The Virtue of Wisdom: Curiosity, Judgment, and Creativity

The Virtue of Wisdom: The Pleasure of Understanding

Piling up facts is not the same as enjoying truly understanding something. That second disposition is what Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman grouped under wisdom in their 2004 classification of positive psychology: the strengths tied to acquiring and using knowledge.

People who lead with this virtue tend to enjoy the process of learning as much as the result, and they apply what they know with their own judgment, not just by rote.

The Five Strengths That Make It Up

• Creativity: producing ideas or solutions that are original and, at the same time, useful, for yourself or for others. It includes artistic creation but isn’t limited to it.
• Curiosity: a genuine desire to experience and to know, and an active readiness to seek out new information when faced with something challenging or unfamiliar.
• Judgment (open-mindedness): the willingness to actively look for evidence against your own beliefs or plans and, if it turns up, to weigh it fairly and be able to change your mind.
• Love of learning: a sustained enjoyment of acquiring new skills and knowledge, whether self-taught or formal, beyond what any specific obligation requires.
• Perspective: a higher level of judgment that makes it possible to give others wise counsel and to take on the big questions about the meaning and course of life.

How It Shows Up in Practice

• They try to understand rather than memorize: they’d rather grasp the why of things than repeat information without questioning it.
• They enjoy intellectual novelty, whether it’s a book, a conversation, or a new problem to solve.
• They weigh information before deciding, instead of going with their first impression.
• They’re the person others ask for advice on hard decisions, not so much for having quick answers as for helping people see them in perspective.

An example: a friend can’t decide whether to take a job in another city or stay put. Someone strong in perspective doesn’t tell her what to do; they ask what would matter more five years from now, which part of the decision can be undone, and what she doesn’t know yet. They don’t offer an answer, but a better way of looking at the problem.

What Psychology Means by Wisdom

Wisdom is the virtue that has been most often measured outside Peterson and Seligman’s framework, and that research helps clarify the strength of perspective.

• The Berlin paradigm. Paul Baltes and Ursula Staudinger (2000) defined wisdom as expert knowledge about the fundamental matters of life. To study it, they asked people to think aloud about hypothetical life dilemmas, open-ended and with no single right answer, and rated the responses on five criteria: rich factual knowledge, procedural knowledge (how problems are handled), lifespan contextualism (placing the problem in its life stage and circumstances), value relativism (recognizing that other people have different, legitimate priorities), and recognition and management of uncertainty.
• Wise reasoning and age. Igor Grossmann and his team (2010) gave a representative community sample stories about conflicts between groups and between individuals, and asked them to predict how they would be resolved. Older people drew more than young and middle-aged adults on forms of reasoning that consider multiple perspectives, allow for compromise, and recognize the limits of one’s own knowledge, despite the decline in fluid intelligence with age.

Data from the VIA-IS questionnaire add two nuances. In Park, Peterson and Seligman’s (2004) study of 5,299 adults, curiosity was among the strengths most closely tied to life satisfaction, while creativity, judgment, and love of learning showed weak relationships with it. And in Robert McGrath’s (2015) analysis of more than a million cases, the intellectual strengths formed a factor of their own, which he called Inquisitiveness, weighted by creativity and curiosity but also by zest and bravery: wisdom, in the data, has something of daring about it.

Curiosity as a Talent, Not Just a Trait

In Now, Discover Your Strengths (2001), a popular business book, Marcus Buckingham and Donald Clifton, creators of Gallup’s StrengthsFinder method, offer a broad definition of talent: any recurring pattern of thought, feeling, or behavior that can be productively applied. Being instinctively curious fits that definition squarely, just like being competitive, persistent, or charming.

The distinction changes how curiosity is treated: not as a trait you either have or don’t, but as a resource you can recognize, name, and use deliberately at work or in your studies, seeking out projects, roles, or conversations that call for it instead of leaving it as a background hobby.

Four Habits the Literature Links to This Virtue

1. Exposure to ideas different from your own, even if they’re uncomfortable at first. Reading a well-built argument against one of your positions usually teaches more than another article that simply confirms it.
2. Time spent learning something with no immediate use, purely out of interest in understanding it.
3. The question “What if I’m wrong about this?”, which keeps critical thinking active and is, in essence, open-mindedness in action.
4. Separating the moment of generating from the moment of judging: creativity is usually associated with producing many ideas before evaluating them, and perspective with looking at a problem from the position of each person involved, as in Grossmann’s studies.

If you’re curious whether wisdom is your dominant virtue, our Character Strengths Test compares it with the other five, among them the virtue of courage, with which it shares more than it might seem.

Sources

• Peterson, C. and Seligman, M. E. P. (2004). Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification. Oxford University Press.
• Baltes, P. B. and Staudinger, U. M. (2000). Wisdom: A metaheuristic (pragmatic) to orchestrate mind and virtue toward excellence. American Psychologist, 55(1), 122-136. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.55.1.122
• Grossmann, I., Na, J., Varnum, M. E., Park, D. C., Kitayama, S. and Nisbett, R. E. (2010). Reasoning about social conflicts improves into old age. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107(16), 7246-7250. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1001715107
• Park, N., Peterson, C. and Seligman, M. E. P. (2004). Strengths of character and well-being. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 23(5), 603-619. https://doi.org/10.1521/jscp.23.5.603.50748
• McGrath, R. E. (2015). Integrating psychological and cultural perspectives on virtue: The hierarchical structure of character strengths. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 10(5), 407-424. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2014.994222
• Buckingham, M. and Clifton, D. O. (2001). Now, Discover Your Strengths. Free Press.