We reach for the phone before the moment has finished arriving. The sky opens in color, a wave breaks against the rocks, or fireworks scatter above us, and we begin arranging the experience for someone else to see. Yet something escapes the frame. Standing beneath that enormous sky, we may briefly forget how carefully we have been arranging ourselves. In that moment of awe, life becomes larger than the image we hoped to capture.

What Is Awe in Psychology

Awe interrupts the familiar. Something about an experience exceeds the boundaries of what we ordinarily notice or understand. For a moment, our concerns lose their usual proportions. The world has not necessarily changed; our position within it has.

Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt (2003) proposed two central features of awe: perceived vastness and a need for accommodation. Vastness can be physical, as with an ocean or a towering forest. It can also be conceptual or social. An idea, an extraordinary ability, or an encounter with immense power may stretch our sense of what is possible.

Accommodation means revising a mental framework when an experience does not fit. We usually interpret new events through what we already believe. Awe can expose the limits of that familiar arrangement. We pause because our existing explanation feels insufficient. The need to accommodate, however, does not guarantee that we will successfully change our understanding (Keltner & Haidt, 2003).

Awe and Related Experiences

Not every moving experience is awe. Admiration can center on someone’s skill, while moral elevation concerns being moved by goodness. Awe involves an encounter with perceived vastness that stretches our understanding. These experiences can overlap: an act of courage may inspire admiration, elevation, and awe, depending on what it means to the person witnessing it (Keltner & Haidt, 2003).

David Yaden and colleagues describe a family of experiences in which we become less caught up in ourselves and feel more connected with the world around us. They include awe, flow, and mystical experiences in this broader account (Yaden et al., 2017). The resemblance does not make them the same. We might lose ourselves in playing music without encountering something so vast or unfamiliar that it changes how we understand the world.

Awe and the Disruption of Certainty

Awe can open a space between what we encounter and what we already believe. That space may be exhilarating, unsettling, or both. Spiritual encounters and threatening experiences show different ways that our usual understanding can be challenged.

Spirituality and the Disruption of Certainty

William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience holds a personal place in my understanding of awe. While researching religion for a psychology course, I encountered testimonies that unsettled beliefs I had taken for granted. My ordered account of life no longer felt sufficient. What followed was an extended existential funk and roughly two years of searching for an understanding large enough to accommodate what I had read.

James examined religious conversion and mystical experience through personal accounts. In his lectures on mysticism, he described experiences that resist adequate expression in words and carry a powerful sense of insight. These accounts illuminate the felt importance of encounters that can remain difficult to explain long after they end (James, 1902).

Jonathan Haidt develops a related theme in The Happiness Hypothesis. Encounters with vastness can interrupt habitual thinking and make us receptive to change. His discussion connects awe with spiritual experience, while leaving room for awe beyond religion (Haidt, 2006). A person may find it in prayer, another in music, and another in a scientific explanation that makes the universe feel suddenly more intricate.

The unsettling part deserves attention. Openness may begin with losing confidence in an old explanation. That can feel freeing, but it can also leave us uncertain about where to stand. Our willingness to remain curious during that uncertainty may matter more than the intensity of the original moment.

When Awe Is Threatening

The spectacular can frighten us. A violent storm may command attention through the same immensity that makes it dangerous. Keltner and Haidt’s original account explicitly included threat among the features that shape awe. Wonder and fear can occupy the same experience (Keltner & Haidt, 2003).

Research by Amie Gordon and colleagues distinguishes a threatening form of awe from more positive experiences. Threatening awe involved greater fear and powerlessness and did not produce the same immediate gains in well-being found with positive awe (Gordon et al., 2017). Feeling small can therefore have different meanings: connection with a larger world in one setting, vulnerability before an overwhelming force in another.

We should leave room for those differences. A disaster is not a lesson someone must appreciate. Terror, grief, and awe may overlap, but they are not interchangeable. Respect for the complexity of experience includes allowing people to respond to loss without requiring wonder or growth.

Awe and Discernment

Feeling profoundly moved does not settle what we should believe. Keltner and Haidt discuss awe in relation to charisma and power as well as beauty and virtue (Keltner & Haidt, 2003). Someone who overwhelms us may command our attention without earning our trust.

Epistemic vigilance means attending to the reliability of what we are told and the people telling us (Sperber et al., 2010). Applied here, the invitation is to remain receptive while continuing to examine an explanation. This is a connection between related ideas, not a finding that awe necessarily makes us gullible. We can respect an experience and still question the interpretation attached to it. This kind of intellectual humility leaves room for wonder and careful judgment together.

A Smaller Self and a Wider Circle

One of awe’s intriguing possibilities is a change in the scale of our concerns. The missed compliment, the inconvenient delay, or the need to appear impressive may briefly loosen its grip. Attention has somewhere else to go.

Paul Piff and colleagues examined this possibility across five studies. Their work connected awe with generosity and other prosocial behaviors. In one experiment, participants who looked up at towering trees helped pick up more dropped pens than participants who looked at a building. Across their studies, feelings of a smaller self helped account for some of awe’s relationship with concern for others (Piff et al., 2015).

The useful shift is in perspective: our needs remain real while other people and the surrounding world become harder to overlook. The experiments examine particular responses, however; helping after a brief experience does not establish a lasting change in character.

Humility and the Quiet Ego

Jennifer Stellar and colleagues found converging evidence linking awe and humility. Their studies included associations between everyday awe and humility, alongside experiments in which awe encouraged a more balanced presentation of personal strengths and weaknesses or greater acknowledgment of outside contributions to success (Stellar et al., 2018).

Joshua Perlin and Leon Li suggest that a quiet ego may describe some of these changes more fully than a simply diminished self. Their proposal emphasizes interdependence, a balance between concern for self and others, and an orientation toward growth. They offer a theoretical reinterpretation of the evidence, with questions that further research needs to test (Perlin & Li, 2020).

Heidi Wayment, Jack Bauer, and Kateryna Sylaska give the quiet ego a practical meaning in their research. It involves noticing what is happening without immediately defending ourselves, recognizing our connection with others, considering their perspectives, and remaining interested in growth. Concern for other people can coexist with confidence in our own ability to act (Wayment et al., 2015). Their study helps clarify a quiet ego; it does not show that awe creates one.

The distinction matters. Humility need not silence a person’s voice. We can recognize our abilities while acknowledging how much we owe to others. Awe may help interrupt the assumption that our own perspective is the natural center of everything.

Understanding Without Losing Wonder

At an Independence Day celebration, I noticed a man watching the fireworks through his phone. I understood the impulse. We want to keep what moves us. Still, I wondered how much of the evening slipped past while he worked to preserve it.

A photograph can become a meaningful reminder. A film or a piece of music can itself evoke awe. The question is what happens to our attention when preserving an experience becomes its main purpose. Sometimes we need a moment in which nothing is being captured, improved, or presented.

Research raises a related tension. Measuring awe requires selecting features that can be compared: a report of wonder, a change in self-focus, a helpful act. Those measurements can reveal something valuable while leaving much of a person’s experience outside the study. Schneider’s critique asks psychologists to retain room for sustained, complicated encounters with existence alongside brief experimental inductions of awe (Schneider, 2017).

Science can also deepen wonder. Sara Gottlieb and colleagues found that a tendency to experience awe was associated with aspects of scientific understanding and thinking. Their findings do not show that a brief awe experience automatically makes someone a better reasoner. They do, however, challenge the assumption that explanation and awe must pull us in opposite directions (Gottlieb et al., 2018).

Learning how a tree lives can enlarge our appreciation of the forest. Knowing something about memory may deepen our amazement at recognizing a childhood voice. An explanation can give wonder more places to settle.

Awe and Psychological Growth

Schneider distinguishes the sudden “quick boil” of awe from a “slow simmer” cultivated through sustained engagement with life. He uses this distinction to question whether brief, measurable responses adequately represent the broader experience. His distinction describes a way of engaging with life; it is not an established classification of two separate emotions (Schneider, 2017).

Making Sense of an Awe Experience

When an experience exceeds our understanding, the immediate pause is only a beginning. Growth would require bringing that encounter into the way we interpret and live our lives. A stirring evening beneath the stars may fade by breakfast. An experience that changes how we listen to another person may travel further.

Research on narrative identity—the stories through which we understand our lives—offers a useful connection. Laura King and Joshua Hicks describe how people reconsider a future they once hoped for and begin investing in a different one. In a separate study following students for three years, Jack Bauer and Dan McAdams found two patterns: goals centered on learning and understanding predicted a more complex view of self and others, while goals centered on emotional and social growth predicted greater happiness and life satisfaction (Bauer & McAdams, 2010; King & Hicks, 2007).

These studies concern development rather than awe itself. Together with the awe literature, they suggest a possible bridge: an encounter challenges our familiar story, and reflection and subsequent choices help us revise it. They do not establish a sequence in which awe inevitably produces maturity. The lasting question is what we do with an experience after its intensity recedes.

Wonder and the Fact of Being Alive

Kirk Schneider approaches awe through the larger mystery of existence. In Rediscovery of Awe, he invites psychology to begin with the astonishing fact that we exist at all. His account includes magnificence and vulnerability, an appreciation of possibility alongside an awareness of how little we control (Schneider, 2004).

Schneider and Rollo May’s existential perspective explores this tension between freedom and limitation (Schneider & May, 1995). It gives language to the experience of caring deeply while being unable to command the outcome. A mountain can overwhelm us in a moment; loving someone whose choices we cannot govern may keep returning us to the limits of our understanding.

As my hair silvers, I find this enduring form increasingly compelling. The starry sky remains astonishing. So does the capacity of ordinary people to care for one another while carrying fears and disappointments of their own. We watch someone we love struggle, witness a birth, or discover a moment of unexpected generosity. Beauty and vulnerability refuse to stay neatly separated.

Perhaps awe can become a way of remaining in contact with that complexity. We acknowledge how little we can command and still participate. We allow love to matter despite its risks. Here, enduring awe describes a willingness to keep encountering life, even when an experience leaves us with questions rather than a satisfying explanation.

Making Room for Everyday Awe

Everyday practice offers a modest place to begin. In an eight-week study, 60 healthy older adults were assigned to weekly 15-minute outdoor walks, with one group encouraged to look for awe. Analyses included 52 participants. Compared with ordinary walks, awe walks produced greater awe and some more favorable daily emotional patterns. Measures of anxiety, depression, and life satisfaction did not improve from baseline in either group (Sturm et al., 2022).

The findings offer a modest reason to explore a shift in attention. We might walk a familiar route with enough curiosity to notice the height of a tree, the movement of clouds, or the complicated life in a patch of soil. Novelty can help, but we need not travel far or manufacture a dramatic feeling.

Afterward, a little reflection may give the encounter somewhere to go. What surprised us? Did anything challenge an assumption? Did our own concerns become easier to hold alongside someone else’s? Such questions invite personal reflection; they are not a tested protocol.

Awe Without the Pressure to Improve Ourselves

We can put down the camera and still find ourselves arranging the experience for an audience. Sometimes that audience is an imagined future self: calmer, kinder, more impressive, finally transformed. Even wonder can become something we feel obliged to accomplish.

Abraham Maslow described peak experiences as having value in themselves, rather than serving only as means to another goal. His account concerns a broader range of experiences than awe, but it raises a useful question here: can we allow a moment to matter before requiring it to improve us (Maslow, 1968/1982)?

There may be something to learn from the encounter, or a change we want to carry into ordinary life. We need not demand either result in advance. We can hear the music, feel the cool air, or stand quietly beneath a tree without keeping score. This offers one way to live Schneider’s concern about turning awe into another product to acquire (Schneider, 2017).

There will also be ordinary days. We can pay attention and feel very little. Savoring life leaves room for a quiet experience to have value without becoming extraordinary.

A Few Words by Psychology Fanatic

The fireworks end. The photographs remain, and perhaps one will bring back something of the evening. Yet the fullest part may be what we never managed to frame: the cool air, the faces turned upward, the brief release from needing to be the most interesting thing in view.

We return to unfinished work and familiar worries. Perhaps we return with a little more room around them. Life continues beyond the edges of our explanations, asking for our attention. We can meet it with curiosity and a breathless respect for the strange, fragile experience of being here.

Associated Concepts

• Narrative Identity: The evolving story through which we connect our experiences and understand who we are. Awe may challenge parts of that story.
• Prosocial Behaviors: Actions that benefit others. Research examines when awe encourages generosity and helping.
• Spirituality: Experiences and commitments concerned with meaning, connection, and what a person regards as sacred. Awe can occur within and beyond religious practice.
• Quiet Ego: A balanced sense of self that allows us to consider others, remain open to growth, and respond with less defensiveness. Awe may encourage this shift by drawing attention beyond our immediate concerns.
• Savoring Life: Attending to and appreciating meaningful experiences rather than immediately moving past them.
• Existential Funk: A period of questioning in which familiar sources of meaning feel unsettled. Disruption can invite reflection without guaranteeing growth.

References

Bauer, Jack J.; McAdams, Dan P. (2010). Eudaimonic Growth: Narrative Growth Goals Predict Increases in Ego Development and Subjective Well-Being 3 Years Later. Developmental Psychology, 46(4), 761–772. DOI: 10.1037/a0019654.
(Return to Main Text)

Gordon, Amie M.; Stellar, Jennifer E.; Anderson, Craig L.; McNeil, Galen D.; Loew, Daniel; Keltner, Dacher (2017). The Dark Side of the Sublime: Distinguishing a Threat-Based Variant of Awe. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 113(2), 310–328. DOI: 10.1037/pspp0000120.
(Return to Main Text)

Gottlieb, Sara; Keltner, Dacher; Lombrozo, Tania (2018). Awe as a Scientific Emotion. Cognitive Science, 42(6), 2081–2094. DOI: 10.1111/cogs.12648.
(Return to Main Text)

Haidt, Jonathan (2006). The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom. Basic Books. ISBN: 9780465028023.
(Return to Main Text)

James, William (1902). The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature. Longmans, Green, and Co. Full text: Project Gutenberg edition.
(Return to Main Text)

Keltner, Dacher; Haidt, Jonathan (2003). Approaching Awe, a Moral, Spiritual, and Aesthetic Emotion. Cognition and Emotion, 17(2), 297–314. DOI: 10.1080/02699930302297.
(Return to Main Text)

King, Laura A.; Hicks, Joshua A. (2007). Whatever Happened to “What Might Have Been”? Regrets, Happiness, and Maturity. American Psychologist, 62(7), 625–636. DOI: 10.1037/0003-066X.62.7.625.
(Return to Main Text)

Maslow, Abraham H. (1968/1982). Toward a Psychology of Being. Second Edition, 1982 Reprint. Van Nostrand Reinhold. ISBN: 0442051522.
(Return to Main Text)

Perlin, Joshua D.; Li, Leon (2020). Why Does Awe Have Prosocial Effects? New Perspectives on Awe and the Small Self. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 15(2), 291–308. DOI: 10.1177/1745691619886006.
(Return to Main Text)

Piff, Paul K.; Dietze, Pia; Feinberg, Matthew; Stancato, Daniel M.; Keltner, Dacher (2015). Awe, the Small Self, and Prosocial Behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 108(6), 883–899. DOI: 10.1037/pspi0000018.
(Return to Main Text)

Schneider, Kirk J. (2004). Rediscovery of Awe: Splendor, Mystery, and the Fluid Center of Life. Paragon House. ISBN: 1557788340.
(Return to Main Text)

Schneider, Kirk J. (2017). The Resurgence of Awe in Psychology: Promise, Hope, and Perils. The Humanistic Psychologist, 45(2), 103–108. DOI: 10.1037/hum0000060.
(Return to Main Text)

Schneider, Kirk J.; May, Rollo (1995). The Psychology of Existence: An Integrative Clinical Perspective. McGraw-Hill. ISBN: 0070410178.
(Return to Main Text)

Sperber, Dan; Clément, Fabrice; Heintz, Christophe; Mascaro, Olivier; Mercier, Hugo; Origgi, Gloria; Wilson, Deirdre (2010). Epistemic Vigilance. Mind & Language, 25(4), 359–393. DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-0017.2010.01394.x.
(Return to Main Text)

Stellar, Jennifer E.; Gordon, Amie; Anderson, Craig L.; Piff, Paul K.; McNeil, Galen D.; Keltner, Dacher (2018). Awe and Humility. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 114(2), 258–269. DOI: 10.1037/pspi0000109.
(Return to Main Text)

Sturm, Virginia E.; Datta, Samir; Roy, Ashlin R. K.; Sible, Isabel J.; Kosik, Eena L.; Veziris, Christina R.; Chow, Tiffany E.; Morris, Nathaniel A.; Neuhaus, John; Kramer, Joel H.; Miller, Bruce L.; Holley, Sarah R.; Keltner, Dacher (2022). Big Smile, Small Self: Awe Walks Promote Prosocial Positive Emotions in Older Adults. Emotion, 22(5), 1044–1058. DOI: 10.1037/emo0000876.
(Return to Main Text)

Wayment, Heidi A.; Bauer, Jack J.; Sylaska, Kateryna (2015). The Quiet Ego Scale: Measuring the Compassionate Self-Identity. Journal of Happiness Studies, 16(4), 999–1033. DOI: 10.1007/s10902-014-9546-z.
(Return to Main Text)

Yaden, David Bryce; Haidt, Jonathan; Hood, Ralph W., Jr.; Vago, David R.; Newberg, Andrew B. (2017). The Varieties of Self-Transcendent Experience. Review of General Psychology, 21(2), 143–160. DOI: 10.1037/gpr0000102.
(Return to Main Text)