When Knowing Is Not Enough: A Situated–Dispositional Framework of Wise Professional Judgment in Medical Psychology Education

Abstract

Medical psychology equips future health professionals with concepts for understanding health, illness, adaptation, communication, and care, but knowledge alone does not ensure sound judgment under uncertainty and value conflict. This conceptual article develops a Situated–Dispositional Wisdom Development Framework linking psychological wisdom, adaptive intelligence, and practical wisdom in medicine. Dispositional wisdom denotes the relatively enduring, modifiable organization of wisdom-related resources and generative person–situation processes. Situated wise reasoning regulates thought through monitoring of epistemic limits, uncertainty, perspectives, and self-involvement, as well as adjustment of attention, information search, confidence, and integration. Its quality concerns context-sensitive, proportionate adjustment rather than monitoring frequency. Wise professional judgment is evaluated independently through its evidential, contextual, ethical, and practical adequacy. Professional commitments constrain deliberation, while case-specific aims are specified and revised within it. Reflection, feedback, meaning-making, and varied practice are proposed as pathways through which judgment episodes may alter later readiness. Comparable immediate gains may yield different maintenance and unprompted transfer depending on how episodes are processed. Regulatory burden and recovery are considered alongside judgment quality. Broader wisdom development requires converging affective and motivational evidence. A fictional teaching case illustrates the framework, which distinguishes elicitation from development and process from outcome, yielding testable implications for wisdom-oriented medical psychology education.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Journal of Intelligence, 2026 · DOI ↗