Award Winners

APA Division 1 is pleased to announce the winners of the 2024 George A. Miller Award, Judith Glück and Nicholas Westrate, for their article “The wisdom researchers and the elephant: An integrative model of wise behavior”. The George A. Miller Award goes to the nominated paper that best represents the mission of APA Division 1 to integrate perspectives across subdisciplines of psychology and from psychology to other fields. We appreciated the way the authors integrated the best parts of several different models of wisdom, notably including both cognitive and non-cognitive components. No doubt other researchers and theorists on wisdom will find their new theory to be as compelling as we did and use it as the basis for further advances. We share the authors’ hope that understanding the psychology of wisdom better will lead to more of it. The reference for the article appears below.

Judith Glück is a full professor of developmental psychology at University of Klagenfurt, Austria. She holds magister’s (1995) and doctoral (1999) degrees in psychology from University of Vienna. From 1999 to 2002, she worked as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, where Paul B. Baltes introduced her to wisdom research. Having received tenure (habilitation) from University of Vienna in 2001, she got her position in Klagenfurt in 2007. Her main research focus is wisdom: how wisdom can be defined, how it develops, how it can best be measured, how it manifests itself in real life and which situational and contextual factors can foster or hinder wise behavior, and how people’s conceptions of wisdom differ within and across cultures. She has received several research grants on wisdom from the Austrian Science Fund; her current project investigates whether video games can foster wisdom. She has published in journals including Personality and Social Psychology Review, Psychological Inquiry, Annual Review of Psychology, Developmental Psychology und The Journals of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences. She is also co-editor of the Cambridge Handbook of Wisdom.

Nic M. Weststrate, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Human Development and Learning in the Department of Educational Psychology at the University of Illinois Chicago. He is also a member of the Center for Research on Health and Aging in the Institute for Health Research and Policy and an affiliate faculty of the Community and Applied Developmental Psychology program in the Department of Psychology. Nic was trained in lifespan developmental psychology at the University of Toronto, Canada, and completed a postdoctoral research fellowship at the University of Klagenfurt, Austria, with Dr. Judith Glück. Nic’s research investigates personal, social, and cultural resources that support the development, manifestation, and transmission of wisdom across the lifespan. Recently, he has been using multiple methods to explore the use of intergenerational storytelling as a context for wisdom-sharing in LGBTQ+ communities, including a community-engaged ethnographic experiment (www.generationliberation.com). Nic’s work has been published in journals such as Developmental Psychology, The Journals of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences, Psychological Inquiry, Perspectives on Psychological Science, and American Psychologist.

Glück, J., & Weststrate, N. M. (2022). The wisdom researchers and the elephant: An integrative model of wise behavior. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 26(4), 342-374. https://doi.org/10.1177/10888683221094650