The Kind of Awe That Softens How We Treat Others

That spine-tingling feeling you get standing beneath a towering canyon wall or gazing up at a sky full of stars has a name: awe. It is one of the most humbling emotions we experience, and researchers wondered whether it might also change how we treat the people around us, and whether the kind of awe matters.

What the researchers wanted to know

Emotions clearly shape how aggressive we act, and the researchers were especially interested in college students. Most past work, the abstract notes, has focused on reactive aggression, lashing out in the heat of the moment. Far less attention has gone to proactive aggression, the colder, more calculated kind that is used to get something and can carry more serious social consequences.

The team also zeroed in on a gap: evidence about how the specific flavor of awe matters is limited. Awe can feel uplifting and expansive, but it can also feel unsettling or threatening. So they asked whether positive awe and negative awe affect proactive aggression differently, and whether empathy might be the thread connecting awe to behavior.

How they studied it

The researchers recruited 110 college students and randomly assigned each to one of three groups: positive awe, negative awe, or a neutral emotional state. Awe was stirred up using video clips of natural landscapes designed to evoke each feeling.

To measure proactive aggression, they used a modified lab task (described as a bug-killing paradigm) that captured two things: how much force participants used and the proportion of bugs 'killed.' Empathy was measured separately using a well-known questionnaire, the Interpersonal Reactivity Index. Randomly sorting people into groups is what makes this an experiment rather than a snapshot; it lets researchers see whether the awe videos themselves nudged behavior.

What they found

The results drew a clear line based on the emotional flavor of the awe. Participants who experienced positive awe showed significantly lower proactive aggression than those in the neutral group, and this held across both measures. On force intensity, the positive-awe group averaged notably lower than the neutral group (2.86 versus 4.17), and on the proportion of bugs 'killed,' they were lower as well (0.68 versus 0.93).

Negative awe was a different story. Its calming, aggression-reducing effect was weaker and less consistent. Compared with the neutral group, negative awe was linked to a lower proportion of bugs 'killed,' but this effect was more fragile.

In short, awe was not a single, uniform force. The warm, wonder-filled version appeared to soften aggressive behavior more reliably than its darker, more threatening counterpart.

What this means for you

Here is the gently hopeful part: the emotions we deliberately seek out may shape how we treat other people. If a sense of positive, uplifting awe is linked with less cold, calculated aggression, then the walk that leaves you breathless at a sunset or the video that gives you goosebumps might be doing quiet good beyond the moment itself.

It is also a reminder that not all big feelings are interchangeable. Awe that inspires wonder seems to work differently than awe that unsettles us. If you are looking to reset after a tense day, this research hints that the awe worth chasing is the kind that makes you feel small in a good way, connected and expanded, rather than threatened.

For anyone building more calm into daily life, that is an easy, no-cost experiment: seek out the vast and the beautiful, whether that is nature, art, music, or a night sky, and notice how you carry yourself with others afterward.

The honest caveats

Some real limits are worth naming. This was a single experiment with 110 college students, so the findings may not generalize to other ages, cultures, or settings. Lab tasks are useful stand-ins for behavior, but they are not the same as real-world conflict, and how someone acts in a controlled study may differ from how they would act in life.

The study measured proactive aggression specifically, the calculated kind, so it does not tell us much about heat-of-the-moment reactions. And while the researchers set out to explore empathy as a possible connecting mechanism, the abstract's clearest results are about the difference between positive and negative awe; the fuller picture of how empathy fits in is more nuanced than a short summary can capture.

Finally, this is early, curiosity-driven research, not medical or clinical guidance. It does not prescribe awe as a treatment for anything. What it offers instead is a fascinating clue: that the quality of our wonder might matter, and that leaning toward the uplifting kind could be a small, pleasant way to bring out our better selves.