The Science of Awe: How Wonder Changes Our Sense of Self

You step out of a cottage after dark to bring in a jacket you left on the rail. The porch light has gone out and, for a few seconds, all you can see is the outline of the ridge. Then more stars become visible. What looked like an empty stretch of sky begins to show depth, with a pale band running almost from one horizon to the other. The message you were composing in your head can wait. You stand there long enough to notice that the jacket is cold in your hands.

That shift in perspective is part of what psychologists call awe. An encounter can feel so vast, powerful or intricate that it takes a moment to work out where you fit. The feeling can be joyful, unsettling or a mixture of both. Researchers have begun to test which aspects of that experience change how people see themselves, how they attend to their surroundings and what they do when someone else needs a hand.

What exactly is awe?

Keltner and Haidt (2003) proposed that clear cases of awe involve two appraisals. One is perceived vastness. A mountain range can seem vast in space, the age of a fossil vast in time and an extraordinary musical performance vast in skill. The other is a need for accommodation, the sense that the encounter stretches the mental framework you usually use to understand it. A glacier may look imposing in a photograph. Standing near one and realising that a whole valley owes its shape to moving ice can stretch your understanding of what ice can do.

Surprise registers a break with expectation. Admiration recognises something worthy of esteem. Happiness can come from a familiar pleasure, and curiosity pulls us towards a question we want to answer. Awe can include any of these feelings and adds a particular problem of scale or understanding. Cowen and Keltner (2017) found distinguishable categories, including awe, in people’s emotional reports after watching short videos. They also found gradual transitions between categories. In practice, a performance can be surprising for a few seconds, admirable on reflection and awe-inspiring when you grasp what it took to deliver it.

The psychology of overwhelming wonder

We use expectations to make unfamiliar scenes intelligible. On a visit to a fossil gallery, you might read that two creatures lived millions of years apart and initially file that fact under ‘a very long time’. A timeline that puts both fossils, the first humans and your own lifetime on one wall can make that category feel inadequate. Accommodation describes the work of revising the frame. Feeling that revision is needed and actually changing what you believe are separate steps. An experience can interrupt your usual interpretation even if you leave with only a clearer sense of what you have yet to understand.

Across four preregistered studies, McPhetres (2019) found that awe-inducing videos made people more aware of gaps in their knowledge. People who reported those gaps also tended to express more interest in science. A later study series by Tunç et al. (2026) asked whether nature’s beauty felt possible to capture with a conventional measure. Participants exposed to awe inductions tended to judge that beauty as less amenable to measurement. One experiment suggested a role for having expectations exceeded. The judgement concerns what people felt a measurement could capture. A photograph can have an exact exposure time, while the scene it records can still feel poorly described by numbers. This is one way awe and curiosity can intersect.

The small-self phenomenon

In a moment of awe, the self can seem to occupy less of the scene. Shiota et al. (2007) found that an awe-inducing encounter influenced how participants described themselves in relation to larger groups. Piff et al. (2015) examined the idea across five studies, using measures that separated feeling smaller from sensing something vast in relation to oneself. Some of their analyses linked aspects of the small self to more generous or other-oriented responses. Those analyses suggest a possible pathway. Establishing whether smallness itself causes someone to help would require isolating it from other things the experience changes, such as mood or interest in the people nearby.

Feeling small next to a mountain is a judgement about scale. Self-esteem concerns how you evaluate yourself. You can feel secure in your abilities while being acutely aware of how little space you occupy under the night sky. Edwards et al. (2026) separated metaphorical self-size from a sense of personal significance in four experiments. Participants tended to describe a smaller self after awe, while their reports of feeling significant followed a similar pattern across awe and comparison conditions. The distinction helps explain how a moment can make someone’s immediate concerns recede while leaving their sense of worth intact.

Awe and social behaviour

Helping, intending and feeling connected

In a field experiment, Piff et al. (2015) gave participants a minute to look up at either towering eucalyptus trees or a tall building nearby. A researcher then dropped a box of pens in a staged accident. People in the tree condition picked up more pens on average. Other studies in the paper used resource-allocation games or questions about how participants would respond to an ethical dilemma. Picking up a pen is an action. Choosing how to divide a stake tests generosity under specified rules. A survey answer tells us what someone says they would do. Each gives a different view of prosociality.

Across 30 papers, Gao et al. (2025) found an overall positive relationship between awe and prosocial outcomes, with differences across behaviours. The synthesis brought together studies that elicited awe and studies that measured a person’s tendency to experience it. An experiment can test how a particular induction changes an immediate decision. An association with a general tendency leaves room for other influences, including who seeks out awe-inspiring settings and who has opportunities to volunteer.

Stellar et al. (2017) describe awe as a self-transcendent emotion because it can direct attention beyond immediate self-interest. That wider focus can take a particular social direction. Song et al. (2026) reported that awe induced by recall or virtual reality strengthened reported identity fusion, a sense of oneness with a specific group or collective. Feeling more closely bound to a group is one route by which people might co-operate. It leaves open whom they will include and how they will respond when a shared goal asks something of them.

The neuroscience of awe

What a brain scan can show

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) detects changes in blood oxygenation that researchers use to infer changes in brain activity. Van Elk et al. (2019) showed participants awe-inducing, pleasant and neutral videos. Sometimes participants were asked to become absorbed in the footage. At other times, they counted changes in camera perspective. Parts of the default mode network, a set of regions involved in processes such as thinking about oneself and remembering personal events, were generally more active during absorption than during counting. The difference between those tasks was smaller for the awe videos.

Some frontoparietal regions involved in attention and task control were especially active when participants counted perspective changes in the awe clips. The footage may have been particularly absorbing, making the counting task more demanding. The study supports a shift in what holds attention under those viewing conditions. Different camera cuts, levels of arousal and demands on attention could also contribute. A brain signal gives researchers a way to compare those conditions, while participants’ reports give a separate view of what the experience felt like.

Takano and Nomura (2022) compared videos eliciting pleasant awe with amusing videos, and videos eliciting threatening awe with frightening videos. Both awe conditions showed lower activity in part of the left middle temporal gyrus relative to their respective comparisons. The patterns of co-activity with other regions differed, with amygdala connectivity featuring in the threatening condition. Those patterns are a starting point for studying how attention, threat and self-related thought interact during awe. The experiment measured short-term responses to clips. Lasting changes would require a different design and measurements after the experience had passed.

Nature as a source of awe

A forest canopy, the movement of an ocean or the sudden view across a mountain pass can put an ordinary sense of scale under pressure. Joye and Bolderdijk (2015) compared slideshows of extraordinary landscapes, more ordinary nature and neutral scenes. Viewers of the extraordinary scenes reported more feelings of smallness and humility. Their choices on a social-allocation measure also shifted, while ratings of willingness to donate were similar across groups. The slideshow design removes exercise from the comparison, although the photographs can still differ in beauty, novelty and visual complexity.

Anderson et al. (2018) followed people taking part in whitewater rafting and found that reported awe during the trip predicted changes in well-being one week later. A separate diary study linked students’ encounters with nature, their reported awe and their well-being. In the rafting setting, exercise, the company of other people and the novelty of the trip were all part of the experience. In the diary setting, people chose where they spent their time. Both studies capture awe in real settings. A controlled walk can ask a narrower question about the role of attention within a shared outdoor activity.

Awe beyond nature

Perceived vastness can come from a painting whose detail keeps opening up as you look, a scientific idea that explains observations you had thought unrelated, or a musician sustaining a phrase you could barely imagine before hearing it. Salimpoor et al. (2011) used brain imaging to study dopamine release around peak emotional moments in music. Their experiment concerned intense musical pleasure. A bodily chill can mark that kind of pleasure and can also accompany awe. What the listener makes of the music helps distinguish the two experiences.

Graziosi and Yaden (2021) examined awe evoked by other people, including reactions to remarkable skill and virtue. Watching an athlete execute a move can give you a finer sense of what years of practice make possible. Hearing that someone repeatedly helped a stranger at a cost to themselves can stretch your expectations of what people are willing to do for one another. The particular action may be small in physical scale, even as its implications grow on reflection. The same episode may also elicit admiration, gratitude or a desire to emulate the person.

The darker side of awe

Imagine watching a wall of storm cloud advance across an open plain. The scene can be absorbing even as the speed of the wind changes what you need to do next. Gordon et al. (2017) found that threatening awe was associated with more fear and a weaker sense of personal control than more positive forms. One experiment also reported differences in indicators of autonomic arousal, the bodily changes involved in states such as alertness and recovery. The comparison helps explain why being transfixed by something can feel very different depending on how safe or powerful you feel in its presence.

In a registered report, Zhao et al. (2026) compared pleasant and threatening awe using both recalled experiences and videos, with neutral comparison conditions. Both variants increased reported connectedness relative to neutral, with stronger connectedness for pleasant awe. Both also increased reports of changes in the experience of self. The researchers’ new measure yielded similar scores for the two awe conditions on its pleasant and unpleasant aspects of self-loss. A person can feel drawn into a larger scene and at the same time feel unsettled by the scale of what is happening.

How culture influences awe

Bai et al. (2017) examined awe across six studies, including comparisons of participants in China and the United States. People in both settings reported a smaller sense of self in response to awe, while the kinds of experience they recalled and the size of some effects varied. In one daily-report study, participants in China mentioned other people as a source of awe more often, while participants in the United States more often reported experiences centred on themselves. The groups included many students, and the findings describe those samples and settings. Family expectations, spiritual practices, local landscapes and experiences of travel can vary substantially within a single country.

Language affects what a comparison can establish. Takano and Nomura (2023) asked Japanese participants to recall pleasant or threatening awe, using different Japanese terms for the two conditions. People recalling threat reported more powerlessness, and that measure helped account for stronger endorsement of interdependence. The outcome was a judgement about mutual reliance. How people actually support their neighbours after an event remains a separate question. Katz and Franz (2026) argue that much of the literature depends heavily on asking for ‘awe’ by name. Asking what happened, what people attended to and how they understood the experience can give researchers more to compare than a single translated label.

Awe and our sense of time

In three experiments, Rudd et al. (2012) found that participants who experienced awe reported more time available or less impatience, depending on the task. In one experiment they were also more willing to volunteer time. Think of how an evening can feel less hurried after you have spent a few minutes looking up, even when the clock shows that you have fewer minutes left. Felt time availability is a judgement about how much room you have to do things. Estimating the length of an interval and remembering how quickly a year went by are different questions about our experience of time.

Can we deliberately experience more awe?

Sturm et al. (2022) randomly assigned 60 older adults to take either awe-oriented or control walks, with a weekly 15-minute walk over eight weeks. The awe group received instructions to look for things that might evoke wonder. They reported more awe on their walks and tended to occupy less of the frame in photos of themselves over time. They also reported increases in positive emotions towards others in daily life relative to the control group. A smaller figure in a photograph could reflect the choice to show more scenery, making it an indirect measure of the small self.

The comparison is useful because both groups went outside and walked. The instructions also changed what participants expected to notice, and they may have led people to seek out different places. With one small group of older adults and outcomes measured during the eight-week study, the size and persistence of similar effects elsewhere remain open questions. The part of the experiment most easily tried on an ordinary walk is the shift of attention. On a familiar route you might look up at how a tree branches above the roofline or pause to follow a sound across a space. Whether the result feels like awe depends on what the detail brings into view for you.

What researchers still do not know

One challenge is deciding what counts as evidence for a change. The Awe Experience Scale developed by Yaden et al. (2019) distinguishes six facets, including physical sensations, vastness, perceived changes in time and smallness of self. That breadth lets researchers describe different kinds of experience. It also makes it important to check which items are used. If a score for awe already includes questions about feeling small, correlating that score with a second small-self measure partly compares overlapping content. Separate measures can help establish whether one experience reliably precedes the other.

Jiang et al. (2024) review evidence linking awe to outcomes such as social connection and changes in how people understand the world. Researchers still need to find out which responses last beyond the immediate task, how they vary across languages and whether similar neural patterns appear across quite different triggers. Testing a variety of awe-inducing experiences against equally gripping comparisons would help separate the role of awe from that of general absorption. Longer follow-ups and behaviour observed outside the study would help show whether people carry a shift in perspective back into an ordinary week.

Seeing ourselves within something larger

Someone opens the cottage door and light spills across the steps. The faintest stars disappear from view. You bring the jacket in and sit down to finish the message you were composing. For a few minutes, your attention belonged to a scale of time and distance that rarely enters an evening’s plans. The concerns you left indoors can still matter. Awe can change their place in the scene for long enough to notice what surrounds them.

Written by Arkadiusz Dawidowicz for Inside Behaviour.

References

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