University of Michigan researchers have reported that there’s truth in several sayings:
Older but wiser
and
Listen to your elders!
The researchers claim that results indicate that elders have advantages in analyzing social problems. Older people are more likely than young or middle-aged people to recognize that values differ, to accept uncertainties and other people’s points of view, and to acknowledge that things change over time. The findings were part of an article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Participants in the study gave opinions on the outcome of a fictitious conflict. They were rated on things like searching for compromise, flexibility, perspective, and seeking conflict resolution. While the researchers expected that wisdom would increase with age, they were surprised at how different the results were in handling disputes in society, based on age.
“People have held the opinion forever that older people are wiser,” said senior study author Richard E. Nisbett in a US News and Word Report article. Nisbett is a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. “Now we have some evidence it’s true. Independent of social class, older people are wiser, by our definition, for group conflicts and individual conflicts. And this was true independent of their level of intelligence.”
The abstract for the article says that results suggest that older individuals might play key social roles involving legal decisions, counseling, and intergroup negotiations.