Endorsing Research on the Aristotelian Phronesis Model

I am delighted to have the opportunity to comment on the forthcoming publication by Villacís and Vaccarezza (2024) regarding their suggestions for continuing research on the Aristotelian Phronesis Model (APM), proposed by Kristjánsson and his colleagues (Darnell et al., 2019, 2022; Kristjánsson et al., 2023; Kristjánsson and Fowers, 2024). I could not agree more with their conclusion that “there seem to be more aspects in the blueprint function than those captured by moral identity measures.” A second reaction to their paper is that I find it gratifying and humbling that two such fine scholars would take the time to write a commentary about our model. My feeling is that criticism from such strong scholars is more a compliment than anything, and I am deeply grateful for it. A third reaction is that their paper is very well written and well argued. It is a privilege to be invited to write a commentary on such a fine piece of scholarship.Their paper appears at an auspicious time for wisdom research, from my perspective. To put this field in context, wisdom research began, in earnest, with the Berlin Wisdom Paradigm (Baltes and Staudinger, 2000). Although informative, this approach was largely abandoned because it was overly costly and cumbersome, with its reliance on expert raters who quantitatively evaluated participants’ qualitative responses. This was followed by a lengthy era of self-report wisdom scales (e.g., Ardelt, 2003; Levenson et al., 2005; Webster, 2003) that provided easier, but more dubious measurement of wisdom. These scales have only moderate overlap, and it is immediately apparent that they represent very different conceptions of wisdom. The latest phase of wisdom research has been a return to the concept of phronesis, as seen in the work of Grossmann et al. (2020) and Kristjánsson and colleagues (Darnell et al., 2019, 2022; Kristjánsson et al., 2023; Kristjánsson and Fowers, 2024).The primary point of their article is that, although the APM has much to recommend it, the authors believe that alternative forms of measurement would provide a richer examination of the value and validity of the model. I completely concur with this point in that additional measurements and assessments are needed. I hope that the APM will have the heuristic function of generating considerable research to investigate the complex and challenging concept of phronesis. I think the article by Villacís and Vaccarezza (2024) can help spur this research, and I am glad that they wrote it.Villacís and Vaccarezza's (2024) primary focus is the blueprint function, which we described as a general perception of what a good life is that can guide individuals in their actions. The other three functions are the constitutive function (the ability to appropriately perceive the morality of a situation), the cognitive-emotional function (the ability to properly integrate cognitions and emotions to enable virtuous responses), and the integrative function (the ability to prioritize and integrate virtues when more than one is called for by a situation).It may seem odd that one of the authors of the APM would agree so readily with critics, but their views coincide with my own in many ways, so it would be difficult to disagree with their primary point. After all, the published research on the APM has been very clear that our purpose was to provide “proof-of-concept” evidence that would simply indicate the viability of this model, not fully test its overall validity (Darnell et al., 2022). We approached the topic provisionally from the beginning, choosing a set of available scales for assessing the model from those that had been previously validated and were publicly available. For these reasons, I am in favor of more research, better measurement, qualitative research, and a richer examination of the APM. As it turns out, Villacís and Vaccarezza (2024) read far more theoretical commitment into the use of moral identity measures to assess the blueprint function than we have (or have expressed). The use of moral identity measures has been more of a pragmatic matter than of a firm theoretical commitment, which is why it is easy to agree with their encouragement for the use of other measures and research approaches to assess this function. As these authors suggest, our understanding of the limitations of the moral identity construct does constitute an invitation to research on other ways to assess the blueprint function.For me, more in-depth research is the most important next step for the APM. Kristjánsson et al. (2023) are pursuing one such line of research, broadening the sampling for APM assessment to include participants from the UK and the USA and aiming to create a shorter, more useful assessment tool for the APM. Their work remains quantitative, so there is ample room for more qualitative approaches.In this context, it is important to note that Kristjánsson et al. (2023) have retained the performance measures of phronesis in their current research. A performance measure is one that assesses the match between a respondent’s account of a wise action with an expert response to the scenario. Thereby, the assessment is of a respondent’s performance rather than a mere self-description. Performance measurement is unfortunately rare in current wisdom research, which is generally strongly weighted toward self-report measures. It is somewhat difficult to credit self-reports of wisdom for some obvious and less obvious reasons, so having a way to assess wisdom beyond how the respondent describes themselves is necessary. The Situated Wise Reasoning Scale (Brienza et al., 2018) is one of the few contemporary measures of wisdom that attempts to go beyond the self-report of general descriptions of wisdom by having respondents report on what they actually did in situations requiring wisdom. Still, it is difficult to know how well self-descriptions match what they actually did, as people can consciously or unconsciously misreport their actions. Villacís and Vaccarezza (2024) do not comment on the performance measurement because their focus is on the blueprint function, which was initially assessed through self-report measures. Given the individualization of the good life that is described by Kristjánsson and Fowers (2024), it is difficult to see how the blueprint function could be assessed performatively because each person is likely to have a somewhat different understanding of what a good life is.One of the primary points of Villacís and Vaccarezza’s (2024) paper is that alternative assessments of the blueprint function are required. From my viewpoint, an important purpose of developing a model such as the APM is to differentiate its conceptualization from its assessment. That means that the conceptualization is not limited to the measurement we used to assess the model (Darnell et al., 2022), and we never implied that any such dependency between model and measurement existed. Of course, I agree that the measurement used in the proof-of-concept study was limited and that the model should be assessed in other ways. The APM was measured in terms of moral identity initially as a pragmatic matter, not as a firm commitment to this concept.Villacís and Vaccarezza (2024) recommend applying the work of Little (2020), Emmons and King (1988), Taylor (1989), and McAdams (1995, 2010) for a richer assessment of the blueprint function. I think these scholars’ work can provide excellent sources of alternative methods for this assessment. I find Taylor’s work especially conducive to this, given the centrality of the moral for him. I would be honored to see their excellent work applied to the APM that I helped develop and assess. I can think of no reason to discourage researchers from assessing the blueprint function with additional concepts and methods.Villacís and Vaccarezza (2024) recognize that there are limitations of the goal measures that they mention. Importantly, they proposed qualitative research on the good life that can expand our understanding of it, which is a great idea. Bauer (2024) conducted a review of the recent book on the APM (Kristjánsson and Fowers, 2024), and he made very similar and cogent suggestions about how the APM could be richly assessed using the unique combination of qualitative and quantitative studies pursued by McAdams (2006, 2013). I would love to see this kind of research conducted, and I encourage readers to engage in it.I would add to this encouragement that researchers can helpfully include other models and measures of wisdom as comparison approaches. One of the shortcomings of wisdom research is that so little work has genuinely compared the various approaches. This kind of research could be applied to several goals. One is to assess the measures’ degree of correspondence with one another, a key goal of quantification (Porter, 1995). The goal of correspondence research can be analogized to the measurement of temperature, wherein multiple temperature models are available (i.e., Fahrenheit, Celsius, Kelvin), and each model can be measured, but the key accomplishment in this area is that each one can be effectively, efficiently, and accurately translated to the others. This degree of correspondence is unlikely with wisdom measurement, but it is a worthy goal to attempt to approach. Of course, there have been studies that correlated many self-report measures of wisdom (Dong et al., 2022; Dong and Fournier, 2022; Glück et al., 2013), but these correlations have been modest, contributing very little to our cumulative knowledge about wisdom.One of the reasons for the modest correlations among wisdom measures is that each of them suggests that wisdom has different components. The debate about the components of wisdom has been mostly waged in conceptual arguments, and no one has made a sufficiently compelling case for their viewpoint that it has carried the day. For this reason, Igor Grossmann convened a gathering of experts on wisdom to explore the possibility of creating a “common model” of wisdom (Grossmann et al., 2020). This gathering was remarkably successful, especially given the complexity of the topic and academics’ well-known penchant for disagreement and self-assertion. To no one’s surprise, there were several dissident viewpoints about the “common model” that advocated for the inclusion of various elements in the model that the authors happened to favor (e.g., Aldwin et al., 2020; Farb, 2020; Glück, 2020). From my perspective, none of the arguments from these authors for the inclusion or exclusion of various elements is a knock-down argument, so it is reasonable to attempt to answer these questions about the inclusion or exclusion of various components empirically. What do we gain or lose by including or excluding elements such as humility, transcendence, or specific emotions, etc.? The assessment of the importance of various components, including those of the APM, requires empirical attention. Although I do not have brilliant research designs to suggest, I tend to think that the combination of conceptual argument and empirical evidence will be more persuasive than either one alone.There were a few minor issues I will also comment on. First, I find the use of the term “operationalize” superfluous and stuffy. The authors clarified, in their revision, that they meant the term in its “methodological” sense rather than as a part of logical positivism. The debate about logical positivism is part of our history, so there is no need to revisit it here. Logical positivism is irrelevant to my objection to this term because I object to it on methods terms. That is, one can use the phrase “We operationalized concept X with measure Y,” but all it really means is that “We assessed concept X with measure Y.” So why use the bloated term operationalize? It simply adds unnecessary and problematic verbiage to a process that is quite simple and should be described simply.I also found the inclusion of Peterson and Seligman in a discussion of wisdom odd, considering that these authors did not develop any measure of phronesis and used the outmoded term “prudence” in their conceptual discussion. I understand that their views have become somewhat venerable, and they did cite phronesis, but they never got around to measuring or studying it. The VIA famously and inexplicably neglects wisdom (Kristjánsson and Fowers, 2024) in favor of a set of concepts that some claim (unconvincingly) can substitute for it (McGrath, 2019). Although it is important to give credit where it is due, we never referred to Peterson and Seligman (2004) or positive psychology as “central to virtue science.” Such a description would seriously challenge our loyalty to Aristotle.My quibbles aside, Villacís and Vaccarezza (2024) have provided a very clear invitation to furthering the research on the APM. As such, my primary response is to cheer them and readers on. Theirs is a worthy effort, and I am happy to see good conceptual work presented in psychology.I wish to acknowledge the work by Kristján Kristjánsson, the lead author of the APM, as well as the efforts by our other coauthors Catherine Darnell, David Pollard, Liz Gulliford, and Panos Paris on APM-related papers. This commentary would not have been possible without their fine work.The authors have no conflicts of interest to declare.No funding was used for this article.The sole author wrote the entire article.