Awe: An existential emotion that promotes personal growth
By Joshua Perlin
University of Florida. February 20, 2023.
The monotony of our lives is, on occasion, punctuated by moments of awe—moments in which we notice a grandeur that defies explanation and challenges us to think differently. Whether it’s being temporarily captured by the extravagance of a sunset or standing mesmerized before a cosmic portrait of stars and galaxies, we have all experienced that oceanic experience we call “awe”. But what exactly is awe? While we would often say we know it when we experience it, is there a way to precisely define what’s going on when we experience awe?
In psychological science, researchers have defined awe as involving two features: perceived vastness and a need for accommodation (Keltner & Haidt, 2003). The first feature—perceived vastness—entails the feeling of being in the presence of something great and expansive, whether that be in terms of sheer size (e.g., a tall mountain), complexity (e.g., fractals), or stature (e.g., a charismatic leader). Awe’s second feature—a need for accommodation—builds on the theory of cognitive development promoted by the famous developmental psychologist Jean Piaget (Piaget, 1950). According to Piaget, our existing mental representations of the world sometimes need to be adjusted to accommodate new information that is beyond our current comprehension. For example, if you found yourself in awe of a starry night, this would likely entail a feeling that the universe, in its shocking immensity and stunning splendor, stretches your mind to the limit of what it can understand. In short, awe is prompted by our awareness of something greater (perceived vastness) than what our current view of the world is able to appreciate (need for accommodation).
Social psychologists are not only interested in understanding awe—that is, asking what its component parts are. We are also keenly interested in the effects or consequences of experiencing awe, particularly effects involving other people. A large body of research shows that experiencing awe leads people to engage in prosocial behavior—behavior done for the benefit of other people (Piff et al., 2015). But why would that be the case? Why would it be that awe, an emotion often evoked by things distinctly not involving other people (e.g., stars, mountains, sunsets, etc.), would lead people to care about others? My colleagues and I have been thinking about this issue in depth, particularly in light of a growing body of research on awe. In a theoretical paper published in Perspectives on Psychological Science, Dr. Leon Li and I (2020) set out to understand the psychological processes occurring underneath the surface of the link between awe and prosocial behavior. Such a task, it should go without saying, is aided immensely by appealing to the conceptual tools and methods of Existential Psychology.
In this article, I will summarize the earlier and most popular model linking awe and prosociality, discuss three areas for improving that conceptualization, and show how we can advance our understanding of the association of awe and prosociality by attending more to awe’s connection to a topic of great interest to Existential Psychology: the Self. Following that discussion, I’ll describe a new and improved model of awe’s prosocial effects given these theories on selfhood.
An earlier model of awe’s effect on prosociality: The “small-self” hypothesis
The first and most popular interpretation of the link between awe and prosociality has been called the “small-self” hypothesis. This hypothesis is grounded in the idea that awe leads us to be prosocial by lessening our attention to ourselves (thus, a “small” self), freeing up our attention for other people. To be sure, there is some good social scientific evidence that leads researchers to this hypothesis. Namely, in studies that induced some participants to experience awe, compared to other participants induced to experience another emotion (e.g., pride) or no particular emotion, those who felt awe reported more feelings of self-diminishment (Piff et al., 2015; Shiota et al., 2007).
Room for improvement: Three shortcomings of the small-self hypothesis
While my co-author and I felt that the small-self hypothesis was a good start for explaining the awe–prosociality link, we also identified three aspects of this approach that left room for improvement:
Shortcoming #1: The small-self hypothesis unnecessarily pits concerns about oneself against concerns about others. The logic of the small-self hypothesis is that I can only ever give attention to either myself or another person. In actuality, however, the two can work together through our uniquely human capacity for interdependence—not just a sense of “you” or “me” but a sense of “we” (Tomasello, 2019). That sense of “we”, for example, would be exemplified by the feeling of shared humanity with all people, which incidentally is commonly endorsed by people after experiencing awe (Van Cappellen & Saroglou, 2012). An implication of this shortcoming is that awe’s prosocial effects are likely not just a result of my attending to your being in an unfortunate situation; in addition to that, it is the sense that you are human just like me.
Shortcoming #2: The small-self hypothesis assumes that attention automatically implies motivation. However, a shifting of attention away from oneself and towards others would not really explain why we would be motivated to help others. To explain why we would want to help others when our attention shifts towards them, we need to account for internal motivations like personal goals, values, and beliefs. In turn, because these internal motivations differ from person to person, our prosocial responses to awe are likely to occur in ways unique to who we are. The small-self hypothesis does not seem to explain this well; it seems to stay at the level of shifts in attention and does not probe deeper into what underlying motivations may be driving awe’s prosocial effects.
Shortcoming #3: The third shortcoming was that awe, my co-author and I felt, must be bigger—must be more existentially meaningful—than the rather mechanistic and reductionist way it was being described. To be sure, the greatest credit to the small-self hypothesis is its simplicity. Nevertheless, this benefit can also be its detriment: By focusing only on shifts in attention, the small-self hypothesis fails do justice to the sheer impact of awe on who we are as people, to its capacity to transform and re-orient our lives. For example, in their seminal paper on awe, Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt (2003) use the story of St. Paul’s revelatory experience on the Damascus road to illustrate awe’s transformative effects. But can something as seemingly simple as shifts in attention really explain St. Paul’s dramatic reconfiguration of priorities? When we experience awe and feel compelled to help another person, it’s not just that I now have more attention to dedicate to that other person, although that is certainly part of the equation. Rather, there is something deeper we feel. We not only attend less to our own desires; we feel less concerned about them. We not only attend to the other person; we care about them. In simpler terms, there is some real growth and transformation that happens in the wake of a profound awe experience that can’t be adequately accounted for by the small-self hypothesis. Thus, my co-author and I argue that the self, rather than merely shrinking in the wake of awe, actually develops. In a manner of speaking, it seems that awe ultimately doesn’t promote personal diminishment as much as it may promote personal growth.
In reflecting on these three shortcomings of the small-self hypothesis, my co-author and I saw that what connected them was, in point of fact, an existential thread: the need for a fuller theoretical conception of the self. In other words, what the small-self hypothesis might have actually been missing is a more robust idea of what the self is in the first place.
The multi-layered self as a platform for improved theoretical understanding
To try to overcome the above shortcomings, my co-author and I attempted to link the awe–prosociality relationship to recent research on psychological selfhood. This research understands the self as consisting of three “layers”: the self as a social actor, the self as a motivated agent, and the self as an autobiographical author (McAdams, 2013). Each of these layers of the self, importantly, corresponds to and addresses one of the aforementioned shortcomings.
Social actor. First, the self can be conceptualized as a social actor who performs roles within communities. Human beings are remarkably and uniquely social. Even the beginnings of our very sense of self—of ourselves as individuals within a collective—are rooted in our evolved capacity for understanding others’ perspectives on who we are and what we are like. In other words, I learn to know who I am because I was first known by you. Given our ultra-sociality, human beings have the distinctive capacity for interdependence, that is, not just a sense of “I” or “you” but, strikingly, a sense that “we” are bound together (Tomasello, 2019). Entailed in this sense of interdependence is the close linking of self and other, a union which is unappreciated by the logic of the small-self hypothesis (Improvement #1). Indeed, Abraham Maslow (1961), one of the originators of research on self-transcendence (of which awe is an example), claimed that in peak experiences, the individual both “feels himself . . . to be the responsible, active, creating center of his activities” (p. 256) and cultivates an attitude of “respecting-loving the other” (p. 257). He went on to say that peak experiences facilitate the sense that “the intrapsychic (me) and the extra-psychic (other) are not so terribly different after all, and certainly are not really antagonistic” (p. 258).
But the issue is not just a theoretical one: Empirical research on awe has shown that awe leads to reflections on self-concept that include other people and broad social categories (e.g., Van Cappellen & Saroglou, 2012). Further, empirical research has demonstrated that the self is not completely discounted during awe experiences. For example, individuals who experienced awe attributed their accomplishments to external forces to a greater extent (on a sliding scale of 0%–100%) than individuals experiencing amusement or no particular emotion; however, individuals in the awe condition still only attributed about 55% of the credit for these achievements to external forces (Stellar et al., 2018). Therefore, the self is likely not obliterated in awe (attention is not just shifted from oneself to another in a mutually exclusive way), but rather there is more of a sense of balanced humility and interdependence.
Motivated agent. Second, the self can be conceptualized as a motivated agent, striving towards particular goals based on a unique set of beliefs and values. Intuitively, we know that individuals differ with respect to their internal goals, beliefs, and values. Yet, the small-self hypothesis—with its seeming self-other dichotomy—cannot help but overlook the influence of these internal dimensions of motivation on awe’s prosocial effects (Improvement #2). In other words, if awe is said to shift attention away from the self, then the self—including its unique goals, beliefs, and values—cannot possibly exert an influence.
However, there is mounting empirical evidence that internal goals, beliefs, and values do influence awe’s effects in unique ways. For example, Patty Van Cappellen and Vassilis Saroglou (2012) found that different awe elicitors (i.e., videos of nature vs. videos of childbirth) led to different responses depending on participants’ religious and spiritual beliefs. When people scored high on traditional religiosity, awe from childbirth videos led to greater feelings of closeness with friends specifically but not with human beings broadly. By contrast, when people endorsed more “spiritual universality”, awe from nature videos led to feelings of greater closeness with human beings broadly but not with friends specifically. Additionally, Bai and colleagues (2017) found that awe led Chinese participants to feel more closely connected with others but led American participants to perceive more social ties. In the first instance, awe is leading to a sense of deep relationships, whereas in the second instance awe is leading to a sense of numerous relationships.
Autobiographical author. Finally, the self can be conceptualized as an autobiographical author, narrating a life story about where they’ve been in the past, are in the present, and will be headed in the future. This layer of the self is capable of making sense of awe’s transformative potential for personal growth and psychosocial development (Improvement #3). Specifically, individuals use themes of accommodative processes (which are, as a reminder, central to experiences of awe) in their self-narratives in order to document how they have changed as an individual over time. What’s more, these accommodative processes in the life story have been shown to relate to personal growth, self-development, and psychosocial maturity (King et al., 2000), which are often defined in relation to prosociality (Westenberg & Block, 1993). By way of just one example of many, Jennifer Pals Lilgendahl and her colleagues (2013) found that women who narrated life challenges at age 52 using themes of accommodative processing showed increases in self-development over an 18-year period between the ages of 43 and 61.
Awe facilitates a quiet ego, not a small-self
So, where does all of this theory on the self lead? Ultimately, any theory of awe’s prosocial effects on the self should account for: (1) our capacity for self-other interdependence and therefore less of a self–other dichotomy; (2) internal motivations, including personal goals, beliefs, and values that may contour awe’s prosocial effects; and (3) awe’s capacity to effect personal growth and psychosocial development through accommodative processes.
Incidentally, psychologists working in the existential, humanistic, and positive psychology traditions have called such a sense of self the “quiet ego” (Wayment & Bauer, 2008). The quiet ego is a description of the self at its most mature. It is a self that is characterized by an appreciation of self–other interdependence, a posture that sustains prosocial behaviors (Improvement #1); internal motivations to behave prosocially (Improvement #2); and an orientation toward personal growth and psychosocial development that results in a more mature—and, in turn, more prosocial—sense of self (Improvement #3) (Bauer, 2008; Wayment & Bauer, 2008, 2017, 2018; Wayment et al., 2015). In sum, a better description of what awe is doing in producing prosocial behaviors is “quieting the ego” rather than “making the self small”. It was a happy accident for me and my co-authors that the terms “quiet ego” and “small self”—used in separate arenas of psychological science—seemed to linguistically parallel each other so elegantly. Existing theory on the quiet ego ultimately allowed us to posit that awe researchers were onto a good start with the small-self hypothesis; however, the hypothesis needed further theoretical refinement and a different lens (an existential psychological perspective on the self) in order to account more fully for what awe is and how it is linked to prosocial behaviors.
It is possible that, in the final analysis, awe is too profound an experience—its phenomenology too thick—to be reduced to any one mechanistic theory or clever experimental design. While it is important to pursue scholarly, empirical work on such a topic, the experience itself may ultimately transcend any categories we scholars try to impose on it. It may belong to that class of phenomena we might call “ineffable”, and the sheer depth and richness of such an experience is perhaps enough to make one feel awed.
Joshua Perlin is a graduate student in Dr. Erin Westgate’s Florida Social Cognition and Emotion Lab at the University of Florida. He attended Emory University for his undergraduate degree, earning a B.A. in psychology with a minor in ethics. At Emory, he worked in Dr. Robyn Fivush’s Family Narratives Lab, where he cultivated an interest in approaching the self as an ongoing story through time. After graduating, he was a lab manager for the Identity and Diversity Lab at Duke University under the direction of Dr. Sarah Gaither. His research interests concern how linking the self to the past and future through storytelling—both within one’s own lifetime and across generations—can promote the good life. Additionally, he is interested in how various religious and secular worldviews shape the construction of a “good life story”. His research is currently funded by an NSF GRFP.