Psychologist Dacher Keltner has spent years studying what happens to us in the presence of something vast: a night sky, a grove of towering trees, a waterfall. He calls it the “small self.”
Awe, it turns out, shrinks our sense of importance, how central we feel to the story. And that shrinking, strangely, makes us better people. It softens the grip we keep on our own significance.
In one study, researchers had people stand among giant trees, nothing more, and measured what happened next. Compared to a control group, they became more helpful, less entitled, more generous in simple tests of sharing and fairness. Across five separate studies, the same pattern held.
It’s a strange thing for science to prove: that shrinking ourselves makes us better neighbors. Psalm 104 got there first. Sometimes the data just catches up to the doxology.
