A new psychology study finds wisdom may shape whether creativity aligns with prosocial behavior.

Creativity alone does not reliably predict helping behavior in morally complex situations.

Traits linked to wisdom may guide creative thinking toward socially constructive outcomes.

Curiously, I have been speaking and corresponding with a few data scientists and experts in artificial intelligence (AI) lately. What’s curious is the common theme: These people are immersed in building powerful technological tools, but they want to keep their humanity, if not their wonder, in the process.

They’ve got me thinking. If creativity and innovation are accelerating faster than ever, what ensures they serve the greater good? I don’t have the answers as much as I have questions.

But one recent psychological study suggests one direction is wisdom.

What is wisdom in practice with creativity?

According to neuropsychiatrist Dilip Jeste, traits of wisdom include prosocial attitudes, self-awareness and reflection, fostering emotional stability with happiness, social decision-making, and balancing decisiveness with uncertainty.

These are not traits we normally associate with innovation. But new research suggests they may shape whether creativity benefits others or not.

Researchers found that wisdom functions as a moral compass for creativity. Across two studies, researchers found that creativity did not reliably predict prosocial behavior on its own. In one experiment, highly creative participants who scored lower in wisdom were less willing to help another person in a moral-emergency scenario. Among participants higher in wisdom, creativity was instead associated with more socially mindful responses.

One way to think of the implications here is that creativity generates possibilities, but wisdom helps determine which possibilities serve others rather than ourselves alone.

In my work, I typically define creativity and creative intelligence as the capacity both to generate novel and useful ideas and solutions as well as to execute on the best of them, or as the everyday ability to generate, ideate, and act on novel and useful solutions to the problems you care about. This study adds a new dimension.

Wise creativity, we might posit, includes ethical foresight and relational consequences.

The lead author said the work was motivated in part by concern that human thinking can become more “computationalized,” meaning more procedural, efficiency-driven, and emotionally blunted. Yet, people still crave genuine human understanding and care. The concern is that the more we interact with computational systems, the easier it becomes to treat human problems as technical problems.

How do we foster wisdom then? How do we train and educate ourselves and others for wisdom in this age?

Perhaps, ironically, it’s the very line of studies often under attack these days: the humanities.

Notably, Daniela Amodei, cofounder of Anthropic with her brother, recently suggested that studying the humanities may become more important than ever in an AI-driven world. When hiring, she said the company looks for people with strong communication skills, empathy, curiosity, and the ability to understand human behavior, capacities often cultivated through the humanities.

“I actually think studying the humanities is going to be more important than ever,” she told ABC News. “[U]nderstanding ourselves, understanding history, understanding what makes us tick—I think that will always be really, really important.”

Literature, philosophy, and history, after all, expose us to moral dilemmas and human complexity.

“Wisdom begins in wonder,” Socrates said. Wisdom may be one of the deeper expressions of wonder—the capacity to pause, reflect, and consider how our actions affect others. There are ways to track wonder and curiosity—and to keep our humanness fully alive.

Here are 3 ways to cultivate wise creativity

Study human stories, fiction, and nonfiction. Look for stories that are not direct mirrors of your own life. Find biographies and memoirs by people from backgrounds, cultures, and circumstances different from yours. Seek fiction with complex resolutions. As I describe in Tracking Wonder, reading fiction has significant positive effects on the brain and our capacity for empathy.

Practice perspective-taking. When making daily decisions or critical decisions, assume the perspective of who will benefit and who might be harmed. If you’re in a leadership position, seek conversations. Gather input. Ask: Who benefits? Who might be harmed?

Foster curiosity about people. Curiosity is one of the facets of wonder and a gateway to wisdom as well as to human belonging. And what is sometimes called relational curiosity, social curiosity, or empathetic curiosity is the behavior of being actively curious about other people. Some organizations might have Curiosity Hours in which they pair people from different departments to learn about each other. Some teams ask team members to present on a topic that they are impassioned about.

Data scientists, entrepreneurs, leaders, and creators all have unprecedented creative power. The real challenge of our era may be guiding new ideas wisely.

In an age of AI, the most valuable human advantage may be creative intelligence coupled with wisdom.

Ma, Jason. "Anthropic cofounder says studying the humanities will be ‘more important than ever’ and reveals what the AI company looks for when hiring." Fortune, Feb 7, 2026

Jeste, Dilip with Scott Laffe. Wiser: The Scientific Roots of Wisdom, Compassion, and What Makes Us Good (Sounds True, 2020).

Zhang, Jingmin et al. "Can wisdom guide intelligence and creativity toward prosocial ends? Evidence from humanistic, domain-aligned." Intelligence (Volume 114, 2026) 101971

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