Great art aims for awe — the feeling of standing before something vast enough to make you feel small. It turns out that feeling does something measurable to how people treat each other.
Paul Piff and colleagues, including Dacher Keltner, published five studies in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2015, with more than 2,000 participants. People who felt awe — whether measured as a personality trait, prompted by a video, or produced by standing in a grove of towering eucalyptus trees — behaved more generously, made more ethical choices, and helped strangers more.
The mechanism they identified is elegant. Awe produces what the researchers call the small self: standing before something immense, your own concerns briefly shrink. And a smaller self leaves more attention for other people. In one study, participants who had just looked up at tall trees picked up more dropped pens for a stranger and reported feeling less entitled.
This gives a hard-nosed reason to care about scale and beauty in cultural spaces. A soaring room, a huge canvas, a piece of music that opens up — these are not indulgences. They may prime the exact psychology that makes a community more generous.
The caveat: these were controlled studies of induced awe, and the effects, while consistent, were modest. Awe is not a reliable machine for producing saints.
Still, for anyone shaping how people encounter art, it argues against playing it small. Build for the moment that makes someone feel briefly tiny in front of something larger. That moment appears to turn people outward.
Sources
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(6).