The Power of Awe

How awe can provide a vital break in the cadence of the mundane and encourage us to move away from self-centeredness.

It’s a feeling we’re all (hopefully) familiar with - an overwhelming sense of scale, an instant sense of presence, an awareness of the moment we’re living in.

Perhaps it’s the first time you saw the skyscrapers in New York City, craning your neck back to take it all in. Or when, after hours of hiking, you burst through the trees to be greeted by a view so tremendous that time itself seems to slow down.

Awe.

The nature of the feeling requires that it be extraordinary. Often associated with immenseness, be it natural or man-made, awe is tied to feelings of reverence - an appreciation for the magnificence of the world we inhabit.

When experiencing awe, we often feel that our problems and worries are suddenly less daunting. The stress of a minor problem at work feels less important when compared to the sight of the night sky alight with billions of stars.

What if, though, awe is more than just a sense of beauty or wonder? More than a way to minimize our problems? What if it’s a way to understand our existence amidst the vastness of the universe? A way to feel connected to others?

We’re predisposed to live our lives as the main characters in our story. We can get lost in the minutiae of routine and lose touch with the reality of our place in the world.

David Foster Wallace brilliantly outlined this in a commencement address to Kenyon College graduates back in 2005, “Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence… [this] is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth… there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute center of.”¹

The solution, in Wallace’s mind, is to constantly strive to maintain perspective - to think and remind yourself that everyone else is just as complex emotionally as you are and to rein in our sense of self: “The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.”

Easier said than done, no doubt. Wallace himself spends most of his speech addressing just how difficult this can be. Life is constantly affirming the overinflation of our sense of self. We’re encouraged to be selfish and to diminish the importance of others.

How, then, can we maintain a framing that allows us to remain aware of our place in the world?

This is where awe comes in. Whereas daily life drives self-centeredness, moments of awe - wonder at the world around us - can provide a vital break in the cadence of the mundane.

Think of a moment in which you truly felt awe. I think of my first visit to Yellowstone, looking out from Artist’s Point at the waterfall crashing down through the park’s Grand Canyon, or the first time I entered Notre Dame de Paris, brought to tears at the sheer beauty of the stained glass rose window. In such moments, we’re transported out of our routine by awe. Awe makes us feel part of something bigger, it diminishes that inflated sense of self.

Suddenly, we don’t seem so important in the grand scheme of things.

A 2015 study published by Piff, Dietze, Feinberg, Stancato, and Keltner in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology examined the effects of awe and found that there is concrete evidence to support the way awe can help reframe our reality.² It can function as a shortcut to tap into the awareness of our relative insignificance in the world.

In the study, they refer to this diminished sense of self as the ‘small self’, defined as ‘feeling one’s being and goals to be less significant.’ One might find that a rather somber conclusion, bordering on nihilism: “What does it matter anyways? Nothing I do matters."

But when we consider the context of our ‘default setting,’ we can come to the understanding that the insignificance we feel is not telling us that we don’t matter at all, but rather that we are not the only thing that matters.

This realization is a key element of the aforementioned study. Once the belief of our immeasurable importance has been dismantled by awe, several things become possible.

Firstly, an increased connectedness to the world and people around you, “Awe has also been associated with a sense that one is a part of something larger than oneself, most typically larger categories such as a community, a culture, the human species, or nature.”

This sense of connection to larger communities results in what is often referred to as prosocial behavior - defined as ‘voluntary behavior intended to benefit another.’³

What does prosocial behavior actually look like? I see a wondrous willow tree and I decide to donate to charity. Seems far-fetched.

But perhaps it isn’t?

Piff, Dietze, Feinberg, Stancato, and Keltner found that participants who had been presented with awe-inspiring clips from BBC’s nature documentary, Planet Earth were notably more generous when completing the ‘Dictator Game’ than those who had not been shown a video.

The game is simple: there are two players, one who controls all the resources and one who is passive (no control). The first player, the dictator, is tasked with deciding how much of the resources they want to share with the second player, ranging from giving it all away to giving nothing away.

In the study, those exposed to Planet Earth clips were nearly 21% more generous with the distribution of resources than the control group. Now, compare that to what you might feel experiencing such awe in person - the level of awe that comes from seeing the Northern Lights for the first time, or the energy of a live concert, sharing in the joy of music. One could assume the effect of that awe - that connectedness and generosity would increase.

The study included several different experiments all offering one conclusion:

…[T]hat awe, although often fleeting and hard to describe, serves a vital social function. By diminishing the emphasis on the individual self, awe may encourage people to forego strict self-interest to improve the welfare of others.

This foregoing of self-interest is exactly the break from the ‘default setting’ that Wallace is desperate for his liberal arts audience to understand. We have to push back against the narrative in our head that tells us that we are more important, more interesting, and more complex than everyone else.

This does not mean that the solution is to go out every day and look at a mountain and think, ‘Well, now I’m a good person.’ The work of managing our egocentric nature cannot be alleviated simply by main-lining awe-inducing experiences.

In the daily struggle to deviate from our default setting, we fail. We inevitably become convinced of our superior importance from time to time (if not the majority of the time). The danger is that this slip into the default setting almost always happens without our knowing. It builds up over the course of an exhausting day, week, or month.

To be able to break free from that tendency, we sometimes need an extra bit of help. You may not be able to find those mind-bending Northern-Lights-level awe moments every day, but awe can be found in little ways too.

Perhaps, we all just need a bit more David Attenborough in our lives.

The Visual Thinker is co-created by Conor Pfister and Michelle Reijngoud. Together, we work on researching various topics which we then explore with words (Conor) and visuals (Michelle). Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support our work.

1. Wallace, David Foster https://web.archive.org/web/20080213082423/http://www.marginalia.org/dfw_kenyon_commencement.html

2. Piff, Paul & Dietze, Pia & Feinberg, Matthew & Stancato, Daniel & Keltner, Dacher. (2015). Awe, the Small Self, and Prosocial Behavior. Journal of personality and social psychology. 108. 883-899. 10.1037/pspi0000018.

3. Eisenberg N. Altruistic emotion, cognition, and behavior. Hillsdale, N.J: Erlbaum; 1986.