Awe
Definition
Awe is the emotion arising from an encounter with something vast enough to exceed a person's existing frame of reference, and which therefore requires that frame to be revised.
Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt identify two necessary features: perceived vastness — physical, conceptual, social or temporal — and a need for accommodation, the requirement that existing mental structures be adjusted to take in what has been encountered.[1] Without the second, vastness produces only impression; without the first, accommodation is merely learning.
Characteristics
Awe is unusual among emotions in several respects. It is not clearly positive or negative — the same encounter can produce elation or dread, and reports frequently contain both. It reliably produces a diminished sense of self: experimental subjects induced into awe draw themselves smaller, report feeling physically smaller, and describe their own concerns as less pressing. And it slows the perception of time: people in an awe state report having more time available and become measurably more willing to give it away.
Downstream, awe is associated with increased prosocial behavior, generosity, humility, and a greater tolerance for uncertainty. Keltner's group has proposed the "small self" as the mechanism: an emotion that reduces self-focus makes room for collective concern.
Sources
The reliable elicitors are nature at scale, birth and death, music and art, extraordinary skill, moral beauty, collective ritual and effervescence, and — increasingly documented — vast conceptual scale, such as deep time or the size of the universe. The overview effect, the reorientation reported by astronauts seeing Earth from orbit, is the most studied single case, and has been the model for many attempts at synthetic reproduction.
Awe and Technology
Two distinct relationships are worth separating.
Technology as a means of producing awe. Immersive environments, planetaria, large-scale projection, VR reconstructions of orbital views and simulated deep time all deliberately target the two conditions. The research on VR-induced awe finds real effects on prosocial measures, and also that the effect depends heavily on the sense of presence rather than on visual fidelity — see immersive technology.
The technological sublime. David Nye's term, extending Kant and Burke, for the awe historically directed at human-made vastness: the railway, the bridge, the dam, the rocket, the factory. Nye's argument is that in the United States this became a civil religion, with technological objects performing the function landscape performed in European Romanticism. Product launches, and the aesthetics of scale in data-centre and rocket photography, are its current form.
The interesting question for this field is what routine access does to the emotion. Awe requires that something exceed one's frame; a frame continuously stretched by images of everything may become correspondingly harder to exceed. Whether this constitutes a genuine erosion or merely a shift in what elicits awe is not settled.
Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology
Awe is the emotion most directly concerned with the boundaries of a person's model of the world, which makes it the natural counterpart to a field studying the extension of the person. It is also one of the few states in which the reduction of the self is experienced as a good — a useful corrective in a technological culture organised almost entirely around its amplification.
Related Reading
References
- ↑ Keltner, Dacher, and Jonathan Haidt. "Approaching Awe, a Moral, Spiritual, and Aesthetic Emotion." Cognition and Emotion 17, no. 2 (2003): 297–314.
