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Why Wisdom （智慧）Doesn't Work as Well as We Think It Does
We relate wisdom to age. Most of us believe that gaining wisdom is like picking up stones on a path: the longer you're on the path, the more stones you'll collect.
It seems a reasonable inference, then, the older you are, the more wisdom you have. Older people usually make fewer careless mistakes, and they often know the best course of action in a given situation. But I think there's another explanation at play here, which we might consider in the light of what we know about human decision-making.
There are two different ways of decision-making: plans and habits. Here's an example of how these ways differ. If you're driving somewhere for the first time, you'll need a plan. You will need to know whether to turn left or right, because you don't already have that information stored away in your head. On the other hand, you don't need a plan when you're going somewhere familiar （熟悉的） because the order of steps that will take you there is stored as a habit. But if you find that the road is blocked by fallen trees, you'll have to think about another way. Such a plan allows you to more easily deal with new situations, but they require a lot more attention.
The use of plans and habits changes over the course of our lives. A baby can't use habits to make decisions, because any situation she's in will be a new one. As we build up a store of familiar situations, the more we can depend on habits. The older you are, the more likely your behavior is based on tried- and-true habits rather than fresh planning.
But what does this tell us about wisdom? Well, it suggests that wisdom is interactive, notstatic: it is a relationship between a person and their surroundings （环境）. The reason that wisdom seems to come out so effortlessly from well-seasoned minds is that they have a store of habitual information about how to act in a given situation.
But it also makes a worrying prediction: if older people were put in a new situation, with which they had no familiarity, they wouldn't make better decisions than someone who is young. It is the same with mistakes. Older, seemingly wiser people make fewer mistakes because they're familiar with surroundings they often deal with. If you controlled for the familiarity of the situation, then people in different age groups would probably make the same number of mistakes. Younger people might even make fewer mistakes, because they are better at coming up with fresh plans.
While wisdom gives you expertise within a particular environment, it doesn't mean that you'll be able to generalize that to new experiences. It's not that we necessarily get wiser as we get older, but we put ourselves in fewer situations where we are likely to make mistakes.
