The Awe Effect

Definition

Awe is the emotion produced by encountering something with, in Edmund Burke's 18th-century formulation, "vastness of extent" that resists our ability to make sense of it — historically the province of religious experience before Burke and later Emerson secularized it. Psychologist Dacher Keltner argues awe is functionally unique among positive emotions: rather than simply feeling good, it turns attention outward, away from narrow self-interest and toward the collective. Paul Piff puts it more bluntly: "awe is something that blows your mind."

In the Book

Williams follows the UC Berkeley/Irvine research of Keltner and Piff, who tested awe's effects experimentally. Asking 1,500 people how often they felt awe and then giving them lottery tickets to share, they found the highest-awe group gave away 40 percent more tickets than the lowest. In a live experiment, subjects who spent one minute looking up at a grove of tall eucalyptus trees (versus a tall building) were more likely to help a lab assistant who "accidentally" dropped pens. In a further study measuring saliva for the inflammation marker cytokine IL-6, awe was the only positive emotion, among twenty tested, that predicted significantly lower levels — Keltner's explanation is that awe strengthens social bonds, and bonds lower stress and inflammation. The book connects this to the "three-day effect" wilderness researchers describe and to astronauts' "overview effect," positioning vast natural settings — mountains, canyons, night skies — as unusually reliable awe triggers, even when the awe carries an edge of fear.

Why It Matters

Awe gives a name and a mechanism to something usually treated as ineffable: an emotion that reliably shifts people from self-focus toward group-focus, with downstream effects on generosity and inflammation. That makes it a design target, not just a byproduct — any domain that wants to build cooperation or reduce stress-driven conflict has a concrete lever (engineer genuine vastness/incomprehensibility) rather than a vague appeal to "wonder."