroticism as well as one’s overall
tendency to think about the past. The relation of personality to the
adaptive use of autobiographical memory is an avenue for further
research.

Unifying Lives: Relation of Experienced Wisdom

to the Life Story
McAdams (1990) argues that a unified or integrated life story
provides individuals with an identity. We examined both temporal
and causal coherence between the experienced wisdom episode and
one’s larger view of life. As reported in another paper (Glück, Bluck,
Baron, McAdams, 2003), participants reported events from all
periods of the life span. In terms of temporal coherence, about
30% of participants talked about generic (Brewer, 1986; Neisser,
1986), rather than single events, even though our instructions asked
particularly for a specific event. That is, they talked about long-term
or repeated situations (e.g., dealing with depressive episodes across
several years) that were not isolated experiences but were extended
across a temporal period in the life story. Our results are consonant
with Singer & Moffit (1992) who found that when individuals are
asked to recall personal memories relevant to their own self-under-
standing, they tend to tell more generic memories. In the current
data, an adolescent boy, for example, described how he discovered
ways of dealing with his father’s dominance by making compro-
mises. A young woman dealt with her cancer by learning a lot about
it and asserting herself so that doctors would take her seriously. An
older man talked about several incidents in which he was able to
intervene in violent conflicts between young people. These generic
566 Bluck & Glück

memories, of not just single episodes, but of the development of

wisdom over a longer situation, or a repeated situation, suggest that
individuals are not only wise in a limited way in response to a specific
event. Some people, instead, recall having gained and applied their
wisdom over time. Such reports give us further insight into the
development of wisdom through experience.
We hypothesized that adolescents might more often use the
limited, specific time frame. In fact, there were no age differences
in the likelihood with which the age groups described specific versus
generic episodes. Though temporal coherence in narratives is not
present in early childhood, a review of the child developmental
literature (Habermas & Bluck, 2000) suggests that temporal coher-
ence may develop earlier, in late childhood and early adolescence,
than the more sophisticated forms (e.g., causal and thematic coher-
ence). Our sample of 15–20 year olds may be using temporal frames
in thinking about life episodes in a manner already consistent with
adults.
Sixty percent of participants exhibited causal or explanatory
coherence between the event and something that happened later
(specific later events or life in general). For example, one man spoke
of having taken the opportunity to work in the hotel business as
a young man even though the work was very hard and demanded
most of his time. He suggests that his decision and dedication at
that time led to possibilities opening up for him that led to a very
satisfying career later on. Another example is of a person who
was a teacher and relied largely on punitive methods for controlling
the children in his classroom. But at one point he decided to take
the risk of encouraging the children’s creativity instead of trying to
control them. He found that this really worked, and it developed
into a teaching philosophy and a way of approaching children
that he has continued to work on for several decades and found
highly satisfying. A final example involves a woman who finally
left a bad marriage, but through her struggles with her husband,
learned to be a very tolerant and diplomatic person. She describes
how those qualities really helped her when she found a new mate
and began a new marriage. Such narratives show the type of
autobiographical reasoning (Habermas & Bluck, 2000) and nar-
rative processing (Singer & Bluck, 2001) that is indicative of
reflective meaning making about the self and the world (Staudinger,
2001).
Wisdom-of-Experience Narratives 567

Thus, wisdom-related events were events that had an effect on

later life; they were incorporated into a larger story through their
consequential linkages with later events, or with the direction that
one’s life later took. In general (i.e., not specific to wisdom
narratives), the extent of coherence in adults’ narrative accounts
of their lives is related to psychological well-being (Baerger &
McAdams, 1999). We might expect that linking memories of self-
efficacy, such as wisdom experiences, within the life story would have
even greater benefits.
As expected, we found differences in the extent of causal coher-
ence displayed by adolescents and adults. Adolescents were about
half as likely to show causal coherence. We suggest that this lack of
coherence may be indicative of a life story that is still being initially
crafted in adolescence (Habermas & Bluck, 2000; McAdams, 1990)
so ‘‘the life lived’’ is not so often used as a frame of reference as in
adulthood (Erikson, 1968; Neugarten, 1996). An alternative expla-
nation is that events in the lives of adolescents may simply have been
too recent to have had effects on later events.

Discovering Aspects of Self and Life: Lessons Learned

From the Event
In the study of trauma and negative life events, there is an intriguing
literature that addresses how struggling with negative events, or
challenges, can result in positive outcomes and lessons learned (e.g.,
Taylor, 1983; Lehman et al., 1993). For example, King et al., have
shown that individuals facing life crises (in this case, a child’s
diagnosis with Down’s Syndrome) who describe struggling to
make sense of the event show higher levels of ego development
and that those who provide a coherent narrative with a ‘‘happy
ending’’ have greater subjective well-being.
We were interested in whether the wisdom-related events, which
often involved struggling with choices or circumstances and often
had positive outcomes, would result in growth in terms of lessons
learned. The events reported in the current study did not necessarily
involve trauma, though some were negative events and situations.
We expected that because these were situations that were not only
difficult, but ones in which people felt that they met the difficulties
involved with the wisdom necessary to transform them, these might
568 Bluck & Glück

be situations in which people were particularly likely to learn

something about themselves or about life.
Beyond linking the events temporally or causally within the life
story (or possibly because of that), the large majority of participants
felt that they learned a lesson from them. Beyond that, about 80%
also showed some indications of generalization of the lesson to other
events, knowledge of self, or philosophy of life. This included (in
equal likelihood) learning factual or procedural knowledge about
life, or learning things about one’s self or one’s life philosophy
(examples are presented in Table 3). Thus these wisdom experiences
may be common candidates for self-defining memories (Singer &
Salovey, 1993; Singer, 1995) that influence individuals’ future life
goals and choices. Note that the likelihood of learning a general-
izable lesson from such events was not equal across age groups. As
hypothesized, adolescents infrequently reported having learned a life
lesson, even when reporting a situation in which they felt they had
been wise. This finding, along with the lack of causal coherence in
adolescent narratives, supports the view that wisdom is still being
developed in this life phase (Pasupathi, Staudinger, & Baltes, 2001).
Adolescents may not have developed enough of a view of self and life
to generalize what they are learning. Young adults, however, seem to
be very oriented toward making sense of life events, in terms of the
lessons to be learned from experience, in order to generalize to other
situations. These adult participants were extremely likely to report
learning from the event. Older adults reported having learned a
lesson as often as would be expected in this sample. The extent to
which individuals learn lessons about self and life from experienced
wisdom may depend on life phase, the nature of the event, and other
individual-level variables (e.g., personality).

CONCLUSION
Recalling and retelling autobiographical experiences of having felt
wise allows individuals to remember and share a sense of self as
having been efficacious in facing difficulty or uncertainty. Such
narratives of experienced wisdom are sometimes time-delimited
episodes, but are also quite frequently linked across larger temporal
periods, becoming part of one’s identity through being coherently
integrated into the life story. Although participants of all ages
described having experienced wisdom, it seems that wisdom itself
Wisdom-of-Experience Narratives 569

manifests differently in different life phases, and full use of one’s

wisdom appears to be a developmental achievement. Adolescents
may not yet have developed the ability to take full advantage of their
life experiences by embedding them in a life story and learning
lessons from them. Adults, however, often link these episodes to the
larger life story by explaining how the wisdom experience was related
to later life consequences or to the direction that their life took. In
many cases, adults also report having learned lessons about them-
selves or having gained a life philosophy from such experiences.
Through such a mechanism, especially if repeated over various
events, one might surmise that individuals continue to develop the
wisdom of experience over their life span.

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