Paul Baltes

Introduction

Paul B. Baltes (June 18, 1939 – November 7, 2006) was a German developmental psychologist who did more than anyone else to turn psychology's attention to the whole life course rather than to childhood alone. Working across the United States and Germany, he built the case that development is lifelong, multidirectional, and plastic — that at every age it consists simultaneously of gains and losses — and he gave the field both a research infrastructure and a vocabulary for studying it. His 2007 obituary notice in an American psychology journal described him as probably the most influential developmental psychologist of his time.

Two of his ideas travelled furthest. The first is the model of selective optimization with compensation (SOC), developed with his wife and collaborator Margret Baltes, which describes how people manage the shrinking ratio of resources to demands that comes with age: narrowing the field of goals, investing in the ones that remain, and substituting new means when old ones fail. The second is his attempt to make wisdom a measurable scientific construct, which produced the Berlin Wisdom Paradigm and the uncomfortable finding that growing older does not by itself make anyone wiser.

Early Life and Education

Baltes was born in Saarlouis, in the Saarland region of Germany, on June 18, 1939. The Saarland was a border region whose sovereignty shifted more than once in the first half of the twentieth century, and the historical gradedness of that environment is often noted as a background to Baltes's later interest in cohort, history, and context as developmental forces.

He entered the University of Saarland at Saarbrücken to study psychology, with minors in biology and physiology, completing his pre-diploma in 1961 and his Diplom-Psychologe in 1963. There he met Margret Maria Labouvie, a fellow psychology student whom he married in 1963 and who became his closest scientific partner. Also at Saarbrücken he encountered the work of the American lifespan methodologist K. Warner Schaie, who helped arrange a year for him as a graduate exchange student at the University of Nebraska in 1963 and 1964. Schaie's critique of the research designs then used in developmental psychology — in particular the confounding of age with cohort in cross-sectional and longitudinal studies — supplied the problem that Baltes's 1967 doctorate addressed. He received his Dr. phil. in psychology, with minors in physiology and psychopathology, from Saarbrücken in 1967.

Academic and Professional Career

The connection to Schaie produced a first job: Baltes joined West Virginia University as an assistant professor in 1968 and became an associate professor in 1970. Margret, who had begun doctoral study in experimental psychology there — still unusual for a woman in a German academic marriage at the time — completed her PhD in 1973. In 1972 the couple moved to the Pennsylvania State University, where Baltes was associate professor and then, from 1974, professor of human development, and where he directed the Division of Individual and Family Studies from 1972 to 1978. He spent 1978 and 1979, and later 1990 to 1991 and 1997 to 1998, as a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford.

In 1980 the family returned to Germany. Baltes became a scientific member of the Max Planck Society and co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, where he founded and led the Center for Lifespan Psychology, and from 1981 he was honorary professor of psychology at the Free University of Berlin, where Margret held a chair in psychological gerontology until her sudden death from heart failure on January 28, 1999. He later held a distinguished professorship at the University of Virginia from 2004 and, from 2005, directed MaxnetAging, an international research network on the behavioral and social sciences of aging. He also chaired the Berlin Aging Study with the sociologist Karl Ulrich Mayer, and with the sociologist Neil Smelser served as co-editor-in-chief of the twenty-six-volume International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, published in 2001. He was the author or editor of eighteen books and more than two hundred and fifty articles.

Major Contributions to Psychology

The Lifespan Perspective

Baltes's general lifespan framework rests on a small number of propositions that he restated and refined over three decades. Development is lifelong, not completed at maturity. It is multidirectional: any period of life contains both growth and decline, and different systems change in different directions at the same time. It is plastic, meaning that the range of possible functioning at any age is wider than any single observed level of performance suggests. And it is embedded in three interacting systems of influence: age-graded biological and social events, history-graded events such as wars or economic transformations, and non-normative events unique to the individual. His 1987 statement of these propositions, and his 1997 essay on "the incomplete architecture of human ontogeny" — arguing that evolution and culture have done progressively less well at equipping the second half of life — are the two canonical theoretical papers of the field.

Selective Optimization with Compensation

Baltes and Margret Baltes proposed SOC in 1990 as a general model of successful development, not merely a description of old age. Selection is the narrowing of goals, whether elective (choosing among opportunities) or loss-based (abandoning goals after resources decline). Optimization is the acquisition, refinement and investment of means for reaching the selected goals. Compensation is the substitution of alternative means when a previously available one is lost — the hearing aid, the written list, the changed route up the mountain. In their formulation, successful aging is the orchestration of these three processes so as to maximize gains and minimize losses. The model's appeal was that it defined success as a process rather than as a fixed end state, which meant that a person with significant impairment could still be developing well.

Cognitive Plasticity and Testing the Limits

Baltes worked out his plasticity claim empirically with the "testing the limits" method: rather than measuring how well people perform once, his laboratory trained them over many sessions until performance asymptoted, treating the gap between baseline and asymptote as an estimate of reserve capacity. The work supported a dual-component picture in which the cognitive mechanics — speed, working memory, fluid reasoning — show steady age-related decline, while the cognitive pragmatics — knowledge, expertise, language — hold up much longer into old age. It also established that the size of the reserve shrinks in later life, so plasticity is real but not unlimited.

Wisdom and the Berlin Wisdom Paradigm

Baltes's most unusual project treated wisdom as expertise in "the fundamental pragmatics of life." The Berlin Wisdom Paradigm, developed with Ursula Staudinger, Jacqui Smith and others, asked people of all ages to think aloud about difficult hypothetical dilemmas — a fifteen-year-old who wants to marry immediately, a friend who calls to say he has decided to end his life — and had trained raters score the transcripts on five criteria: rich factual and rich procedural knowledge about life, lifespan contextualism, value relativism, and the recognition and management of uncertainty.

The results were deliberately deflationary. In a 1990 study, wise responses were equally likely from young, middle-aged, and older adults. Across four studies the group found no evidence that wisdom as they defined it increases with age; instead there was a plateau of wisdom-related performance through middle and old age, with evidence from a separate study that it begins on average to decline around seventy-five, probably alongside the cognitive mechanics. The team speculated that the "world record" in wisdom might be held by someone in their sixties. Of roughly seven hundred people assessed, in the words of Jacqui Smith, they never found a single person who scored at the top across the board. Baltes and Staudinger concluded that wisdom is a collectively anchored product and that individuals are only weak carriers of it.

Major Publications

Lifespan Development and Behavior (book series, co-edited from 1977 onward)
"Theoretical Propositions of Life-Span Developmental Psychology: On the Dynamics Between Growth and Decline" (Developmental Psychology, 1987)
Successful Aging: Perspectives from the Behavioral Sciences (co-edited with Margret M. Baltes, 1990)
"People Nominated as Wise: A Comparative Study of Wisdom-Related Knowledge" (Psychology and Aging, 1995)
"On the Incomplete Architecture of Human Ontogeny" (American Psychologist, 1997)
The Berlin Aging Study: Aging from 70 to 100 (co-edited with Karl Ulrich Mayer, 1999)
"Wisdom: A Metaheuristic (Pragmatic) to Orchestrate Mind and Virtue Toward Excellence" (American Psychologist, 2000)
International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences (co-editor-in-chief with Neil Smelser, 2001)

Impact and Legacy

Baltes's institutional legacy is unusually concrete: a Max Planck center, the Berlin Aging Study and its public dataset, a volume of encyclopedia, a generation of students including many of the current leaders of European lifespan research, and, with Margret, a foundation in Berlin that funds work in the field. His conceptual legacy is that aging research now routinely asks about gains as well as losses, about the oldest old as well as the young old, and about plasticity rather than fixed decline.

The criticisms are equally substantive, and several of them were answered by Baltes himself.

On the SOC model, the most frequent objection is conceptual: critics such as Steverink, Lindenberg and Ormel argued that a model which lets each person define their own goals makes "successful aging" unfalsifiable, since any outcome can be described as compensation for a loss. Others, including Martha Holstein and Meredith Minkler, have argued that any successful-aging framework is covertly normative — that it encodes Western, middle-class, able-bodied ideals and implicitly blames those who age with illness or poverty for failing to optimize. The measurement side has its own problem: the SOC questionnaire developed by Alexandra Freund and Baltes is a self-report instrument, and the three-factor structure identified in older adults has failed to replicate cleanly in adolescent samples. Baltes's own reply to the definitional objection was that he and Margret had deliberately rejected criterion-based definitions — he and Laura Carstensen had themselves criticized fixed-criteria models in 1996 — and that a process definition was the only way to respect the heterogeneity of old age.

On plasticity, subsequent large-scale cognitive-training research has largely supported the reserve-capacity finding while limiting its scope: training improves the trained task substantially, but transfer to untrained tasks and to everyday functioning has generally been small. Baltes's own late work had already conceded the point, showing that plasticity narrows with age.

On wisdom, the Berlin paradigm has been criticized on three fronts. Monika Ardelt argued that it is too exclusively cognitive and neglects reflection and emotion; Laura Carstensen made the same point about emotional regulation; Michael Levenson argued that it omits self-transcendence and concern for the common good. A different objection concerns ecological validity: as Judith Glück, who did postdoctoral work with Baltes, has pointed out, a person may reason wisely about a hypothetical dilemma and act foolishly in their own life. A philosopher's version of the critique holds that the five criteria measure a wisdom-relevant characteristic rather than wisdom itself, since a clever undergraduate who has paid attention in a cultural anthropology class can produce a highly rated answer. Baltes responded directly to the emotion critique in the 2005 Handbook of Wisdom edited by Robert Sternberg, proposing that a wise person first empathizes and then down-regulates that emotion in order to create the distance needed to be helpful. The experiment designed to test the proposal had not run when he died of cancer in Berlin on November 7, 2006.

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References

Baltes, P. B. (1987). Theoretical propositions of life-span developmental psychology: On the dynamics between growth and decline. Developmental Psychology, 23(5), 611-626.