I'm a liberal pagan living in West, Texas. Yes. That West, Texas.

Tuesday, April 06, 2010

AGE REALLY MAY BRING WISDOM

There is an article in the DAM NEWS this morning, that says research finds older people deal better with conflict, uncertainty and change. Yes, folks us old farts are wise.
Researchers led by Richard Nisbett of the University of Michigan found that older people were more likely than younger or middle-aged ones to recognize that values differ, to acknowledge uncertainties, to accept that things change over time and to acknowledge others' points of view.
"Age effects on wisdom hold at every level of social class, education, and IQ," they report in today's edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
In one part of the study they recruited 247 people in Michigan and divided them into groups ages 25-40, 41-59 and 60 or over.
Participants were given fictitious reports about conflict between groups in a foreign country and asked what they thought the outcome would be. Ratings were based on factors such as searching for compromise, flexibility, taking others' perspective and searching for conflict resolution.
While the researchers expected wisdom to increase with age, they were surprised at how strong the results were for disputes in society, Nisbett said. "There is a very large advantage for older people over younger people for those."
If this is true...why are the old people in the Senate, House, Military sending the young off to fight wars? Just askin'...

4 comments:

Charlene said...

Why the old people in Congress do that is because they are not touched by what they legislate.

Cut back on some social program, no problem to them, they are so rich from graft it's not an issue.

If we lived our lives backward, there would be more wisdom in Congress.

lucy said...

Majority of people who run this country was born with a silver spoon in their mouth. They don't have to put their olds in a run down home or send their kids to schools where they are not learning and all of the special classes like music and art have been taken away. They don't have to worry that their kids might not come home alive. Most of their children that go into the Army etc, enter into special safe areas and never see front line fighting. They set up social programs, which is a good thing, but they don't care that it is not regulated and it is totally abused by people who are capable of working. Majority of people in my area are on some sort of government aide, and have never worked a day in their lives. The govenment doesn't care. They throw us the social progams as some sort of bone to make themselves feel like they are doing something good.

Scary that our younger generation is growing up with games and movies that do nothing but kill. Tv is almost all of Reality crap that shows people doing nothing but swearing, arguing, out for only money and that you can meet someone in two weeks, fall madly in love and get married. How are they going to grow up with Wisdom when they are already brain dead.

Intense Guy said...

The old farts in congress may have a physically advanced age but they are what they used to call "retarded" so they are mentally young... very young... like boob sucking young.

texlahoma said...

So when Obama gets older he might REALLY be against war?