The present study aims at presenting evidence on the psychometric location of a measure of ‘wisdom’-related performance in relation to standard measures of intelligence, personality, and their interface.
A sample of 125 men and women heterogeneous with regard to age, years of education, and professional status responded verbally to 3 wisdom-related dilemmas and completed a psychometric battery of 33 scales (12 tests) involving intelligence, personality, and the personality-intelligence interface.
Findings were consistent with predictions. First, 40% of the variance in wisdom-related performance was predicted by measures of intelligence, personality, and their interface, although none of the individual predictors could be considered equivalent to the authors’ measure of wisdom-related performance. Second, the personality-intelligence-interface measures provided the largest unique share (15%). Third, wisdom-related performance evinced a fair degree of measurement independence (uniqueness).
…Zero-Order Correlations Between Predictors and Wisdom-Related Performance: After applying the Bonferroni correction for multiple testing, wisdom-related performance was statistically-significantly correlated (α = 0.05) with 11 of the possible 33 scales—specifically,
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with 1⁄2 measures of fluid intelligence (APM, r = 0.29) and both crystallized intelligence measures (vocabulary: r = 0.34; practical knowledge: r = 0.24),
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with 3⁄12 measures of personality (personal growth: r = 0.29; openness to experience: r = 0.42; psychological-mindedness: r = 0.28), and
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with 6⁄17 measures of the interface between personality and intelligence (cognitive styles: judicial, r = 0.25; progressive, r = −0.26; conservative, r = −0.36; oligarchic, r = −0.38; and creativity, r = −0.37).
For each of these 11 zero-order correlations, the direction of the correlation was in the direction suggested by our a priori theoretical analysis. Due to overlap in predictive variance, these zero-order correlations are less informative with respect to their absolute size than with regard to their pattern (see below).
