What Awe Does to Your Mind

In 2003, psychologists Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt tried to give a slippery, almost embarrassing emotion a proper scientific definition. Awe - the feeling you get facing a mountain range, a cathedral ceiling, a piece of music that seems too large for the room, or an act of extraordinary skill or moral courage - had mostly been left to poets. Keltner and Haidt argued it has two necessary ingredients: perceived vastness, something that is physically, socially, or conceptually much bigger than your usual frame of reference, and a need for accommodation, the sense that your existing mental categories are not quite big enough to take it in, so you have to update them.

That definition matters because it predicts something specific: if awe is really about confronting something vast enough to challenge your sense of scale, it should shrink the thing that usually sits at the centre of your attention - yourself. That is exactly what later research went looking for, and largely found.

Keltner and Haidt also proposed a working list of what tends to trigger awe across different settings: natural scenes on a scale that dwarfs a person, artistic or musical works, and other people displaying extraordinary skill, virtue, or charisma. This is also what separates awe from a related but distinct emotion, surprise. Surprise is about the unexpected, however small; awe is about scale and meaning, and can happen even when you saw it coming, such as approaching a familiar mountain range you have visited many times before.

The trees, the pens, and the smaller self

In one of the more memorable field experiments in this area, Paul Piff and colleagues stationed people at the base of a grove of tall eucalyptus trees on a university campus. Half were told to look up at the trees for one minute; the other half looked at a large building instead, a comparison chosen to be impressive without being awe-inducing in the same way. As each person walked away, a researcher "accidentally" spilled a handful of pens in front of them. People who had just spent a minute looking up at the trees stopped to help pick up more pens than the people who had looked at the building, and separately reported feeling less entitled and less self-important immediately afterward.

Piff and his co-authors, publishing in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2015, described this as awe producing a "small self" - a temporary shrinking of how central and important your own concerns feel, which in turn seems to free up a bit of attention and generosity for the people around you. It is a strange effect to produce with one minute and a row of trees, but it replicated across several of their studies using different awe-inducing scenes.

A feeling that turns up in more than one culture

A reasonable worry about a result like this is that it might be a quirk of one country's students on one campus. In 2017, Yang Bai, Dacher Keltner and colleagues tested the small-self effect across a range of different countries and methods, including having people draw a symbol representing themselves at a size that reflected how they felt in the moment. The diminished-self pattern showed up broadly across the cultures they tested, though its size and some of its finer details varied - a useful reminder that even a fairly robust emotional pattern is not perfectly identical everywhere, and that the WEIRD problem in psychology (samples that are Western, educated, and from industrialised, rich, democratic countries) is worth checking for rather than assuming away.

The strange feeling of having more time

A separate line of work looked at what awe does to something less social and more practical: your sense of time. Melanie Rudd, Kathleen Vohs and Jennifer Aaker, in a 2012 paper in Psychological Science, put people through brief awe-inducing experiences - such as watching footage of vast, striking scenes rather than more ordinary or simply happy ones - and then asked how much available time they felt they had, and watched what they chose to do with it. People who had just experienced awe reported feeling as though they had more time on their hands, were more willing to volunteer their time to help someone else, and leaned more toward experiences over material purchases when given a hypothetical choice. The proposed explanation is that awe, by pulling you out of your usual sense of yourself and your schedule, loosens the everyday feeling of being rushed - at least for a little while.

What this means for you

None of this means you should engineer awe on command to become more generous or feel like you have more free time; these are measured, temporary shifts in a lab or field setting, not a lasting personality change, and the samples involved are still relatively narrow. But the research does point to something practical: moments that make you feel genuinely small in front of something larger than yourself - a landscape, a piece of art, a night sky away from city lights - are not just pleasant. They seem to nudge, briefly, how self-focused and how rushed you feel.

If you want to see how much this kind of experience already shows up in your own life, our positive emotions test and nature connection test look at related patterns, and our aesthetic sensitivity test looks at how strongly you tend to respond to beauty and vastness in the first place - which, on this research, might be worth paying attention to rather than dismissing as just a nice feeling.