What Awe Really Is and When Most People Experience It
Awe is a complicated feeling that can be hard to describe. Here's what it is and where people tend to experience it.
“Awe is the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your current understanding of the world.”
So writes Dacher Keltner in his book, Awe. Keltner is a psychology professor at the University of California, Berkeley who studies the science of human emotion. Awe balances the technicalities of awe with the meaning it fills our lives with.
He begins with the eight sources of awe, which were collected from global survey responses:
Moral Beauty
Collective Effervescence
Nature
Music
Visual Design
Spirituality and Religion
Life and Death
Epiphany
There’s also a ninth “other” category which includes “incredible flavors, video games, overwhelming sensations (for example, of color or sound), and first experiences of sex.” The other category made up five percent of Keltner’s survey responses.
The Eight Sources of Awe
Anyone who’s marveled at an act of bravery or humbling example of forgiveness has felt awe at the moral beauty of that action. It’s hard not to feel awe for the civilian who stops an active shooter or crime victim who forgives a criminal who’s wronged them.
Collective effervescence is the feeling of awe that some feel in large group activities. Group rituals like sports events, dances, or religious rituals can tie people to the group and evoke a feeling of awe.
Nature, music, and visual design are all mediums that awe can be accessed through. Extravagant hikes, favorite songs, and impactful pieces of art make us feel connected to the ethereal “something” that awe connects us to.
Spirituality and religion are powerful connectors to the greater something. They’re often pursued by people who seek that connection. Similarly, life and death are the boundaries of the great “somewhere.” In both celebration and grief, awe can be found on this border.
Finally, epiphany can make people feel like they’re connected to a web of ideas, a library of knowledge that has been built upon with the latest great idea. This is a broad category that bleeds through the other sources of awe.
Awe Resides Near Joy, Admiration, and Calm
One of Keltner’s most remarkable studies mapped a wide range of emotions in a visual semantic map in collaboration with Alan Cowen.
“Alan first scoured the internet, locating 2,100 emotionally rich GIFs, or two-to-three-second videos,” Keltner described. Study participants viewed these GIFs, then “rated their experience on more than fifty emotional terms.” This was the result:

Keltner and Cowen ended up with a visual map of major emotions based on the words and feelings his survey respondents identified. Awe was in the same group as admiration, joy, and aesthetic appreciation.
Aesthetic appreciation was the closest to awe, but beauty and awe are different. Keltner elaborates on the difference between the GIFs that evoked feelings of beauty and awe:
“The GIFs evocative of the feelings of beauty were familiar, easier to understand, and more fitting with our expectations about our visual world - images of oceans, forests, flowers, and sunsets. The awe-inspiring GIFs were vast and mysterious - an endless river of cyclists in a road race; an undulating, spiraling swarm of birds; the time-lapsed changes of a star-filled sky in the desert; a video of flying through the Alps as seen through a bird’s-eye camera; a trippy immersion in Van Gogh’s Starry Night.”
Scale seems to be the difference between something awe-inspiring and something pretty. A scene that’s nice to look at isn’t awe-inspiring by itself. Fundamentally, Keltner wrote, “awe locates us in forces larger than ourselves.”
Awe Can Mingle with Horror, Too
Keltner begins his book with the instance of awe that inspired him to research it as an adult. He writes about his brother, Rolf, dying of colon cancer. Sitting aside Rolf’s deathbed, Keltner “felt small. Quiet. Humble. Pure. The boundaries that separated me from the outside world faded. I felt surrounded by something vast and warm. My mind was open, curious, aware, wondering.”
This was in addition to the grief. Amidst the grief, Keltner was confronting the great mystery of where we go after we die and where we are before we’re born. He felt the small place he lived in the larger circle of life.
It was something that his emotion visualization study would confirm years later. Among the visualization’s findings was that “many emotional experiences…are emotion blends…for example, of sadness and confusion, love and desire, or awe and horror. Emotional experience is complex.”
It’s no surprise, then, that events that force us to face our smallness in the world can be as awe-inspiring as they are terrifying. These emotions may be separate, but they can flavor each other.
Awe doesn’t cancel out other emotions. It’s a feeling like all the others, complicated, unreasonable, and all too human. It’s difficult to find a clear explanation of it, but Keltner has managed to write it.