Awe

As our bodies and physiologies align with those of others, so too do our feelings. The study of emotional contagion finds that as individuals share spaces and daily living as roommates, neighbors, romantic partners, and work colleagues, their feelings come to resemble one another’s. The default self assumes our feelings are unique; the more likely truth is that we are nearly always feeling together.

Through moving in unison and convergence in feeling, a transformation in consciousness occurs: we shift from an egocentric view, seeing the world through our eyes only, to a shared attention to what is transpiring. In elegant and important work, psychologist Michael Tomasello has documented how synchronized social behaviors during childhood—play, pointing, exploring, working on tasks together—enable this capacity for shared attention. In these moments, we combine separate perspectives into a shared perspective, what you might call shared awareness, a collective consciousness, or extended mind.

This is the beginning, quite early in development, of how as adults we gravitate to shared representations of reality. For example, studies find that after traumatic events like terrorist attacks, people initially express unique perspectives, such as the fear of another attack or outrage at the innocent being killed. Over time, individuals’ emotions converge; people develop a shared and collective understanding of what has transpired. This convergence in mind leads to goodwill, cooperation, and a transformed sense of self as part of a community.

This process of moving in unison, contagious feeling, shared attention, collective representation, and transcendent self brings us awe in cultural practices when we realize our actions are part of a movement, a community, a culture. These feelings can arise during the rites of funerals, which our twenty-six-culture study found to be a human universal. Here is an experience of awe at a funeral in Sweden, during a moment in which the mourners gathered to collectively say goodbye:

It was at a funeral where my best friend was buried. I was very sad and it was time to go around the coffin to say the last goodbye. When I laid down my rose on the coffin and said some words to my friend, what she had meant to me for many years, I felt awe. After the ceremony I gave my friend’s daughter a hug and went down to the sea because that is the place where I feel calm.

Graduations are also organized around shared attention and moving in unison, as well as exalted feeling, collective representation, and ushering in new identities. Psychologist Belinda Campos experienced this at her graduation recognizing her PhD, at a time when only a handful of Mexican Americans received such an honor—all the more unlikely in her case given that her parents had to stop their educations in fifth grade to go to work. As Campos was leaving the ceremony, a Mexican grandmother told her how much it meant to see someone like her up onstage receiving a doctoral degree. Here is Campos’s story of awe:

The woman’s words jerked me out of myself. There were so many sacrifices, individual and collective, that made it possible for someone like me to be up on the stage that day. The chain of life, and sacrifice, suddenly seemed to stretch for generations and span countless people. . . . But the thought of the collective struggle, the people trying to rise, and the urgency of the need for a better, more equal, world fills me with fear-ish wonder and reminds me that anything anyone does is part of the grander human experience.

Ceremonies like graduations locate our individual selves within larger narratives, often occasioning awe and “fear-ish wonder” for historically marginalized people entering mainstream society.

The instinct to move in unison is deep, the transformative power of collective effervescence widespread.

Walking

Perhaps the simplest form of moving in unison is walking with others. Our evolutionary shift from arboreal life to bipedal walking paved the way for awe. As we began to walk upright, our perception of the world changed; we encountered vast vistas and mysteries of what lies beyond. We became a wandering species, timing our migrations and settlements to the cycles and patterns of the sun, weather, seasons, life cycles of flora and fauna, and migratory patterns of other mammals. The ways in which we defended ourselves from predators shifted from scampering individually into trees to fending off peril in synchronized movements together. Through the hunting of large mammals (and also with the emergence of agriculture), food sharing arose, enabled by ritualized ceremonies tied to seasons and harvests. We would eventually walk in small groups (perhaps as small as ten to thirty) to all the continents in the world, beginning in our second out-of-Africa meandering some fifty or sixty thousand years ago.