Wisdom in action: A call to bridge fields in psychology (and beyond) to solve complex world problems

Twentieth century boosts in creativity and intelligence advanced society in many ways, but humanity still faces major challenges: New and increasingly complex collective problems include climate change, widespread misinformation and political polarization, and the aftermath of the first global pandemic experience. In this article, we argue that these problems cannot be solved by creativity and intelligence alone-they require wisdom. Research on creativity and intelligence has burgeoned over the past century, but research on wisdom and its applications to contemporary problems is slow in coming. Accordingly, the aim of this article was to inspire researchers from across fields of psychology to join the quest for understanding wise problem solving. We review the current state of psychological wisdom research, showing that wisdom involves the orchestrated use of psychological capacities that have been studied mostly independent of each other, and discuss how to measure wisdom, providing an online repository of validated wisdom measures. We then identify three areas in particularly high need of future research: (a) processes of wise problem solving, (b) interventions that foster wisdom both on the trait and on the state levels, and (c) extending our conceptions of individual wisdom toward understanding collective wisdom. We hope that this article inspires researchers to join the quest for a better understanding of how to solve individual and collective problems more wisely. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).