Place of publication: United States, Ann Arbor; ISBN=978-1-369-37130-7
M.A.
Applied Psychology and Human Development
University of Toronto (Canada)
2016
Many wisdom studies explore the essential characteristics required to be considered wise. These studies fail to explain the personal and cultural characteristics that influence motivation to become wise. In this study, we looked at 160 participants' causal beliefs about wisdom in two different cultures, Iran and Canada, and created a coding scheme to categorize what ordinary people believe causes wisdom. A mixed method analysis pointed out that attribution styles affect implicit mindset towards developing wisdom in both cultures: people who have controllable attributions (associated with incremental theory) are more likely be optimistic about developing wisdom, while individuals with uncontrollable causal attributions (associated with entity theory) are more likely to be pessimistic about developing wisdom. Our results support previous findings on the importance of mindset and causal beliefs in achievements and add to the wisdom literature by empirically investigating the role of motivational disposition on wisdom scores.