Born to Be Good_The Science of a Meaningful Life

by Dacher Keltner

  The spine-tingling, jaw-dropping experiences of awe involve vastness and accommodation. Our experiences of powerful, charismatic humans, our experiences in nature—when viewing mountains, vistas, storms, redwoods, oceans, tornadoes, earthquakes; our experiences of astonishing artifacts—cathedrals, skyscrapers, sculptures, fireworks, the world’s largest ball of string; our feeling of awe when immersed in the breadth and scope of a grand theory (feminism, Marxism, evolutionary theory)…are all founded on the sense of vastness and transcendence of our understanding of the world.

  The varieties and nuances of awe derive from additional flavoring themes (see columns 4 through 8 in the table). The sense of threat gives rise to awe experiences that have elements of fear; charismatic leaders (Hitler, versus Ghandi) or natural scenes (an electrical storm, versus a sunset) evoke awe-related experiences that can feel dangerous or reassuring. Aesthetic properties of the stimulus (its harmony, balance, and proportionality), color awe experiences with the feeling of beauty (in hearing a symphony; viewing the mirror image of a mountain in a lake). Encounters with people of exceptional ability will trigger a related state, admiration. Encounters with extraordinary virtue will trigger the feeling of elevation, an emotional response to “moral beauty” or human goodness. Admiration and elevation are closely related to awe but typically do not involve perceived vastness or power. When supernatural ideation suffuses the experience of awe—the felt presence of nonmaterial entities such as spirits, or supernatural causal processes—the experience of awe acquires a religious flavor. Epiphanies feel awesome because they involve seemingly trivial, incidental events that reveal unexpected, vast truths: A falling leaf reminds you of your father’s death, and of your own mortality; a subtle lip pucker evident in your beloved directed toward your friend tips you off to a long-suspected secret affair.

  The etymological history of the word “awe” parallels this liberation of the experience. “Awe” derived from related words in Old English and Old Norse that were used to express fear and dread, particularly toward a divine being. Now “awe” connotes “dread mingled with veneration, reverential or respectful fear; the attitude of a mind subdued to profound reverence in the presence of supreme authority, moral greatness or sublimity, or mysterious sacredness” (Oxford English Dictionary). The state has been transformed from one that centered upon fear and dread to one of reverence, devotion, and pleasure.

  IN THE BEGINNING

  The Greek philosopher Protagoras, source of the saying “Man is the measure of all things,” offered the following myth about human origins. For some time, only gods existed on Earth. The gods decided to create the different species, not out of a primordial molecular soup but out of earth and fire. The gods distributed the various capacities and abilities—speed, strength, thick hides, tough hooves, agility, tastes for roots or grasses or meat—to the different species so that they would each occupy specific niches and thrive in their own particular ways.

  The gods ran out of abilities and talents, alas, before figuring out what to do with that thin-skinned, slow-footed species—humans—who were scattered about in semi-functioning, soon to be extinct bands. Reacting to this state of affairs, Prometheus gave the first humans technology—fire. Zeus, however, quickly realized the limitations of technology. Fire could provide warmth, a means of burning germs out of meat, and forms of defense, but humans would need more to survive; they would need to be bound together in cooperative, strong communities. So Zeus gave humans two qualities. The first is a sense of justice, to ensure that the needs of all would be met. The second was reverence, or the capacity for awe.

  In his beautifully distilled book Reverence, philosopher Paul Woodruff reveals in his analysis of ancient Greek and Chinese cultures why our capacity for awe ranks so high on Zeus’s list of prerequisites for the prospects of an enduring human culture (I risk offense by summarizing his argument in the accompanying flow chart).

  Awe and reverence

  Awe is triggered by experiences with that which is beyond our control and understanding—that which is vast and requires accommodation. This experience, at its core, centers upon the recognition of the limitations of the self; in Confucian thought, we feel a deep sense of modesty. Around the world awe has a modest physical signature seen in acts of reverence, devotion, and gratitude: we become small, we kneel, bow, relax and round our shoulders, curl into a small, fetal ball (see Darwin’s observations on devotion in table below).

  ADMIRATION

  EYES OPENED, EYEBROWS RAISED, EYES BRIGHT, SMILE

  ASTONISHMENT

  EYES OPEN, MOUTH OPEN, EYEBROWS RAISED, HANDS PLACED OVER MOUTH

  DEVOTION (REVERENCE)

  FACE UPWARDS, EYELIDS UPTURNED, FAINTING, PUPILS UPWARDS AND INWARDS, HUMBLING KNEELING POSTURE, HANDS UPTURNED

  Darwin’s observations of emotions related to awe

  Modesty involves placing the self within a larger context. Experiences of awe reveal us to be small iterations of the patterned history of a family or community, small specks of time and matter in the vastness of the universe. Ambitions and crises, desires and longings, are fleeting instants of time. Our culture is a blip in the millions of years of mammalian evolution.

  Reverence, Woodruff continues, is grounded in a sense of unity and a feeling of common humanity. For John Muir, the “flesh-and-bone tabernacle” of the self merged with the trees, air, wind, and rock of the Sierras. The perceptual world of discrete objects and forces vanishes; the flimsy screen of rational consciousness, in William James’s terms, is lifted. The mind, like a darkened lake illuminated by the light from the movement of a cloud, reveals forces that interconnect and unite—Emerson’s “currents of the Universal Being.” All objects are animated by the same pattern of vibration of molecules. The structure of the human face reveals the genome that makes up all humans. Mathematical patterns of design unite the life-forms of a tidepool or floor of a forest. Old traditions—Thanksgiving dinner, weddings, toasts, fathers dancing with daughters—fold individuals into time-honored, cooperative patterns of exchange. Out of this perceptual unity emerges a deep sense of common humanity: We were all infants, we all have families, we all experience grief, and laugh; we all suffer; we all die.

  And in the end, awe produces a state of reverence, a feeling of respect and gratitude for the things that are given. Rituals build upon this feeling of reverence—we revere birth, we give thanks for food, we honor those who marry, we pay homage to the dead. We bow our head in appreciation of the kindness of strangers and everyday generosity.

  Evolutionists like David Sloan Wilson have arrived at their own story about the evolution of awe, which would not seem foreign to Protagoras or Confucius were they studying evolutionary thought today. This thinking assumes that for groups to work well, and for humans to survive and reproduce, we must often subordinate self-interest in the service of the collective. The collective must often supersede the concerns, needs, and demands of the self. Awe evolved to meet this demand of human sociality.

  In our hominid predecessors awe first began to occur in the emotional dynamics of collective action—for example in collective defense, in coordinated hunting, in the rapid response to storms, in the mobilization required at the sound of a herd. In these kinds of collective actions, early hominids felt surges of physical power and connection to their kith and kin. Their body movements became synchronized with others, giving rise to the percept that some force coordinates the many, a sense of unifying common purpose, and a fading of the awareness of boundaries between self and other.

  These experiences laid down a readiness to respond to all that unites the members of a group, an attunement as potent as our sensitivity to threat or harm or to the vulnerability of a child. The early hominid mind was ready to respond with awe to individuals who unite the collective—highly ornate leaders, dead family members, neonates. The same came to be true for ideas and objects that bring people together in common feeling or action: mythological stories about the origins of people, chant,
celebratory dance, the appreciation of cave paintings. Awash in this experience, our hominid predecessors felt small, a sense of restraint, and a sense of commonality and unity with other group members. This capacity for awe, to be moved by that which unites us into collectives, was to be wired into our minds and bodies. It was to become a dynamic force in culture—source of religion, art, sport, and political movements. The scientific study of awe was to do only modest justice to these claims.

  FRACTALS, GOOSE BUMPS, AND T. REX

  Some emotions are absurdly easy to study in the lab. Embarrassment is one: The minute an individual walks into a lab, aware of being analyzed, experimented upon, videotaped, coded by teams of undergraduates working late into the night, and turned into data, that blush begins to wash over the face.

  Other emotions are not so easy. At the top of that list is awe, a humbling object of inquiry. Awe requires vast objects—vistas, encounters with famous people, charismatic leaders, 1,000-foot-tall skyscrapers, cathedrals, supernatural events—that don’t fit well in the fluorescent-lighted 9' × 12' space of a lab room. Awe requires unexpected, extraordinarily rare events that exceed our current understanding of the world—the birth of a child, the death of a parent, that one time you were in the hotel lobby near Mick Jagger, that freak tornado that ripped down your street during a summer storm, the first time you went to a rock concert, political rally, saw mountain peaks, had sex, ate chocolate ice cream, drank wine in a Parisian café.

  The scientific study of awe represents a Zen-like challenge—measuring that which might transcend measurement, planning what can only be unexpected, capturing what is beyond description. But this didn’t prevent my students from producing an outpouring of ideas about how to study awe at a weekly lab meeting devoted to the topic. Capture people’s stream of consciousness as they stand at the lip of the Grand Canyon, which William James found to be like one animated organism unified in design. Have participants play a cooperation game with the Dalai Lama or, barring that, the seven-foot center for the basketball team. Bring the world’s biggest ball of string into the lab and have participants sit next to it. Fill a bus with participants and drive five hours from Berkeley to the Humboldt Redwoods State Park, where the subjects could walk amid the tallest redwoods in the world. Record the instant the oarsmen of the Berkeley crew are so in sync that their selves dissolve and they let out an exultant roar (an experience of awe recounted to me by their coach, Steve Gladstone). We thought of staging epiphanies in the lab, to capture James Joyce’s notion of “the significance of trivial things.” Have a participant fall into a conversation with a stranger (actually a confederate) in which they discover that two of their parents almost married, and they almost became siblings. Stage a supernatural event—a voice that sounds like their mother, a vision of a ghost, ooze coming out of the walls. As word spread that we were trying to study awe, I was approached by an all-night dance society—a drug-free raver community—about a possible study of the state they descended into during their parties, which they held in an old church.

  Recognizing the impracticalities of these studies, I started with words and images, experiences that, having been raised by a literature professor and a painter, are near and dear to my heart. One student, a devotee of haiku, had undergraduates fill their minds for half an hour with the best of that poetry—flesh-tingling and inspiring for him—and look at whether the experience filled them with a sense of unity and common humanity. No such effect. The students weren’t quite sure why they were reading this obscure poetry in a windowless psychology lab.

  So I turned to images, on the supposition that awe may more uniformly be triggered by the visual modality. Small groups of undergraduates watched images of endlessly unfolding fractals on a forty-eight-inch screen for half an hour, on the assumption that this experience would lead to expansive, communal conversations afterward. When I looked in on the experiment from my lab’s control room (from which you can watch, via video feed, participants in rooms nearby), I saw my honors student running the study, clearly just back from Burning Man, with glitter speckling her cheekbones. Groups of what appeared to be electrical engineering and molecular and cell biology students sat, bemused, watching the fractals, deriving mathematical functions that would explain such organic forms. I swear I heard someone mumble, “Didn’t Timothy Leary get his PhD from Berkeley?” (He did.)

  But the science of awe, notwithstanding these initial missteps, is inching forward. Let’s start with where William James started: The autonomic nervous system. In one study we asked people to describe physical sensations that accompanied different positive emotions, including awe. We found that goose bumps are fairly unique to awe.

  Goose bumps—most typical of awe.

  Goose bumps is the colloquial term for piloerection, the activation of minute muscles that surround hair follicles distributed throughout the body but in particular in the back of the neck and back. Piloerection is one action of the fight/flight, sympathetic autonomic nervous system. In our primate relatives—the great apes—piloerection is resorted to in adversarial encounters; primates piloerect to expand their size (with hair standing on end) to threaten and display physical dominance and power. In humans, piloerection shifted in its use, coming to occur regularly when we ourselves feel expanded beyond the boundaries of our skin, and feel connected to other group members. We feel goose bumps when listening to an elevating symphony, when chanting in common cause at a political rally, when hearing a brilliant, mind-expanding lecture, because our self is expanding beyond our physical boundaries to fold into a collective. Piloerection shifted from an association with adversarial defense to connection to the collective.

  Alongside piloerection, in the depths of awe people report an expansive, warm swelling in the chest, no doubt a representation of the activation of the vagus nerve. Chris Oveis has found that the vagus nerve does indeed fire during the experience of elevation at others’ moral goodness, a close relative of awe. When participants viewed a film about Mother Teresa’s works with the poor and starving in Calcutta, their vagus nerve was activated. Awe in the body, then, reflects a confluence of two physiological processes fitting for our evolutionist claims about this transcendent emotion: the expansion of the self in goose bumps, and the opening of the chest to social connection.

  This physiological state of awe is accompanied by profound shifts in the sense of the individual’s place in the world. In one study, Lani Shiota and I had participants recall transformative experiences in nature, for example when listening to the waves of the Pacific Ocean or walking through the light of a eucalyptus grove. The defining realizations that accompanied these recollections, although lacking the poetic metaphor of Muir or Emerson, were: “I felt small or insignificant,” “I felt the presence of something greater than myself,” “I felt connected with the world around me,” “I was unaware of my day-today concerns.” Awe diminishes the press of self-interest and reorients the mind to interconnection and design.

  Of course, these findings are retrospective, and may just reflect people’s theories about what awe does to the mind, rather than what awe actually does to the way that we look at the world. This led Lani to an imaginative study of in vivo awe. In this experiment participants arrived at our lab but were told they were to complete the experiment in a different building on campus. They walked for about five minutes across some rolling lawns and a bridge over Strawberry Creek, which winds its way through the Berkeley campus, and arrived at the neoclassical Valley Life Sciences building. They proceeded into the main foyer of the building, where they were asked to sit, not coincidentally, next to a full-sized replica of a Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton. The skeleton is about twelve feet high at the hip, about twenty-five feet long, and weighs approximately five tons—a source of awe for evolutionists and creationists alike (and in fact, when we stopped other students walking by the T. rex and asked them how it made them feel, they put their cell phones aside and consistently uttered “awe”).

  We then had our p
articipants complete a well-used measure of the self-concept, known as the twenty statements test (TST). In this exercise, participants completed twenty statements beginning with: “I am __________.” Control participants completed the same measure, sitting in the same climate-controlled, naturally lit room. Instead of having the T. rex looming in their visual field, though, they sat oriented away from it, looking down a hallway. Lani then coded how people described themselves, identifying physical references (“I am redheaded,” “I am covered in moles”), trait-based references (“I am gregarious,” “I am fragile”), relationship-based references (“I am a nephew,” “I am Sherman’s main squeeze”), and, a category rarely mentioned but of theoretical interest, an oceanic universal category, where the individual completes the prompt with references to membership in large, social collectives (“I am an organic form,” “I am an inhabitant of the Earth,” “I am part of the human species”). People feeling awe—that is, those describing themselves while looking at the skeleton of the T. rex—were three times more likely to describe themselves in terms of these oceanic, collective categories than those individuals standing in the same exact spot but looking away from the awe-inspiring T. rex. Awe shifts the sense of self away from characteristics that separate and delineate—idiosyncratic traits and preferences—to facets that unite and highlight common humanity.