Is reading making you wiser? An exploration of the reading habits and their relationship with wisdom among Indian young adults

Pages: 1151-1157
Aakanksha Tomar and Alka Bajpai (Department of Psychology, University of Delhi, Delhi)

This study explored whether there is a relationship between reading books and wisdom. 103 participants in the age group of 20 to 40 years responded to Ardelt’s Three-Dimensional Wisdom Scale, a modified version of Stanovich and West’s Author Recognition Test, and a Reading Habits Questionnaire. A correlational analysis showed a statistically significant positive relationship between the two study variables. A second hypothesis explored whether wisdom levels varied significantly between readers who read predominantly literary fiction versus those who read predominantly popular fiction or non-fiction. Respondents were categorized into these three groups based on their scores on the Author Recognition Test. A one-way analysis of variance however failed to show any significant difference between the readers of these different types of texts. Deep reading as a habit, which has been on a decline in the recent past, may be meaningfully related to wisdom, a quality universally acknowledged as desirable and worthy of pursuit. The implications of this relationship and the possibilities to study it further have been discussed.