Awe

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In many ways, “mean egotism”: Twenge, Jean M. Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, and Entitled—and More Miserable Than Ever Before. New York: Atria, 2006. Sansone, Randy A., and Lori A. Sansone. “Rumination: Relationships with Physical Health.” Innovations in Clinical Neuroscience 9, no. 2 (2012): 29–34.

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world has become more narcissistic: Twenge, Jean M., and W. Keith Campbell. The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement. New York: Atria, 2010.

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Emerson’s mean egotism hypothesis: Piff, Paul K., Pia Dietze, Matthew Feinberg, Daniel M. Stancato, and Dacher Keltner. “Awe, the Small Self, and Prosocial Behavior.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 108, no. 6 (2015): 883–99. I cannot help but report a telling limitation of this study: eucalyptus trees, as awe-inspiring as they are, are an invasive species in Northern California and cause many problems due to their oily leaves and seeds. We can feel awe, and often do, for wonders—invasive species, authoritarian leaders, false prophets, and disseminators of false information—that lead us astray.

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Out in the trees: Wohlleben, Peter. The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate—Discoveries from a Hidden World. Vancouver; Berkeley: Greystone Books, 2016. Haskell, David G. The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature’s Great Connectors. New York: Viking, 2017. Sheldrake, Merlin. Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures. New York: Random House, 2020.

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Our participants feeling wild awe: In another relevant study, simply viewing ten awe-inspiring images of nature led participants to share more of a resource with a stranger in a trust game. Zhang, Jia W., Paul K. Piff, Ravi Iyer, Spassena Koleva, and Dacher Keltner. “An Occasion for Unselfing: Beautiful Nature Leads to Prosociality.” Journal of Environmental Psychology 37 (2014): 61–72.

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experiences of awe lead us: Stellar, Jennifer E., Amie M. Gordon, Craig L. Anderson, Paul K. Piff, Galen D. McNeil, and Dacher Keltner. “Awe and Humility.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 114, no. 2 (2018): 258–69.

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Some backpackers completed:

Atchley, Ruth A., David L. Strayer, and Paul Atchley. “Creativity in the Wild: Improving Creative Reasoning through Immersion in Natural Settings.” PLoS ONE 7, no. 12 (2012): e51474. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0051474.

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Polarization: Jesse Shapiro has documented the rise of political polarization in the United States and its sources (internet use is not one!). Here’s a recent piece of his: Boxell, Levi, Matthew Gentzkow, and Jesse Shapiro. “Cross-Country Trends in Affective Polarization.” NBER Working Paper No. 26669, June 2020, revised November 2021. https://doi.org/10.3386/w26669.

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We assume that we are reasonable: Robinson, Robert, Dacher Keltner, Andrew Ward, and Lee Ross. “Actual versus Assumed Differences in Construal: ‘Naive Realism’ in Intergroup Perception and Conflict.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

68 (1995): 404–17.

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wild awe might defuse: Stancato, Daniel, and Dacher Keltner. “Awe, Ideological Conviction, and Perceptions of Ideological Opponents.” Emotion 21, no. 1 (2021): 61–72. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0000665.

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Americans often sense the Divine: Froese, Paul, and Christopher D. Bader. America’s Four Gods: What We Say about God—and What That Says about Us. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.

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