What Are the Necessary Conditions for Wisdom? Examining Intelligence, Creativity, Meaning-Making, and the Big-Five Traits

Abstract

We investigated whether intelligence, creativity, meaning-making, and the Big-Five traits are necessary conditions for wisdom. We used Amazon’s TurkPrime to recruit 298 participants who ranged from 20 to 73 years of age. Participants completed measures of intelligence, creativity, meaning-making, and the Big-Five traits, along with a battery of self-report and performance wisdom measures. We used principal component analyses to reduce the wisdom battery into self-report and performance wisdom components, followed by necessary condition analysis and segmented regressions to examine whether the cognitive and personality variables under consideration here were necessary conditions for each wisdom component. We found that intelligence was necessary for the performance wisdom component whereas the Big-Five traits were necessary for the self-report wisdom component. This study is the first to demonstrate that high levels of wisdom are unlikely without some level of intelligence and adaptive personality traits.