Howard Nusbaum, LAB’72, Stella M. Rowley Professor of Psychology, brings together psychology and neurobiology to study topics including language use, learning, attention, and working memory. He founded the University of Chicago Center for Practical Wisdom in 2016; since then, the center has supported wisdom research around the world with grants and has connected wisdom researchers in fields such as economics, psychology, and neuroscience so that they could share their work. The Magazine spoke with Nusbaum about his research, what constitutes wisdom, and how one can learn to be wise.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

How do you define wisdom?

The usual definition we use is the ability to make morally grounded decisions by reflecting on the perspective of others with respect to short-term goals and long-term goals. For me, wisdom is the highest level of something that people can’t be born with. Understanding the process of how we learn to do wise reasoning—what are the complex elements in being human that you need to bring together for that purpose—is a great scientific problem.

What originally drew you to wisdom as a research focus?

Before I went to college, I had been interested in learning, perception, and cognition. I learned how to do hypnosis in eighth grade and did a memory study. I built a Skinner box [a chamber used to study animal behavior] in high school and did a training study with rats to see if they could learn about time.

When I went to college, I studied cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence. But I was always interested in the notion of self-actualization and the idea that the pinnacle of learning for humans is to go beyond themselves. It relates to a very classic problem in psychology: What is fixed about us as humans?

What does wisdom research look like today?

When we started, one of the points of discussion was, is wisdom something that you can teach? Another question was, are there differences between cultures’ understanding of wisdom?

[William Benton Professor] Boaz Keysar’s lab in psychology at UChicago has shown that when people process information in a second language, they do so more rationally. Igor Grossmann in Canada did some research showing that if you simply think about a problem from a third-person perspective, you can be more rational about it rather than emotional about it. Making wise decisions might result from stepping back from a problem.

Some research that we did here with John List [the Kenneth C. Griffin Distinguished Service Professor in Economics and the College] and Ali Hortaçsu [the William B. Ogden Distinguished Service Professor in Economics and the College] looked at how experience changes people’s biases in decision-making. The science of economic decision-making told us that some experiences change the way we make decisions, but it didn’t tell us why. Is it because those experiences make us less emotional? Is it because they give us rewards? Or did people become more rational? We did a neuroimaging study—a technique we didn’t historically have in wisdom research—and that allowed us to test among those three models.

Is wisdom the same as rational thought or the absence of emotion?

Emotion is very important to wisdom, but there’s a tension with respect to what we think about as rational and what we think about as emotional. For example, some years ago a study I did looked at people making decisions about two fantasy football teams playing each other. They were named after real football teams. But people were given actual odds of winning against other teams. It turns out that even though participants had the statistics, when the name of their favorite team was in the matchup, participants were biased in favor of their preferred team. They just couldn’t stop themselves. Emotional intelligence is about your understanding of emotions and how you can manage your emotions, manage other people’s emotions, and make use of them in decision-making.

What have you learned about how wisdom develops over a lifetime? How can we cultivate wisdom?

One hypothesis is that life challenges lead to wisdom. But it turns out that not everybody will become wiser after facing such challenges. This suggests that there may be certain qualities that some individuals have that facilitate the use of an experience and develop more positively from it.

Experiences where you come to understand the limits of your knowledge as well as the strength of what you do know are opportunities to learn epistemic humility—which can help you understand what other people’s experiences are like and how they feel about those experiences, especially when you might feel differently. Thoughtfulness is important for developing wisdom.

It is also important to distinguish between wise people and wise decisions. We tend to attribute wisdom to people, as opposed to attributing wisdom to specific decisions. Even the wisest person can do unwise things. As a result, it may be better to think about what aspects of a situation or what personal capacities can lead to wiser decisions in a particular circumstance.

Much of your earlier work focused on how we perceive speech and acquire language. What connections do you see between that work and the study of wisdom?

My students have named the lab APEX, which stands for Attention, Perception, and EXperience Lab. We study learning the unlearnable. There are several things that psychologists and scientists say you shouldn’t be able to learn, like absolute pitch. However, our research shows that as an adult, you have a lot of mutability and ability to learn. Work on wisdom is also about learning, understanding the way that experience shapes you as a decision-maker.

What advice do you have for people who want to be wiser?

There’s an after-school program in Chicago called Becoming a Man. One of the first things they teach is “take a beat before you do anything.” If something occurs that is emotionally arousing, take a deep breath and count to 10 before you do anything. Sometimes you’ll get asked a question, and you just want to respond immediately. But whenever you’re challenged, rather than responding with the first thought, have a second thought, a third thought.

Another aspect is, instead of thinking harder, think better. Do what we call counterfactual reasoning: If I do this, or if I don’t do this, what’s going to happen? Those are probably the two easiest things to do to become wiser.