Wisdom and Tolerance Grow With Age and Experience in Health Education, Study Finds

What makes a good healthcare professional? Technical skill and textbook knowledge obviously matter, but a growing body of research argues that two quieter qualities—wisdom and tolerance—may shape patient outcomes just as profoundly. A new cross-sectional study conducted in Northern Cyprus offers one of the most direct measurements to date of how these two attributes are distributed among the people who train and work in health-related university departments, and the results suggest that both traits rise with age, professional experience, and exposure to more than one academic discipline.

The study, published in BMC Medical Education by Mine Bahçeci of the Nursing Department at Cyprus International University, surveyed 207 volunteers drawn from university health departments across Northern Cyprus between February and April 2024. Participants included both students and teaching staff in health-related disciplines, a deliberate design choice that allowed the researcher to compare psychosocial attributes across different stages of professional development within the same institutional ecosystem. Ethical approval was granted by the Cyprus International University Scientific Research and Publication Ethics Committee, and participation was voluntary and informed, in line with the Helsinki Declaration.

Two standardized instruments anchored the investigation. Wisdom was measured using the San Diego Wisdom Scale, an instrument developed within the growing empirical literature that treats wisdom not as an untestable abstraction but as a measurable psychological construct encompassing prosocial attitudes, emotional regulation, self-reflection, decisiveness in uncertainty, and social advising. Tolerance was assessed with the Tolerance Tendency Scale–Adult Form, which captures an individual’s dispositional openness to differing views, lifestyles, and identities. Both scales produce continuous scores, allowing the researcher to quantify levels across the sample and to test statistically how those levels vary with age, role, and educational background.

The headline numbers are striking in their own right. Participants scored a mean of 91.50, with a standard deviation of 13.47, on the wisdom scale, and a mean of 33.56, with a standard deviation of 7.61, on the tolerance scale. But the more consequential findings emerged when the researcher broke these averages down by subgroup. Wisdom scores were significantly higher among participants aged 24 and over, among teaching staff compared with students, and among those affiliated with more than one department. Tolerance followed a parallel pattern: teaching staff and individuals connected to multiple departments scored significantly higher than their peers.

Those patterns align with a broader theoretical account of how wisdom develops. Modern wisdom research, much of it consolidated around the San Diego scale’s creators, frames wisdom as partially experience-dependent: it grows through accumulated exposure to complex human situations, through reflection on failure and uncertainty, and through sustained practice in navigating other people’s perspectives. Teaching staff in health disciplines have typically spent years in clinical and academic environments where ambiguous cases, ethical dilemmas, and emotionally charged interactions are routine. The higher wisdom scores among older participants and faculty members are consistent with the idea that such exposure, rather than raw intellect alone, drives the development of wise judgment.

The departmental effect is arguably the most provocative element of the study. Participants associated with more than one health department—suggesting interdisciplinary education or cross-departmental teaching and practice—scored higher on both wisdom and tolerance than those tied to a single discipline. Interdisciplinary environments force individuals to reconcile different professional vocabularies, different hierarchies of evidence, and different assumptions about what patients need. A nurse, a physiotherapist, and a nutritionist may look at the same patient and see three different problems. Learning to hold those perspectives together, the data hint, may cultivate exactly the reflective openness and respect for difference that both the wisdom and tolerance scales are designed to capture.

Perhaps the study’s most practically significant result is the correlation itself: wisdom and tolerance were significantly and positively associated, meaning that participants who scored higher on one tended to score higher on the other. This is not merely a statistical curiosity. In healthcare settings, the two traits plausibly reinforce each other in daily practice. A clinician who can regulate emotion, reflect before acting, and advise with humility is better positioned to tolerate a patient’s refusal of treatment, a colleague’s dissenting opinion, or a family’s culturally grounded care preferences. Conversely, habitual tolerance of difference provides the cognitive and emotional space in which reflective, wise judgment can operate. The correlation cannot establish causation, but it strengthens the case that these attributes belong to a single psychosocial cluster relevant to professional maturity.

Why does this matter for medical and health sciences education? Communication failures, low empathy, and intolerance of patient diversity are recurring contributors to poor care quality, patient dissatisfaction, and burnout across health systems. If wisdom and tolerance are measurable, trainable, and correlated with characteristics that educators can influence—such as curricular design and interdisciplinary exposure—then they become legitimate targets for educational intervention rather than fixed personality features to be screened for at admission. The study’s author explicitly points in this direction, suggesting that incorporating humanities and ethical training into health curricula could enhance students’ professional maturity, and that educational strategies supporting reflective thinking and respect for differences may help develop more compassionate healthcare workers.

The study’s limitations deserve honest framing. It is descriptive and cross-sectional, capturing a single moment in time at a single set of institutions, with 207 volunteers who may differ systematically from those who declined to participate. Cross-sectional data cannot determine whether older, more experienced, and interdisciplinary participants are wiser and more tolerant because of their experience, or whether wiser and more tolerant individuals are more likely to seek out interdisciplinary roles and academic careers in the first place. Self-report scales, however well validated, measure how people perceive their own wisdom and tolerance, which may diverge from how they behave under pressure. And the sample comes from the specific multicultural educational context of Northern Cyprus, which may limit generalization to other regions—though that same multicultural setting is also what makes the findings interesting, since tolerance is arguably most tested in diverse environments.

Even with those caveats, the study adds a useful empirical brick to a wall that medical educators have been building for years: the recognition that producing competent clinicians requires cultivating the whole person, not just the technician. The finding that wisdom and tolerance travel together, that both are elevated among those with broader experience, and that both can be measured with validated instruments gives curriculum designers concrete tools. Future longitudinal and interventional studies—tracking students as they move through interdisciplinary programs, or testing whether ethics and humanities modules actually raise tolerance scores—would be the natural next step. For now, the message from Northern Cyprus is clear and quietly optimistic: the qualities that make healthcare humane are not mysteries. They are measurable, they grow with experience, and education can be designed to nurture them.

Subject of Research: Wisdom and tolerance levels among university students and teaching staff in health-related disciplines

Article Title: Wisdom and tolerance among university students and teaching staff in health-related disciplines: a descriptive cross-sectional study in Northern Cyprus

Article References: Bahçeci, M. (2026). Wisdom and tolerance among university students and teaching staff in health-related disciplines: a descriptive cross-sectional study in Northern Cyprus. BMC Medical Education. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-026-10534-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12909-026-10534-x

Keywords: wisdom, tolerance, health sciences education, medical education, cross-sectional study, Northern Cyprus, San Diego Wisdom Scale, teaching staff, university students, interdisciplinary education, psychosocial attributes, professional maturity