In April 2010, a team led by Igor Grossmann published a paper in PNAS with a title that runs against the usual story we tell about getting older: “Reasoning about social conflicts improves into old age.” The researchers gave a community sample of American adults stories about conflict, asked them to predict how each would unfold, and scored the reasoning. The older participants, between 60 and 90, did better than the young in terms of social reasoning. 

A note before going further. We are writers and editors here, not psychologists, clinicians, or gerontologists. What follows is our reading of one study and the research around it, not advice about your own mind or anyone else’s. The findings below come from observational, cross-sectional work, which describes patterns across groups of people rather than forecasts for any single reader.

The assumption being rebutted

The default picture of ageing is loss. Memory slips, names go missing, new things take longer to learn. There is real evidence behind this. For instance, a study drawing on the Health and Retirement Study, with a sample of more than fourteen thousand people, found fluid cognition declining with age, more steeply after seventy.

So the assumption isn’t baseless.

The problem is treating it as the whole story. Researchers of the ageing literature note that two lay views compete: that age brings decline, and that age brings wisdom. While fluid intelligence falls, crystallised intelligence, the store of accumulated knowledge, tends to rise into the 70s. 

What Grossmann and Nisbett tested

The Grossmann team, with Richard Nisbett of the University of Michigan as senior author, worked with a representative sample of 247 adults, sorted into three bands: 25 to 40, 41 to 59, and 60 and up. Everyone read short stories about social conflict, some between groups, some between individuals, and predicted what would happen next.

The responses were coded on dimensions the researchers tied to wise reasoning: recognising that other people see things differently, acknowledging the limits of one’s own knowledge, and valuing compromise over a clean win. To keep “wisdom” from being a word the team simply defined into existence, they had the coding scheme validated by professional counsellors and wisdom researchers.

The older group reasoned more wisely than the young. The authors’ own summary is direct: “Social reasoning improves with age despite a decline in fluid intelligence.” Nisbett put the result more plainly to reporters: “Independent of social class, older people are wiser, by our definition,” he said, “for group conflicts and individual conflicts. And this was true independent of their level of intelligence.”

That phrase, “by our definition,” is worth holding onto. Wisdom here is what the study’s coding scheme captures, not a verdict from on high. This is also one study, from a particular sample read through a particular lens, and shouldn’t be read as a settled law of the human lifespan.

Why wise reasoning and fluid intelligence pull apart

The striking part is the gap inside a single person. The same older adults who would, on average, be slower at a novel reasoning puzzle were better at thinking through a quarrel. How does one go up while the other goes down?

One answer is that these are simply different things. A 2021 study using a self-report wisdom scale — a different measure from the conflict-reasoning task Grossmann used — found that, in a sample of 141 healthy older adults, more than 95% of the variance in wisdom scores was unaccounted for by fluid intelligence, suggesting the two are largely distinct constructs. Fluid intelligence is about speed and novelty. Reasoning through conflict draws on something else: decades of having watched arguments play out, of having been wrong, of having seen that the person who needs to win the room often loses something else.

What it does and doesn’t licence

The finding drew real interest. Lynn Hasher of the University of Toronto, called the work “the single best demonstration of a long-held view that wisdom increases with age.” Her reason for caring about it says something about the field she works in. “What I think is most important about the paper is that it shows a major benefit that accrues with aging rather than the mostly loss-based findings reported in psychology,” she said. Of course, that is one researcher’s read of a single paper, not a field-wide verdict.

The wider literature has stayed mixed. Later studies have found positive, negative, null, and curved relationships between age and wisdom. A cross-cultural follow-up by the same group found the age gain held for Americans but not for Japanese participants. 

The authors themselves were careful about where the finding could go. They suggested, with their own hedge intact, that “it might be advisable to assign older individuals to key social roles involving legal decisions, counseling, and intergroup negotiations.” The hedge in “might be advisable” is important. These are roles where the question is rarely how fast you can solve a puzzle and almost always how well you can hold two opposed views in mind at once.

If any of this lands near something you’re carrying about your own ageing or someone you love, a qualified counsellor or clinician is the right person to talk it through with.