Please consider a thought experiment involving the solution of 10 quiz questions:
Quiz Questions
Here are some of the serious problems facing the world today. How can they be solved?
- 1.Global climate change.
- 2.Increasing income disparities between the rich and the poor.
- 3.Serious air pollution in some locales.
- 4.Proliferation of nuclear weapons.
- 5.Increasing antibiotic resistance.
- 6.Contamination of food by pesticides and other impurities.
- 7.A garbage vortex in the Pacific Ocean twice the size of Texas and growing.
- 8.Rich countries’ unwillingness to help immigrants from poor countries.
- 9.Increasing tendencies of national leaders to move toward despotism.
- 10.Apparent inability of mutually hostile parties (such as Israelis and Palestinians, Democrats and Republicans, or whomever) to resolve their differences.
Now suppose, in some imaginary world, that one had access to all relevant facts and figures regarding any one of these problems. In other words, all knowledge to be had was made available. Further, assume that one had a superpowerful computer, analytically smarter than any living person, that was available and was able deeply and broadly to analyze all this information. Would any of these problems be solved?
The answer, of course, is no. Now let’s look at why these problems cannot be solved solely by IQ, knowledge, or any combination of them. Let’s just consider three of the problems, as the issues in all of the rest are formally comparable to the issues in these three.
- 1.Global climate change. Climate change is bad, of course, leading to melting ice caps, rising oceans, and severe weather that has already made some locales uninhabitable, with more to come. Presumably, few people think climate change is good. People in developed countries often think that they, along with people in developing countries, have a responsibility to cut down on carbon emissions. But people in some developing countries believe that developed countries are largely responsible for these problems and that those in the developed countries now want to stop them, in the developing countries, from having the same opportunities the developed countries once had. This, some in the developing countries believe, is not fair. And then, again, some in developed countries are unwilling even today to carry any reasonable share of the burden.
- 2.Increasing income disparities between the rich and the poor. High levels of income disparity are bad, of course, fostering resentment, social conflict, and, potentially, rebellion. But many people who are well off believe they have earned their money and that those who have not done well economically have not done well because they are untalented, or have not tried hard enough, or have sold themselves out to substance abuse and other harmful things. These well-off people tend to be the ones in power and may prefer to help those, like themselves, who they believe have “helped themselves.” People who are not well off often are born into and raised in conditions (e.g., poverty, gang-related activity, unstable family situation) that create great hardships for them. Some of them actually may have succeeded in the past and then lost their jobs due to automation, various forms of discrimination, or failure of the business in which they work. Various solutions to the problem of income disparity have been proposed (e.g., Piketty, 2017; Stiglitz, 2013), but despite these proposals, the problem seems on track to getting worse before it gets better, if indeed it does get better.
- 3.Apparent inability of mutually hostile parties (such as Israelis and Palestinians, Democrats and Republicans, or whomever) to resolve their differences. Virtually no one believes that these conflicts—between ethnic groups, ideological groups, national groups, or other groups—can be resolved simply. For example, both Israelis and Palestinians claim certain land is theirs. How does one decide what is anyone’s? How far back do claims go, and what criteria are to be used for deciding ownership of land? What religious grounds count as bases for deciding on some concept of God-granted ownership?
The bottom line is that problems of these kinds simply cannot be resolved by facts, figures, and analysis. All of them involve competing interests, with the needs and desires of the relevant parties having to be resolved by balancing the interests of certain individuals and groups against those of other individuals and groups. As Fisher and Ury (2011) have pointed out, not all positions are necessarily equally justified. It is for that reason that one needs to focus on competing interests rather than positions. Some people always will seek to justify unjustifiable positions when it serves their self-interest. By focusing on interests rather than positions, one moves beyond each party’s conception of what is “true” or “right.” When such balance is involved, the issues can be resolved only through the application of wisdom, where wisdom is defined as using one’s abilities and knowledge toward a common good, by balancing one’s own, others’, and higher interests over the long and short terms through the infusion of positive ethical values (see Sternberg, 2018b, 2019).
Not even one of these serious, world-consequential problems would be solved, even if all facts and figures were available and all the data were comprehensively analyzed. One reason is that each problem involves competing interests. As a result, the problems are ill-structured—they have no clear path to solution. There is no one solution that will satisfy the interests and perceived needs of all parties involved. The problems are nothing like the multiple-choice or short-answer problems that have proliferated in schools, where the correct answer is obtained by a well-structured path to solution and is unique among all of the possible answers to the problems.
If we look at the kinds of problems that appear in school and on standardized tests, they look little like the consequential real-life problems we have to solve that invoke wisdom (Sternberg, 2001) or even social aspects of intelligence (Sternberg & Smith, 1985). What are the differences?
- 1.Definition of problem. School-based problems almost always predefine the problem for the student. All the student has to do is to solve the problems. Wisdom-based problems have no clear definition, and typically, different parties define them in different ways.
- 2.Structure. School-based problems tend to be well-structured. There is a clear path to solution; wisdom-related problems are always ill-structured; there is no clear path to solution.
- 3.Answer format. School-based problems are often presented in multiple-choice or short-answer format. Wisdom-based problems never have clearly defined single correct answers.
- 4.Practicality. School-based problems are often quite far removed from the concerns of everyday life. Wisdom-based problems, in contrast, pertain to the real problems we face in life that involve competing interests.
- 5.Consequentiality. School-based problems have solutions that matter little. Who cares, for example, how many apples Mary buys when she goes to the supermarket? Wisdom-based problems tend to be ones where the consequences matter greatly.
- 6.Ethical considerations. School-based problems rarely involve ethical decision making. Wisdom-based problems typically do.
- 7.Human values. School-based problems rarely touch upon matters of human values such as being honest, sincere, or helpful. Wisdom-based problems always do.
- 8.Competing interests. School-based problems rarely involve competing interests. Wisdom-based problems always do.
These are not necessarily the only differences between school-based and wisdom-based problems. And there may be school-based problems, from time to time, that are wisdom-based. But I believe that presentation of such problems in schools is the relatively rare exception. (Emphasis on creativity is similarly negligible—Sternberg, 2010; Sternberg, Grigorenko, & Singer, 2004.) The analysis below will suggest that the incidence of such problems has decreased greatly over time.
“Where have all the flowers gone?” is a well-know...