E13 - Does Wisdom Peak in the Midlife? (and Alvin shows off his Zoophilia knowledge?!)

In this episode Alvin and I review a research article that attempts to track how wisdom changes over the life span. This is a little longer than our normal run time, so if you want to break this up into smaller segments, we spend the first 25 minutes catching up and talking about some of our favorite and most hated Christmas songs as we enter the holiday season. In minutes 25-68 we talk about what wisdom is and how researchers attempt to measure wisdom, and briefly discuss the difference between making measurements in the hard sciences vs. the social sciences. We take a break from the research discussion in minutes 68-77, where I quiz Alvin in our Real or Fake segment about whether an article about Zoophilia is real, or is a fake report from the Onion. Then in the final 37 minutes of the episode we discuss whether the research shows that our wisdom peaks in the midlife, what factors might contribute to higher wisdom, our reflections on whether we might have had high levels of wisdom in our young adulthood, and some suggestions about how folks might increase their wisdom later in life. Email: [email protected] Twitter/X: @midlifepod2023 Wisdom Across the Lifespan paper: https://academic.oup.com/psychsocgerontology/article/69/2/209/543518 Development of SAWS paper: https://bmcgeriatr.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12877-020-1456-9 Very Bad Wizards episode on zoophilia: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/episode-272-neigh-means-yay/id557975157?i=1000634845734 Zoophilia article from the Journal of Controversial Ideas: https://journalofcontroversialideas.org/article/3/2/255