“Whoa”—a pattern of sound that predates language. A slow, breathy vocal burst that signals now, as it has over evolutionary time, that you are in the presence of vast forces beyond your understanding. You are experiencing the emotion of Awe.
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Awe is a self-transcendent emotion with untapped and underappreciated potential for community changemaking and leadership.
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Awe activates prosocial values around kindness, curiosity and compassion. It heightens our perception of networks, interconnections and interdependencies. It motivates us to form collectives in service of the greater good and face the unknown and uncertain together.
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The emotion of Awe has two key elements: vastness and a need for accommodation.
Vastness can be experienced across physical, social or conceptual domains. The encounter is vast relative to our existing frames of reference or expectations.
Our pattern-matching and predictive brains detect this change or deviation from expectation. Awe disrupts the status quo.
This triggers a need for accommodation, the cognitive process we go through to adjust and update our mental models and understandings of the world.
Awe leads us to wonder, “what does it all mean?”. Questioning leads to learning and learning leads to questioning in endless cycles of exploration and growth such that higher-order cognition is regarded as the primary evolutionary function of Awe.
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Awe is derived from the Old Norse ‘agi’ and Middle English ‘ege’. These relate to fear, dread and horror reflecting the perilous nature of vast unfathomable forces in these harsher times.
Awe has evolved. Nowadays, it is overwhelmingly regarded as a positive and valued emotional experience. Inspiring, positive ‘awesome’ Awe makes up 75-80% of our encounters with vast forces, while fearful, negative ‘awful’, Awe accounts for the remaining 20-25%.
We find Awe in other people, nature, music, design and patterns, collective movement, spirituality and rituals, epiphanies and ideas, and the raw vulnerabilities of life and death.
Quite aside from the prototypical awesomeness of expansive vistas and glorious sunsets, we can find everyday Awe – too easily dismissed as everyday – all around us.
Across countries and cultures, people report they are most likely to find Awe in the kindness, strength and courage of other people. Encounters with such ‘moral beauty’ leaves us humbled and inspired, feeling more integrated with community and more willing to serve the needs and interests of the greater good.
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Awe is an ancient, universal emotion that is at once both familiar, yet hard to describe. We rely on metaphor and abstraction to convey our experience of Awe. In doing so, we reveal an innate and remarkably accurate understanding of the neurochemical and physiological changes taking place in our brains and bodies.
“I feel so small”
The Awe stimulus is perceived vast relative to the self. Our individual concerns feel small in this broader context. Awe quietens the brain’s Default Mode Network (DMN) involved in self-referential thought and mind wandering. The DMN naturally switches on when your brain is not on task but can become dysfunctional if self-referential thought becomes overly ruminative. Awe arrests this process and turns our attention outwards and towards the vast inter-connected systems we are part of. Our minds wonder, instead of wander.
“It was mind blowing”
Our brain cannot make immediate sense of our encounter with vast forces. This triggers our curiosity and sense of wonder as we become aware, even subconsciously, of the gap that has formed in our understanding of the world and how it works.
“Too much”
Sensory rich Awe experiences can feel overwhelming. “Too much” is an instinctive cry as the brain reorganises what it knows and how it feels to accommodate the vast experience into new schemas and understandings.
“I was moved”
The Awe experience must be mentally accommodated into new neural circuitry and connections. “I was moved”, we might say, in intuitive perception that we have moved on to new ways of knowing.
“Cracked open”/ “Jaw-dropping”/ “Eye-opener”
Awe is the emotion most associated with openness. We are most open to change during the Awe experience because the perceptually vast encounter has exceeded current understanding. A window of opportunity for change opens because, with the status quo disrupted, we are receptive to new perspectives and possibilities. Our physical posture reflects this mindset. We become physically open. Our palms are open and upturned, mirroring the openness of our minds. Our jaw drops and mouth opens dissolving a key boundary between our physical self and the environment, and our inner eyebrows lift to widen our eyes to take in more of the new perspective.
“I teared up”
Tears of emotion are activated by parts of the brain involved with social bonding and signalling. They include stress-related proteins and hormones—quite different to the salty composition of tears we shed from a physical injury or irritation of the eye. Tears of emotion signal our awareness of the vast things that connect us to others through shared, bigger-than-self experiences of our common humanity.
“It gave me goosebumps”
Goosebumps, shivers and tingles accompany our experience of Awe. These physiological responses arise in the vastness of ideas and epiphanies, in recognition of shared identity and purpose, and through feeling connected to something good, meaningful and larger than the self. These sensations have deep evolutionary roots. Goosebumps – or more formally, piloerection – bunches the skin to trap a layer of warm air and reduce its porosity to the cold. When we see goosebumps in others it signals a proximal and tactile response. We want to get close, and we want to come together because as social mammals, we have always huddled in coordinated effort against the threat and peril of cold. Over time, a secondary social signal evolved from this primary physiological response. We have a deep embodied appreciation that goosebumps and tingles indicate vast forces are at play. As we have through evolutionary time, we instinctively draw together to face the unknown and uncertain as collectives.
“Time stood still”
Awe alters our perception of time. Time seems to slow down as our brains adjust and work hard to accommodate the new experience. As our sense of time dilates, we feel less rushed and content to stay in the moment. This sense of time expansion is linked to generous dispositions and behaviours, because we feel we have more time and resources available to share with others.
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Of all the emotions, it is Awe that best orientates us into a systems perspective.
We approach Awe’s need for mental accommodation with systemic curiosity. We wonder about connections, relationships, patterns and processes. We focus on the whole, instead of the parts. We perceive cycles of growth, maturity, decay and renewal and accept that change is the fundamental truth of life.
Awe increases our tolerance for uncertainty and makes us more resilient and adaptable to change. It reduces our need for closure and certainty; needs that can fester into conspiracy thinking and polarisation at their most extreme.
Awe connects us into complex and interdependent systems spanning biological, natural, cultural, institutional and spiritual domains.
We think about systems from our place within them, not as passive external observers. In recognising we are part of systems, we understand we have the perspective, position and power to change them.
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Awe is free, easy, abundant and accessible. Through its concurrent activation of prosocial values, systems thinking and collective action, it offers unlimited potential in transformative community changemaking.
Everyday Awe can be found and amplified though the moral beauty of community changemaking—in the strength, courage and kindness of people working together for the greater good.
Changemakers can lean into everyday Awe by drawing attention and awareness to the sights, sounds, scents, tastes and textures of life. Awe is almost always around; we just need to get better at noticing it and drawing the attention of others to its wonders.
Lean in further, by ‘getting meta’ about the Awe process. Next time you experience Awe or observe it in others, be curious and deliberate about the cognitive and physical process of change. Note the feeling and progression through disruption, adjustment and accommodation of mental models because drawing awareness to such things (instead of just experiencing them) can amplify and embed their transformative power.
Collaborate with others on how you might design your changemaking activities and programs to enhance and extend the benefits of Awe. Create opportunities for collective Awe through reflections, stories, images, specimens, music, walks, and so on. Retelling or remembering positive Awe experiences can be as powerful in priming prosocial values and openness to change as the original encounter itself.
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No matter how vast and perilous some forces now feel, this deeply ingrained emotional response will continue to move us from the known to the unknown with intention, with wonder, and with each other—“Whoa”.
Go Deeper
Chen, S. K., & Mongrain, M. (2020). Awe and the interconnected self. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 16(6), 770–778.
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Gordon, A. M., Stellar, J. E., Anderson, C. L., McNeil, G. D., Loew, D., & Keltner, D. (2017). The dark side of the sublime: Distinguishing a threat-based variant of awe. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 113(2), 310–328.
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Jiang, T., Hicks, J. A., Yuan, W., Kumar, A., Balota, D. A., & Van Cappellen, P. (2024). The unique nature and psychosocial implications of awe. Nature Reviews Psychology, 3, 475–488.
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Keltner, D. (2023). Awe: The new science of everyday wonder and how it can transform your life. Penguin Press.
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Keltner, D., & Haidt, J. (2003). Approaching awe, a moral, spiritual, and aesthetic emotion. Cognition and Emotion, 17(2), 297–314.
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Perlin, J. D., & Li, L. (2020). Why does awe have prosocial effects? New perspectives on awe and the small self. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 15(2), 291-308.
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Richesin, M. T., & Baldwin, D. R. (2023). How awe shaped us: An evolutionary perspective. Emotion Review, 15(1), 17-27.
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Shiota, M. N., Keltner, D., & Mossman, A. (2007). The nature of awe: Elicitors, appraisals, and effects on self-concept. Cognition and Emotion, 21(5), 944-963.
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Stellar, J. E., Gordon, A. M., Piff, P. K., Cordaro, D., Anderson, C. L., Bai, Y., Maruskin, L. A., &
Keltner, D. (2017). Self-transcendent emotions and their social functions: Compassion, gratitude, and awe bind us to others through prosociality. Emotion Review, 9(3), 200-207.
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Stellar, J. E., John-Henderson, N., Anderson, C. L., Gordon, A. M., McNeil, G. D., & Keltner, D. (2015). Positive affect and markers of inflammation: Discrete positive emotions predict lower levels of inflammatory cytokines. Emotion, 15(2), 129–133.
© Trudi Ryan, Words for Change
wordsforchange.com.au/awe