Awe

What exactly vanishes during awe? Aldous Huxley called it “the interfering neurotic who, in waking hours, tries to run the show” in making sense of what disappeared during his experiences with mescaline. This is a pretty good approximation of how psychological science makes sense of the default self. This self, one of many that makes up who you are, is focused on how you are distinct from others, independent, in control, and oriented toward competitive advantage. It has been amplified by the rise of individualism and materialism, and no doubt was less prominent during other time periods (e.g., in Indigenous cultures thousands of years ago). Today, this default self keeps you on track in achieving your goals and urges you to rise in the ranks in the world, all essential to your survival and thriving.

When our default self reigns too strongly, though, and we are too focused on ourselves, anxiety, rumination, depression, and self-criticism can overtake us. An overactive default self can undermine the collaborative efforts and goodwill of our communities. Many of today’s social ills arise out of an overactive default self, augmented by self-obsessed digital technologies. Awe, it would seem, quiets this urgent voice of the default self.

How would one study the vanishing self of awe? In our first effort, Yang Bai camped out in Yosemite National Park. Over the course of a few days, she approached more than 1,100 travelers from forty-two countries at a lookout at the side of State Route 140. That lookout offers an expansive view of Yosemite Valley, a natural wonder that led Teddy Roosevelt to observe:

It was like lying in a great solemn cathedral, far vaster and more beautiful than any built by the hand of man.

As a measure of their sense of self, participants were asked to draw themselves on a sheet of graph paper, and write “me” next to their drawing. In a control condition, travelers were asked to do the same thing at Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco, a place more evocative of light-hearted, carefree joy. Other research has found that simple measures—the size of the drawn self and how large you write “me”—are pretty good measures of how self-focused the individual is. Below are randomly selected drawings from this study: to the left is one from Fisherman’s Wharf, and to the right, a drawn self in Yosemite eight squares from the left.

Simply being in a context of awe leads to a “small self.” We can quiet that nagging voice of the interfering neurotic simply by locating ourselves in contexts of more awe.

In related work with Yang Bai, we found that the “small self” effect of awe arises in all eight wonders of life, and not just vast nature. Finding awe in encounters with moral beauty, for example, or music, or when struck by big ideas, quiets the voice of that interfering and nagging neurotic. We also found that awe leads to a vanishing self when this elusive construct is measured by other means, like simple self-report measures (e.g., “I feel small”; “my personal concerns are insignificant”).

What about other core convictions of the default self, of being distinct, independent, in control, and seeking to prevail over others? To explore how awe expands our sense of self from feeling independent to feeling part of something larger, Arizona State University professor Michelle Shiota and I carried out the following study. We took college students to a paleontology museum and had them stand facing an awe-inspiring model of a T. rex skeleton. In the control condition, participants stood in the same location but looked down a fluorescent-lit hallway. Participants then filled in this sentence stem twenty times: “I AM ______________.” People in the control condition defined themselves in terms of distinct traits and preferences, in the spirit of individualism and its privileging of distinctness over common humanity. People feeling awe named qualities they shared with others—being a college student, belonging to a dance society, being human, being part of the category of all sentient beings.