Awe — the response to something vast that exceeds existing frames of understanding — has been studied by psychologists over the past two decades, having previously been the province of religion and aesthetics.
The research is younger and more limited than popular coverage suggests, and the findings are worth knowing.
The definition used
An influential account characterises awe as involving two components: perceived vastness, and a need for accommodation — the sense that existing mental structures cannot assimilate what's being encountered.
Vastness need not be physical. It can be conceptual, moral, or social — an idea, an act of exceptional virtue, a piece of music.
The accommodation element distinguishes awe from mere appreciation. Something is awe-inspiring when it doesn't fit.
The reported effects
Studies inducing awe — through nature exposure, video, virtual reality, or recall of past experiences — have reported several effects.
The small self. Participants report feeling smaller and less significant, with a diminished sense of the importance of personal concerns. This has been measured through self-report and through drawing tasks in which people represent themselves at smaller scale.
Prosocial behaviour. Several studies have found increases in generosity, helping and ethical decision-making following awe induction.
Time perception. Reports of feeling that time is more abundant, and reduced impatience.
Reduced self-focus. Some evidence of reduced use of first-person pronouns following awe experiences.
Wellbeing. Associations between frequency of awe experiences and various wellbeing measures.
The caveats
Substantial and worth stating.
Many studies are small and use brief laboratory inductions, which may not correspond to the experiences the concept is meant to describe.
Effect sizes are generally modest.
Replication has been mixed for some findings, and this area of psychology has been affected by the same replication difficulties as adjacent fields.
And induction methods vary considerably, which makes comparison across studies difficult.
The honest summary: a plausible construct with suggestive findings and considerably less certainty than the popular coverage implies.
The threat-based variant
An aspect that gets less attention. Awe is not uniformly positive.
Researchers have distinguished threat-based awe — encountering something vast that is also frightening — from the positive variety.
Storms, natural disasters, and overwhelming power produce awe with a different character, associated with fear rather than with expansion.
Religious traditions consistently reflect this. The vocabulary of awe in religious contexts frequently includes fear and trembling, and the encounter with the divine is described as terrifying as often as it is described as blissful.
Which suggests the modern research, focused predominantly on positive awe, is examining a subset of what the traditions described.
The religious dimension
Traditions organised substantial machinery around producing this response.
Architecture designed to overwhelm — scale, height, light, acoustics. Music with the same intention. Ritual creating a sense of participation in something larger. Language emphasising vastness and mystery.
Which can be read two ways. As traditions discovering and deploying a psychological effect. Or as the effect being a response to something the traditions were pointing at.
The research doesn't and cannot adjudicate that. It describes the response without addressing the object.
What produces it
Across studies and accounts, the reliable sources cluster.
Natural environments, particularly those with scale — mountains, oceans, night skies, large trees, weather.
The night sky specifically appears repeatedly, and is the source most reduced by modern conditions. Light pollution has removed access to a dark sky for a large proportion of the world's population, which is a loss that receives little attention.
Music, particularly performed live and collectively.
Human achievement — architecture, art, exceptional skill.
Moral beauty — witnessing exceptional virtue or courage.
Birth and death, which most people encounter rarely and which reliably produce it.
Practical implications
If the findings hold, some follow.
Access to natural environments with scale is not merely pleasant. It's contested and unevenly distributed, and it's frequently discussed as amenity rather than as anything more.
Dark skies are a resource being lost with little notice.
And deliberately seeking these experiences, rather than waiting for them, is available. The research suggests that even recalled or mediated experiences produce some effect, which means it isn't necessary to travel.
Though the accounts of people who have encountered vastness directly suggest that mediated versions are a poor substitute, which is what you'd expect from a response defined by exceeding your existing frames.
Awe and belief
One finding worth noting because it complicates simple accounts. Studies have examined whether awe experiences affect belief in agency or purpose, and some have reported increased tendency to perceive design or intention following awe induction.
The proposed mechanism is that encountering something that exceeds explanation prompts a search for one, and that agency is a readily available explanatory frame.
Findings here are mixed and the effect sizes modest. If it holds, it suggests something about why traditions organised themselves around producing this response, and why the response is difficult to separate from the interpretations traditions attached to it.