For most of its history, scientific psychology kept a careful distance from wonder. Fear, anger, disgust, and sadness all got decades of attention, partly because they are easy to trigger in a lab. Awe had to wait until 2003, when Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt published the paper that finally gave it a working definition.

Two decades later, awe has become one of the busiest corners of emotion science. The findings would not startle anyone who has spent time with the mystics. What might startle you is how literal the confirmation has become, right down to measuring the size of the self in the pixels of a selfie.

What the Lab Means by Awe

Keltner defines awe as “the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your current understanding of the world.” The definition has two working parts. There must be vastness, something bigger than your usual frame, and there must be what researchers call a need for accommodation, meaning your existing mental categories fail and have to be rebuilt.

That second ingredient deserves a slow read. The claim is that awe is what a mind feels when its model breaks in the presence of something larger than the model. Contemplative traditions have described that moment for millennia, usually as the instant thinking stops. It is close kin to the sudden seeing this site is named for.

The vastness does not have to be physical, either. A cello line can supply it, and so can an act of courage or a deathbed vigil. What matters is that the thing exceeds the frame you brought to it.

The Small Self, Measured

The signature effect in this literature is called the small self. In one early experiment, a team led by Paul Piff had people stand in a grove of towering eucalyptus trees and look up. Afterward a researcher stumbled nearby and spilled a handful of pens, and the tree-gazers helped pick up more of them than a control group that had stared at a tall building. A short spell of looking up at something old and large made people measurably more helpful.

In 2020 a team at UC San Francisco went further. They asked healthy adults between sixty and ninety to take one fifteen-minute walk a week for eight weeks, and they told half the group to actively seek out things that felt vast or surprising. The awe group reported growing positive emotion and less distress in daily life as the weeks passed, and the instruction itself did the work, since being primed to look for awe produced more of it.

What made headlines was the selfies. Each week the walkers photographed themselves, and in the awe group the self took up fewer and fewer pixels while the surroundings took up more, with smiles broadening as the self shrank. Ego reduction, the oldest promise of contemplative practice, showed up as a measurable change in photo framing. The monks never had a metric this funny.

The Most Common Trigger Is Other People

Ask people what causes awe and most will guess mountains, canyons, night skies. Keltner’s team collected awe stories in twenty-six countries and found something better. The most common source worldwide was other people, specifically what the researchers call moral beauty, the everyday sight of courage, kindness, and integrity in action. By their count, roughly ninety-five percent of moral-beauty awe came from things people did on behalf of someone else.

The full taxonomy runs to eight wonders of everyday life:

  • Moral beauty
  • Collective effervescence, the electricity of moving together in a crowd or ceremony
  • Nature
  • Music
  • Spirituality and religion
  • Life and death
  • Epiphany, the idea that reorders everything
  • Visual art

Read the list twice for what is missing. Money never appears, and neither do status, shopping, or screens. The reliable sources of self-transcendence turn out to be free, which is the same discovery the desert monks organized their lives around.

An ancient saying holds that the kingdom of the Father is spread out upon the earth and people simply do not see it. This site has traced that teaching before, and the awe research reads like its lab notebook. The vastness is in ordinary supply, under the split wood and the lifted stone. What varies is whether anyone is looking.

Where the Lab and the Monastery Part Ways

Honesty requires marking the limits of the agreement. The researcher measures effects, helping behavior, reported wellbeing, pixels, and stays deliberately silent about what awe is contact with. The mystic makes the stronger claim that the vastness is real and that the shrinking self is finally seeing accurately. Science cannot referee that claim, and the better scientists say so.

The traditions also knew things the studies are only beginning to reach. Awe has a dark register, the tyrant’s rally and the terrifying storm, which is why the old texts pair wonder with fear and warn about what you bow to. A fifteen-minute weekly dose is a supplement, while the monastery’s bet was that attention could be rebuilt permanently rather than visited on weekends.

And the science is young. Cohorts are small, most measures are self-reported, and the field has its share of findings still awaiting replication. Treat it as a promising early map that still needs proving.

A Practice: The Awe Walk

The study protocol is simple enough to steal outright, and it costs nothing.

Once a week, take a fifteen-minute walk whose only agenda is finding what is vast or surprising. A few notes from the research make it work better:

  • Go somewhere at least slightly unfamiliar, since novelty feeds awe.
  • Leave the phone in your pocket, except perhaps for one photograph.
  • Look up. Tall things, old things, and skies do reliable work.
  • Walk as if seeing the place for the first time. In the study, the intention to seek awe is what generated it.

Since people are the most common trigger, add a second, quieter practice. Once a day for a week, write down one act of goodness you witnessed, however small. The researchers would call this priming moral beauty. A monk would call it learning to see.

The Nearest Vastness

The awe science makes one prediction you can test this week. Your next brush with self-transcendence is probably not waiting in a national park. It is likelier to arrive from an unglamorous direction, a stranger’s patience, a friend’s courage, somebody quietly carrying somebody else. The mountains are optional. The people were always the main exhibit.

Awe’s working definition and the moral beauty findings are from Dacher Keltner’s research group at UC Berkeley, summarized in his book Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder (Penguin Press, 2023). The eucalyptus experiment is Piff et al. (2015), and the awe walk study is Sturm et al. (2020), published in Emotion.