Abstract
This is the first electroencephalogram study exploring the personal perspective effect on wise advising. Participants advised hypothetical protagonists in life dilemmas from both the 2nd- and 3rd-person perspective. Their advice for each dilemma was rated by two independent raters on wisdom criteria, i.e., metacognitive humility, metacognitive flexibility, and perspective taking. The results revealed that participants felt a significantly shorter psychological distance from protagonists when advising from the 2nd- (vs. the 3rd-) person perspective, p < 0.001. However, there was no significant effect of perspective condition on the wisdom score. Nevertheless, stronger resting-state absolute EEG powers in the frontal lobe were associated with wiser advising from the 2nd-, but not the 3rd-person perspective. Moreover, Z tests revealed that the correlations between the resting-state absolute EEG powers and wisdom scores were significantly stronger during advising from the 2nd- than the 3rd-person perspective. These results suggest that advising from the 2nd-person perspective was more self-related, and mental activities during rest contributed to advising from the 2nd- but not the 3rd-person perspective.
Highlights
What makes one wise may lie in one’s resting mental activity
Most Berlin Wisdom Paradigm (BWP) studies focus on advising from the 3rd-person perspective[12]; little is known about wise advising from a 2nd-person perspective, which is common in daily life
Besides the narrow-band, rhythmic neural oscillations, the current study explored the relationship between wisdom scores and the broadband, arrhythmic activity, indexed by the power-law exponent (PLE)[65]
Summary
What makes one wise may lie in one’s resting mental activity. "resting-state" may not be resting at all. The "rest-self overlap" (i.e., the phenomenon that resting-state brain activities are always related to the processes of the internal self) may be a manifestation of wisdom from the 2nd-person perspective, which is likely to induce self-involvement. Resting-state brain activity may contribute to wisdom about life, which manifests in wise advising on others’ problems. In the process of wise advising, person perspective is a subtle but important manifestation of selfinvolvement and self-reflection. Generic-you, another kind of the 2nd-person perspective, is used to express more general generalizations that are deeply selfrelevant and allows individuals to derive broader meanings from negative experience[24,25] This process of meaning construction conforms to advising as expressing wisdom—through meanings derived from life narratives[26]
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