Need to know
On a crisp, clear day in January about four years ago, my children and I joined a few thousand Rhode Islanders in a protest march against a recent change in law that restricted the number of refugees who could enter the United States. As I held the hand of my four-year-old son, I was overcome with emotion. ‘No hate, no fear, refugees are welcome here,’ the crowd chanted as we marched through the streets, my six-year-old daughter joining in stone-faced. With a tightness in my chest and tears in my eyes, I could barely join along without choking up.
At the time, I didn’t have a word to describe exactly what it was that I was feeling, but now I do: awe.
Since the march, I had a spell working as a research and writing fellow at the Greater Good Science Center based at the University of California, Berkeley, which gave me the opportunity and privilege to delve into the burgeoning science of this emotion. The more I learned about it, the more I came to believe that it’s worth recognising awe and trying to cultivate it in our lives.
The meaning of awe has changed over time
For centuries, mystics, religious scholars, philosophers and artists have had differing understandings of what the word ‘awe’ means. It originally connoted fear and dread toward divine beings, but now has a more general meaning encompassing a wide variety of experiences. ‘I define it as the feeling of being in the presence of something vast and mysterious that you don’t understand with your current knowledge,’ says Dacher Keltner, the founder and a faculty director of the Greater Good Science Center, and a leading researcher into the psychology of awe.
A landmark new scientific conceptualisation of awe by Keltner and his fellow psychologist Jonathan Haidt was published in 2003, based on what had been written about it from the fields of religion, philosophy, sociology and psychology. They proposed that, as varied as awe experiences can be, they all share two features: ‘perceived vastness’ and a ‘need for accommodation’.
According to this framework, while the perceived vastness of dramatic vistas such as canyons and mountains can provoke strong feelings of awe, this aspect of the emotion isn’t limited to literal size. Rather, it encompasses ‘anything that is experienced as being much larger than the self, or the self’s ordinary level of experience’, such as I felt on the Rhode Island march, but other related triggers might be extreme ‘social size’ (fame, prestige or authority), conceptual complexity and even outstanding moral goodness.
The other component of awe, ‘need for accommodation’, refers to the way the emotion forces us to change our understanding of the world. Awe can seem mind-bending in part because it is; it forces us to adjust our mental structures to assimilate new information (recent research scanning people’s brains while they experience awe suggests that this effect manifests at a neural level in decreased activity in the left middle temporal gyrus, a brain area that’s known to be involved in adjusting one’s previous schemas and understandings in light of new events and experiences).
Awe isn’t always experienced as a purely positive emotion. In around a quarter of awe experiences, people also report feeling a layer of fear. Imagine the mix of awe and alarm you might feel if you stumbled upon a grizzly bear on a hike, were stuck in a thunderstorm, or contemplated going to Hell. Early evidence suggests that this kind of threat-based awe might be more prominent outside the Western European and North American populations that have been the source of many awe studies. ‘You find more threat-based awe in hierarchical cultures,’ says Keltner. That said, his work has found that, at least in the Western world, most awe experiences are positive and have positive effects. ‘A quarter of the experiences are threat-based but three-quarters are really about exploration and connection, and have a lot of delight in them,’ says Keltner.
Experiencing awe has many benefits
There’s a lot we can gain from those more delightful awe experiences. In the past nearly two decades of research on awe, dozens of studies have unearthed benefits associated with the emotion. ‘On all the major checkboxes of what’s good for you, it does a pretty good job,’ says Keltner.
For starters, there appears to be a connection between experiencing awe and better physical health. In a recent study, Jennifer Stellar, a psychologist at the University of Toronto, found that awe was one of the positive emotions most strongly associated with having lower levels of proinflammatory cytokines – protective proteins that are released when you get injured or ill, but which can have negative effects on health when they’re chronically elevated, including raising the risk of cardiovascular disease, diabetes and depression.
In terms of awe’s psychological benefits, there’s even more compelling evidence, with research linking greater experience of the emotion to more life satisfaction, increased humility, better mood, dampened feelings of materialism, and greater scepticism toward weak arguments.
Awe can make us better social beings, too. In multiple studies, participants who have been asked to write about an awe experience or who experienced awe in an experiment displayed more generous and cooperative behaviour than people who were induced to feel other emotions.
Besides boosting life satisfaction and making you a kinder person, awe experiences often just feel good – and important. ‘People report it being a very profound experience to have awe,’ says Stellar. ‘It also makes people see the world in a different way, and I think that’s valuable in its own right.’
Awe might feel profound in part because it encompasses a number of transcendent phenomena. It can change our perception of time, making it seem more plentiful and expansive, allowing us to savour the here and now. During awe, people also report feeling less significant and smaller relative to their environment – a positive effect that researchers term ‘the small self’.
‘When people feel shame, they feel very small, but they also feel very aware of themselves, which is different than awe where they feel small but not so aware of themselves,’ says Stellar. ‘[Awe] seems to be this very interesting situation where you can feel self-diminishment, but it’s a good and exhilarating feeling.’ At a neural level, brain imaging research suggests that this is reflected in reduced activity in the ‘default mode network’, a network of brain regions that are particularly active when our minds are wandering or we’re thinking about ourselves (similar neural effects are observed during meditation, states of flow and psychedelic trips).
While awe makes us less focused on ourselves, evidence suggests it also makes us feel more connected to other people, more a part of a greater whole and something larger than ourselves. In this way, it creates a bridge between what Keltner calls the ‘default self’ – our drive to do well, meet our goals, protect ourselves, rise in status – and our desire, and indeed need, to be part of society and help others. ‘I’ve got to protect myself, but I’ve got to serve the collective – that’s one of the great tensions in identity and in our evolution,’ says Keltner.
While we can imagine how, in the wrong hands, this bridge can be used as a force for manipulation – think of a charismatic cult leader or suicide bomber – the transformative effects of awe can also be powerfully positive. ‘[I]t seems to be this really important emotion for when we’re confronting things that might be scary and bigger than us and hard to understand, but it’s the positive side of that,’ says Stellar. ‘It’s so embedded into humanity’s goal of trying to understand the world better and really taking on that challenge and those scary, unfamiliar parts, rather than shying away from it.’
All that being said, some of us are clearly more awe-prone than others. Modern life can also make awe feel inaccessible. If your life is packed full of work stress, domestic demands and commercialised spaces, you might feel that experiencing awe in your day-to-day existence is a challenge – or even an unobtainable luxury. I know I’ve felt that way, especially in the middle of a global pandemic when I’ve rarely left my suburban home and found myself in a loop of repetitive routines. Fortunately, there’s research suggesting that we don’t need to step out of our everyday lives to experience more awe, and in this Guide I’m going to show you how.