Oh, the things you don’t know: awe promotes awareness of knowledge gaps and science interest

ABSTRACT

Awe is described as an a “epistemic emotion” because it is hypothesised to make gaps in one’s knowledge salient. However, no empirical evidence for this yet exists. Awe is also hypothesised to be an antecedent to interest in science because science is one way to fill those knowledge gaps. Results from four pre-registered studies (N = 1518) indicate that manipulating awe through online (Studies 1a, 1b, and 1c) and virtual reality (Study 2) videos, led to greater awareness of knowledge gaps. Awareness of knowledge gaps was consistently associated with greater science interest and to choosing tickets to a science museum over tickets to an art museum (Study 1b). These effects were not consistently observed on, nor moderated by, other measures related to cognition, religion, and spirituality. However, exploratory analyses showed that science interest was better predicted by positive emotions than by awe. Still, these results provide the first empirical evidence of awe as an “epistemic emotion” by demonstrating its effects on awareness of knowledge gaps. These findings are also extended to the effects of awe on science interest as one possible outcome of awareness of knowledge gaps.

KEYWORDS:

• Awe
• science interest
• metacognition
• emotion
• pre-registered
• open-data
• open-materials

Acknowledgements

Jonathon McPhetres designed the studies, collected the data, conducted the analyses, and wrote the manuscript. Special thanks to Miron Zuckerman for feedback and supervision, and to Thuy-vy Nguyen for her comments on the manuscript. Special thanks to my many research assistants for all of their hard work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Open practices

All three studies reported herein were pre-registered on the Open Science Framework prior to data collection. Pre-registered plans and materials are available at the following links:

Study 1a and 1b: https://osf.io/r4ayh/?view_only = 76150450c5024484aba61c1aa168336b

Study 1c: https://osf.io/ek6sy/?view_only = 66be0360259340ef96c770a02e6dfa4e

Study 2: https://osf.io/3ymf5/?view_only = 5e5e8a5b60eb424394672953fbfb192d

Data and syntax are available here: https://osf.io/e734a/?view_only = 6f2d8d06054f41fb9c88ef5f4e100375

ORCID

Jonathon McPhetres http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6370-7789

Additional information

Funding

This study was funded partially by an award from the Center for Integration of Research, Teaching, and Learning at the University of Rochester and by an award from the The Community Foundation.