Recent research published in journals intelligence found that wisdom plays an important role in ensuring that people can use their creativity for the benefit of others. This finding suggests that while creativity can be a powerful tool, it requires the moral guidance of wisdom directed toward socially constructive rather than selfish goals.
“A recurring concern in psychology is that intelligence and creativity are ‘morally neutral.’ Intelligence and creativity can be used to help others, but they can also be used manipulatively or destructively. In many theories, wisdom “It has been proposed that it acts as a moral regulator that helps people orient themselves, but empirical evidence for this regulating role is limited,” said study author Yulin Wang, a doctoral candidate at Peking University and a member of the Self-Inquiry and Meaningful Being Lab.
“We also noticed a methodological problem: intelligence and creativity are often measured on natural science-oriented scales, while wisdom is measured on more humanistic, values-rich scales, creating a domain mismatch that can obscure how these constructs work together in real life.”
“Beyond this theoretical and methodological gap, we were motivated by a broader real-world concern that feels increasingly salient in the AI era: that human thinking may become more ‘computational’, more procedural, efficiency-oriented, and less emotional, but at the same time people crave genuine human understanding and consideration.” From this perspective, wisdom may be an important ability that keeps people psychologically “alive” and ensures that our abilities are ultimately used for the common good. ”
To investigate this dynamic, the researchers conducted two separate studies. The first study recruited 132 participants to complete a series of performance-based tasks online to measure state-level wise thinking. The researchers accomplished this by having participants read about difficult interpersonal dilemmas, such as a conflict between a graduate and her parents over travel plans.
Participants wrote detailed descriptions of how they would handle the situation. They then answered questions about their typical reactions to such conflicts. This allowed the scientists to categorize participants into high and low categories of wise thinking.
The scientists then assessed social intelligence by asking participants how they react to everyday problems. These issues include consumer rights issues and family disagreements. The researchers also measured real-life creativity by asking participants to recall and write about personal experiences in which they had to think outside the box. Independent raters scored these personal stories for creativity based on factors such as unique perspective and practicality.
Finally, the researchers measured prosocial behavior, which involves trying to help others. They did this by asking participants how willing they would be to share their limited oxygen supply with a stranger in the event of a submarine emergency.
This data provided evidence that wisdom acts as a protective buffer. Among participants who scored low on wise thinking, higher creativity actually predicted lower willingness to help strangers in the submarine scenario. For these people, a lack of wisdom seems to cause creative thinking to become selfish or divorced from moral action.
This negative tendency disappeared among participants who showed high levels of wise thinking. Their creativity did not lead to decreased helping behavior. This suggests that wisdom prevents creative potential from being exploited in ethically questionable ways.
Based on these findings, the scientists conducted a second study using a larger sample of 801 online participants. This time, we used self-report questionnaires to measure stable personality traits rather than reactions to specific scenarios. Participants completed an assessment of integrative wisdom, which includes balancing sharp thinking skills and moral virtues such as fairness and benevolence.
Participants also completed a survey measuring social intelligence, including the ability to read body language and adapt to social situations. They answered questions about general creativity, including traits such as curiosity, imagination, and willingness to take risks.
To measure prosocial tendencies, researchers assessed social mindfulness. Social mindfulness refers to a person’s ability to be considerate of others in all everyday situations. This includes respecting different opinions and letting others choose first in shared situations.
Results of the second study showed that among people classified with high levels of trait wisdom, creativity positively predicted social mindfulness. For these wise people, being more creative means being more considerate and socially inclusive. No such positive link between creativity and social mindfulness existed in the medium or low wisdom groups.
“The effect is not ‘huge’, but it makes sense in context because it speaks to when creativity becomes socially constructive rather than potentially ethically problematic,” Wang told SciPost. “For example, in Study 1 (Constrained Moral Crisis Situation), creativity predicted lower willingness to help only among those low in Wisdom Thinking. In Study 2 (Everyday Interpersonal Considerations), creativity predicted higher prosocial orientation only among those high in Trait Wisdom.”
“In practice, this suggests that developing creativity alone may not reliably promote prosocial outcomes. Wisdom-related abilities (such as balancing interests, recognizing uncertainty, and benevolence) may be key to ensuring that creative strengths are translated into social benefits.”
The scientists also used network analysis to visualize how these properties are linked. They found that highly intelligent people have a consistent psychological structure in which virtues such as temperance are closely tied to positive generosity. People low in wisdom exhibited highly fragmented networks. This means that their cognitive skills and moral virtues function independently of each other.
“Our main conclusion is that wisdom appears to be paramount in how people exercise their creativity,” Wang said. “Across the two studies, wisdom consistently shaped the association between creativity and prosocial outcomes. High wisdom was associated with more socially constructive expressions of creativity, whereas low wisdom was associated with a greater risk that creativity would be misdirected in morally difficult situations.”
In neither study, the researchers found no evidence that wisdom similarly guides the use of intelligence. Intelligence tends to be a structured competency focused on efficiency and accuracy. Scientists suggest that creativity is a freer, value-sensitive process that makes us more sensitive to the moral guidance provided by wisdom.
“We had expected intelligence, especially social intelligence, to show a similar ‘wisdom-guided’ pattern, but it did not emerge robustly, forcing us to think more seriously about which abilities are most morally malleable and when moral orientation becomes central,” Wang said.
As with all research, there are some limitations. Assessment of helping behavior relied on hypothetical scenarios and self-report surveys rather than real-world observations. People may behave differently when faced with an actual physical emergency or direct interpersonal conflict.
The researchers noted that their study focused only on humanistic areas, including social and ethical reasoning. Future research could investigate whether wisdom plays a similar role in the natural sciences. For example, scientists could investigate whether wisdom guides the ethical development of new technologies and artificial intelligence systems.
Furthermore, the study relied on data from a single cultural context. Researchers could potentially explore how these traits interact across different cultures. This helps determine whether the regulatory function of wisdom applies globally.
Beyond these methodological limitations, the researchers emphasized that their results should not be interpreted to mean that intelligence plays no role in moral situations.
“The ‘lack of consistent evidence for intelligence’ does not mean that intelligence is irrelevant to prosociality. Rather, it suggests that it may be easier to observe a guiding role for wisdom for abilities such as creativity, which inherently involve meaning-making and value-laden interpretation, but that some forms of intelligence may function more instrumentally, unless moral salience is explicitly involved,” Wang explained.
“In the short term, our next steps will depend on available time and funding. In the future, once we have the resources to expand this body of work, we hope to (a) test these ideas with behavioral outcomes and long-term/experimental designs (e.g., wisdom-building interventions), (b) examine whether different forms of intelligence (e.g., moral reasoning, ethical decision-making ability) are more ‘wisdom-regulated’ than the measures we used here, and (c) make direct comparisons.” We perform domain adjustments (humanities and natural science assessments) to see when the alliance between wisdom, intelligence, and creativity is strongest and most predictive of real-world prosocial behavior. ”
“One of the broader messages is related to measurement. We believe it is important to align constructs within the same assessment domain,” Wang added. “When wisdom is treated as a humanistic and value-sensitive ability, it may be most useful to combine it with similarly humanistic assessments of intelligence and creativity, especially when the consequences involve ethical or prosocial behavior.”
The study, “Can Wisdom Channel Intelligence and Creativity toward Prosocial Purposes? Evidence from Humanistic and Domain-Aligned Evaluations,” was authored by Jingmin Zhang, Yuling Wang, and Liuqing Tian.
