How Awe Experiences Dissolve The Boundaries Of Self

The word gets thrown around loosely — people say they were "awed" by a sandwich, by a quarterly revenue number, by a well-executed marketing campaign. Strip away the inflation and find the actual emotion.

Keltner and Jonathan Haidt provided the foundational characterization in a 2003 paper in Cognition and Emotion. They defined awe as an emotion elicited by stimuli that are vast (physically, conceptually, or socially) and that challenge or transcend existing mental structures. Two components: perceived vastness and the need for accommodation — the normal categories don't fit what's being encountered, and the mind has to stretch.

This is different from beauty (which doesn't require vastness), from admiration (which doesn't require that existing structures be challenged), from fear (which narrows attention rather than expanding it), and from joy (which is typically self-referential — I am happy — whereas awe often involves the self temporarily stepping aside).

Awe has historically been understood in religious contexts as the appropriate response to the sacred — Rudolf Otto's Das Heilige (The Idea of the Holy, 1917) described it as the experience of the mysterium tremendum et fascinans — the mystery that is at once terrifying and fascinating. Otto's analysis was specifically about religious awe, but Keltner and Haidt's framework generalizes it: the same phenomenological structure appears when people encounter moral beauty, intellectual vastness, artistic sublimity, or natural grandeur. The sacred is not the only container for this experience — it may simply be one historically dominant way of naming a more general human capacity.

What the experience feels like from the inside, across these different triggers, is remarkably consistent: a sense of being in the presence of something larger than the self; a momentary loosening of self-boundaries; a change in time perception (time often seems to slow or become irrelevant); physical sensations (often described as chills, goosebumps, a feeling in the chest); and a characteristic shift in attention from self-focused to world-focused.

The neural substrates of awe are being mapped with increasing precision. What we know implicates several overlapping systems.

The default mode network (DMN) — the same system central to ego dissolution research described in the companion article on interconnection — shows reduced activity during awe states. The DMN's job is self-referential processing: maintaining the autobiographical self, evaluating incoming information for relevance to "me," running the rumination and planning loops that constitute much of ordinary mental life. When its activity decreases, the constant pressure of self-concern reduces.

This is not unconsciousness. People in awe states are fully, often intensely, conscious. But the specific quality of self-referential consciousness — the "what does this mean for me?" question that ordinarily runs in the background of every perception — temporarily recedes.

Concurrently, research has found increased activity in the insula (involved in interoception — awareness of bodily states — and in empathy for others' physical states) and in the anterior cingulate cortex (associated with awareness of conflict, error detection, and — in social contexts — sensitivity to others' distress). Both of these are implicated in other-oriented emotional processing. The neural signature of awe, then, is not just "self off" but "self off / other on" — a rebalancing of the attention system away from the first-person perspective.

Research by Michele Shiota and colleagues using skin conductance and self-report measures has confirmed the physiological reality of awe: it's not just a self-description. The body is doing something distinct during awe experiences — something characterizable and measurable.

Belinda Campos and colleagues found that awe involves specific patterns of facial expression (mouth open, eyes wide, head tilted — the postural signature of taking something in rather than defending against it) that are cross-culturally recognizable, suggesting it is a basic human emotion with deep evolutionary roots, not a culturally specific construction.

Most relevant to the argument of this book: Keltner's research team found that awe reliably predicts prosocial behavior. In one series of studies, participants who had just experienced awe (induced by watching an awe-inspiring video, or by standing among very large trees, or by recalling an awe experience) showed greater generosity in economic games, greater willingness to give time to help a stranger, greater scores on measures of social connection and reduced entitlement. The mechanism appeared to operate through the small-self effect: reduced awe-related self-importance was the mediating variable.

This chain — vastness encounters self, self shrinks, prosocial orientation increases — is one of the most significant findings in moral psychology of the past two decades. It suggests that expanding the capacity for prosocial behavior does not require primarily moral exhortation or behavioral incentives. It requires expanding people's access to the experience of their own smallness in a vast world — which, paradoxically, most people find not deflating but liberating.

The "small self" is Keltner's term but the concept has deep roots in psychology and philosophy. What does it actually mean for the self to be "small"?

In ordinary consciousness, there is a background assumption that functions as the organizing principle of experience: I am the center. Not ideologically — most people don't explicitly think "I am the center of the universe." But phenomenologically, your experience is organized around your perspective, your needs, your ongoing concerns. This is not narcissism; it is the structure of ordinary first-person experience. You can't help it. That's how consciousness is built.

The small self is what happens when that organizing principle relaxes. It's not that the self disappears — it's that it moves from the center of the frame to a position within the frame, aware that it is one point in a much larger field. The frame itself becomes visible. This is technically a kind of meta-cognition — the self becomes aware of itself as a perspective rather than identifying entirely with its perspective.

This shift has effects at multiple levels:

Perceptual: When the self is small, more of the world gets in. Attention widens. What was background becomes figure. Other people, previously experienced as relatively flat (they matter insofar as they are relevant to my concerns), suddenly register with more depth. This is the perceptual basis of the empathy and prosocial orientation that follow awe.

Temporal: The small self is less dominated by past (rumination, grievance) and future (anxiety, planning). It is more present. Time, already stretched by the awe experience, feels more available.

Relational: The small self experiences fewer status concerns. Research shows that awe reduces both expressions of entitlement and competitive behavior. If you feel small in the face of something vast, the hierarchical games of ordinary social life temporarily seem less important.

Existential: People in awe states frequently report a reduction in existential anxiety — the low-level fear about meaning, mortality, and personal significance that constitutes much of ordinary psychological suffering. Being small in a vast world, it turns out, can feel less threatening than being large in a small world.

This is where the politics of awe gets real.

If the main sources of awe experience are — as they appear in most popular discourse — exotic travel, wilderness encounters, or cathedral ceilings, then awe is a luxury good. Available to those with the money and mobility to access it, correlated with class and geography. The awe experience becomes one more item on the list of things that inequality distributes unfairly.

Keltner's research explicitly challenges this framing — and the challenge matters politically.

His team identified eight primary "elicitors" of awe across their cross-cultural research: nature, music, visual art and architecture, moral beauty, spiritual or religious experience, birth and death, vast knowledge or ideas, and the sublime in human performance (witnessing extraordinary skill or courage). The key finding: moral beauty — witnessing acts of unexpected compassion, generosity, or courage — is not only a reliable awe elicitor but one that is equally accessible across income levels, across cultures, across age groups.

You don't need the Grand Canyon. You need to witness a person doing something genuinely good when they didn't have to. You need to see courage that costs something. You need to encounter unexpected kindness at scale. All of this happens in ordinary life, everywhere, in neighborhoods of every income level.

Music — particularly collective music experience — is another equalizer. The same neural and physiological awe-markers appear whether you're at Carnegie Hall or singing in a church basement with ten people or listening to a song alone that hits something in you. Keltner's cross-cultural work found that music is one of the most universal awe elicitors across societies.

The night sky is free. The ocean is free. A forest is free, or far more accessible than a luxury vacation. A good film is free at the library. A conversation with a person who has lived through something extraordinary and survived it is free. Human courage in ordinary contexts — parents sacrificing for children, people staying beside the dying, someone telling the hard truth when a comfortable lie was available — is distributed everywhere.

The access problem is real but not primarily economic. It's primarily attentional. We have built systems that train attention to stay small, to stay in the loop of personal feedback (likes, scores, rankings, personal metrics), to treat every moment as an opportunity for consumption or self-presentation. In that attentional environment, even people standing at the rim of the Grand Canyon are checking their phones. The canyon is there. The awe is blocked.

The question is not how to give people more resources. The question is how to reclaim the attention capacity to encounter what's already in front of them.

Robert Putnam documented the collapse of American civic life in Bowling Alone (2000) — the long-term decline in associational membership, neighborly engagement, trust in institutions, and informal social connection that defined American civic culture in the post-war decades. That trend has continued and deepened. Loneliness has been declared a public health crisis by the U.S. Surgeon General. Social isolation is now documented as a health risk equivalent to smoking fifteen cigarettes a day.

The pathology is not merely social — it is cognitive and perceptual. Isolated individualism is a way of experiencing the world: as populated by separate selves competing for scarce goods, in which every encounter is potentially adversarial, in which trust is an invitation to be exploited, in which the only reliable entity is the self. This is not a moral failure. It is what the experience of chronic separation produces.

Awe intervenes in this cognitive and perceptual pattern directly, at the level of experience rather than argument. You cannot argue someone out of isolated individualism the way you cannot argue someone out of a phobia. The pattern lives at the level of felt reality, of what the world actually seems like from the inside. And awe — precisely because it reorganizes felt reality rather than changing beliefs — can shift it in ways that arguments can't.

Several studies are particularly relevant here:

Paul Piff and colleagues found that people primed with awe showed reduced scores on measures of entitlement and narcissism, and increased identification with groups extending beyond the immediate in-group — identifying more strongly with humanity as a whole rather than with their specific demographic group. The awe experience appeared to expand the functional boundary of the "we."

Yaden and colleagues documented what they call "self-transcendent experiences" — a category that includes awe and related states — and found that they are among the most strongly remembered experiences in people's lives, are associated with lasting positive changes in well-being and meaning, and reliably shift the balance between individual and collective orientation.

Craig Anderson and colleagues studied awe experienced in natural settings and found that even brief exposures (a few minutes near very large trees) produced measurable reductions in self-reported entitlement and increased reporting of being part of something larger than oneself.

What these studies point toward collectively is that awe is not a transient emotional event that leaves no trace. It is a genuine reorientation — brief, often, but with effects that linger. It updates, at the level of felt reality, the model of what the self is and how large the relevant "we" is.

If awe reliably produces small-self effects, pro-social behavior, expanded sense of collective identity, and reduced entitlement — and if these effects are accessible across income levels — then awe is a public health resource.

This reframing has practical implications:

Urban design: Cities that include access to sky, water, large trees, and architecture that induces a sense of scale are providing awe infrastructure. Cities that eliminate these — replacing them with surfaces scaled to individual human transactions — are impoverishing their populations in a specific, measurable way. The research supports including awe-access in public health and urban planning frameworks.

Education: A curriculum that regularly places students in contact with the genuinely vast — with the full scale of history, the complexity of living systems, the depth of mathematical or scientific ideas, the moral enormity of what humans have done to each other and for each other — is providing awe as part of its baseline function. A curriculum oriented primarily around testable knowledge and career preparation is not. Both are choices, and they have downstream consequences for who the students become.

Media and culture: Media environments optimized for outrage and self-validation produce the opposite of awe — they produce a highly activated, narrow, self-focused attentional state. Media environments that include encounters with genuine human courage, genuine natural vastness, genuine artistic transcendence are providing something of public health value. The case for protecting and funding public media, public arts, and natural spaces has a dimension that public health discourse has not yet fully incorporated.

Personal practice: Individuals who build regular awe practice — deliberately seeking out experiences that invoke it, attending carefully when it arises, protecting space for encounters with the vast — are maintaining a specific cognitive and emotional resource. This is not a luxury. It is maintenance of the capacity to be fully human rather than just a node in the personal-feedback loop.

Individual awe is one thing. Collective awe is another, and arguably more important.

Humans evolved in groups in which collective experience was normal — collective ceremony, collective response to natural events, collective engagement with music and story. The experience of being awed together, of the self going small in a shared space where everyone else's self is also going small, creates a specific form of social bond. The research on collective effervescence — the work of Émile Durkheim, extended by contemporary researchers like Jonathan Haidt and Jeremy Frimer — shows that shared emotional experience, particularly shared experience of elevation and awe, is one of the most powerful generators of social cohesion available to human groups.

This is, in part, what collective religious experience has always functioned to do. The critique of institutional religion's abuses is real and necessary. But throwing away the technology of collective awe with the critique of its historical containers is cutting off something that serves a deep human need.

The need for structured occasions of collective encounter with vastness — occasions that transcend ordinary self-concern, that remind people that they are part of something beyond the personal — does not go away when the traditional containers fail. It looks for other containers, sometimes in politics (where it gets exploited by demagogues who provide the emotional form of collective awe without the pro-social content), sometimes in sports, sometimes in entertainment, sometimes in protest.

The question of what sustainable, culturally legitimate, widely accessible containers for collective awe can look like is one of the genuinely important design questions of our era. It is not answered. But it is answerable.

Exercise 1: The Awe Audit

Take fifteen minutes and make a list — no editing, just stream — of every experience in your life you would characterize as genuinely awe-inducing. Go back as far as you can. Note the setting, what it felt like in your body, what happened to your self-concern during it, and how you felt in relation to other people afterward.

Look at what patterns emerge. What are your reliable awe-inducers? How long ago was the last one? What, if anything, is blocking regular access?

Exercise 2: Slow Looking

Choose one thing — a painting, a tree, a piece of music, a night sky — and engage with it for longer than feels comfortable. Most encounters with potentially awe-inducing stimuli are too brief for the awe to land. We look and move on. The awe requires enough duration for the normal self-referential processing to become bored with itself and make room for something else.

Set a timer for fifteen minutes. Stay with one thing. Don't evaluate it. Don't take a photo. Just be there with it long enough for it to get larger than your initial assessment of it.

Exercise 3: Witnessing Moral Beauty

For two weeks, keep a daily record of any moment in which you witness someone doing something genuinely good that cost them something. It doesn't have to be dramatic. A person on public transit giving up their seat and then looking away so the recipient doesn't have to thank them. A parent staying patient under obvious stress. A stranger stopping to help. A colleague admitting they were wrong.

Write it down. Spend thirty seconds attending to what it felt like in your body to witness it. Notice whether anything in your sense of what people are capable of shifts over the two weeks.

Exercise 4: The Collective Experience

Identify one upcoming opportunity to experience something vast in a group setting — a concert, a ceremony, a public event oriented toward something larger than individual preference, a protest or vigil, a sporting event that has stakes. Go. But instead of being a consumer of the event, be a participant in the collective. Notice other people's faces. Notice your own body. Notice the specific quality of having your self go small in a room where other people's selves are also going small.

Write a few sentences afterward about what, if anything, changed in how you felt about the people around you.

Exercise 5: Daily Sky

Commit to one minute of looking at the sky every day for thirty days. Not photographing it. Not thinking about what kind of day it is or whether rain is coming. Just looking. At the scale of it. At the fact that it extends in all directions without edge.

This is a small practice. Its effects are not small.

- Dacher Keltner, Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life (2023) - Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt, "Approaching awe, a moral, spiritual, and aesthetic emotion" (2003, Cognition and Emotion) - Paul Piff et al., "Awe, the small self, and prosocial behavior" (2015, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology) - Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind (2012) — particularly on collective effervescence and moral elevation - Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy (1917) - Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone (2000) - David Yaden et al., "The varieties of self-transcendent experience" (2017, Review of General Psychology) - Abraham Heschel, God in Search of Man (1955) — the theological tradition on radical amazement - Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) — the foundational aesthetic theory