Wisdom is about as elusive as psychological constructs get. It is perhaps for this reason that it is one of the least studied such constructs. Indeed, few people even view wisdom as defining a field of inquiry, in the way that, say, perception, learning, thinking, intelligence, or creativity would be viewed as defining fields of inquiry. But within the past few years, a field that came close to being a nonentity has burgeoned, and the present book is an attempt to document the progress that has been made – mostly during the 1980s – toward understanding wisdom and to point the way for future theory and research.

Fields of knowledge go through a series of overlapping periods, which might roughly be characterized in terms of four stages:

1. an initial stage in which people become interested in a phenomenon and start thinking about how to study it;

2. an early developmental stage in which theory and research really get going and people try to set paradigms and convince others of the worth of their paradigms;

3. a mature stage in which one or more of a small number of paradigms become prominent while others wither on the vine, and a bevy of researchers further develop those paradigms that have passed the early stages;

4. and a postmature stage in which researchers become frustrated with inconsistencies in experimental results and with the inability of the going paradigm or paradigms to answer the questions they really want to answer.