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Key points
- Experiencing an eclipse could help reduce people's focus on the self and shift their attention outward.
- Experiencing self-transcendent emotions like awe encourages prosocial behaviors and concern for nature.
- Collective awe experiences can be especially important in an increasingly polarized and tumultuous world.
Today's solar eclipse offers millions of people a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to witness a cosmic marvel. This event represents a quintessential opportunity to experience awe, a self-transcendent emotion with many positive consequences.
A solar eclipse is a spectacle that leaves people speechless as they experience an event that does not fit with their daily understanding of the world. In the middle of the afternoon, the sun disappears, temperatures drop, and the earth's creatures are confused by what appears to be nightfall.
These conditions, which are grand in scale and exceed our normal frame of reference, trigger the emotion of awe, which is a positive experience making people feel relatively small in comparison to the universe around them. Awe is viewed as a self-transcendent emotion because it shifts people's attention away from themselves and toward others, encouraging a range of positive outcomes such as helping (e.g., Piff et al., 2015), experiencing greater humility (e.g., Stellar et al., 2017), and performing more pro-environmental behaviors (e.g., Jacobs & McConnell, 2022).
Awe is an incredibly important social emotion because it encourages people to shift their attention away from the self and toward larger experiences, encouraging social connection and concern for others (Keltner, 2023). Today, when people experience the eclipse, they will suddenly be focused outside of themselves (i.e., turning their attention toward the skies) to witness something that in terms of size and scale will dwarf them and their concerns.
Moreover, many people will share this moment collectively with others (e.g., neighbors, co-workers, classmates), allowing them to simultaneously feel a sense of greater connectedness with others. Today, millions of people will stop and share a moment in backyards, on sports fields, in parking lots, and on sidewalks. This combination of "smaller self" with "social connection" can have powerful and positive effects where people are more focused on their shared commonalities than on their differences, which is especially important in an increasingly polarized and socially corrugated world.
This feeling of greater smallness can result in many interesting psychological consequences. For example, feeling small can reduce one's sense of self-importance, can make one feel that they are in the presence of something greater than themselves, and can help to put their daily dramas in perspective (Tyson et al., 2022).
Thus, it's not surprising that experiences such as being inside a grand cathedral can encourage parishioners to feel small in a unique and magnificent gothic environment, which, in turn, leads them to experience the presence of larger divine entities. In this sense, religion often highlights each facet of smallness (e.g., one is physically small in a large church, one experiences spiritual connections to larger forces in the universe, one's daily toils seem inconsequential in the context of eternity).
Even for those without religious beliefs, there are many opportunities to experience awe. Indeed, people report experiencing awe through being in nature, through viewing art, or even when listening to music (Shiota et al., 2007). Research in our lab has shown that people are especially likely to feel awe on a daily basis when they feel that nature is an important part of their self-concept and when they feel relatively small compared to nature (McConnell & Jacobs, 2020).
And today, millions of people will collectively experience awe by watching the solar eclipse. Indeed, people would be hard-pressed to find a more powerful way to "feel small" than looking up into the skies and witnessing an object 2 million times their own size (i.e., the moon) completely block their view of an object that is 800 billion times their own size (i.e., the sun) and 93 million miles away!
Self-transcendent emotions such as awe are incredibly important for promoting a better world. Interpersonal violence, environmental degradation, and verbal and physical aggression typically result from people who are too focused on their own needs and egos and too indifferent to the plight of others. If we wish to reduce harmful outcomes such as war, social injustice, and climate change, we need to encourage people to focus more on our collective fates and less on narcissistic individualism. Moments of awe can be powerful ways to help people feel small in the presence of something great, and solar eclipses help millions of people share these moments collectively and powerfully in ways that cross and transcend religious, class, race, gender, and political lines.
Disclaimer: The views posted on this site are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer.
References
Jacobs, T. P., & McConnell, A. R. (2022). Self-transcendent emotion dispositions: Greater connections with nature and more sustainable behavior. Journal of Environmental Psychology. 81, 101797.
Keltner, D. (2023). Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life. New York: Penguin Press.
McConnell, A. R., & Jacobs, T. P. (2020). Self-nature representations: On the unique consequences of nature-self size on pro-environmental action. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 71, 101471.
Piff, P. K., Dietze, P., Feinberg, M., Stancato, D. M., & Keltner, D. (2015). Awe, the small self, and prosocial behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 108, 883–899.
Shiota, M. N., Keltner, D., & Mossman, A. (2007). The nature of awe: Elicitors, appraisals, and effects on self-concept. Cognition & Emotion, 21, 944–963.
Stellar, J. E., Gordon, A. M., Piff, P. K., Cordaro, D., Anderson, C. L., Bai, Y., et al. (2017). Self-transcendent emotions and their social functions: Compassion, gratitude, and awe bind us to others through prosociality. Emotion Review, 9, 200–207.
Tyson, C., Hornsey, M. J., & Barlow, F. K. (2022). What does it mean to feel small? Three dimensions of the small self. Self and Identity, 21, 387–405.
