Awe’s effects on generosity and helping

Abstract

It is unclear whether positive emotionality in general, or some specific positive emotions (e.g. other-oriented ones), but not others (e.g. self-oriented and, possibly, stimulus-oriented ones), enhance prosocial thoughts, dispositions, and behavior. We focus here on awe and argue that, although being primarily stimulus-oriented and not necessarily social in its very nature, awe should enhance prosociality for several theoretical reasons. In replicating and extending previous initial research, we found in two online experiments that the induction of awe (video clip or recall), compared to the induction of amusement or a neutral condition, leads to increased prosocial behavioral intentions of generosity (spontaneous sharing of hypothetical gains) and help of a person in need – in hypothetical everyday life situations. Awe’s effect on prosociality was independent from participants’ religiosity (in both experiments) but seemed to be clearer for those in need of such affective stimulation, i.e. less agreeable participants (Experiment 2).

Keywords:

• positive emotions
• prosocial behavior
• awe
• agreeableness

Acknowledgment

We thank Hanyi Xu for her participation in discussing the methodology of this work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Zhang, Piff, Iyer, Koleva, and Keltner (2014) also found evidence in the US that exposure to subjectively more, compared to less, beautiful nature stimuli increases generosity (dictator task), trust (trust game), and helping behavior. All three effects were mediated by higher positive emotions. This mediation, together with the absence of a neutral – no emotion – condition, suggests that prosociality was simply higher when positive emotionality was stronger, but does not provide us with specific information about awe. Finally, during the evaluation of the first version of the present manuscript, new work with multiple studies, again in the US, was published, showing that the induction of awe increases prosocial attitudes and behavior, partly because of self-diminishment (Piff, Dietze, Feinberg, Stancato, & Keltner, 2015).

2. Universalistic values (Schwartz, 1992) and the resource dilemma (Sheldon & McGregor, 2000) were also included at the end of the experiment, but neither were affected by the condition nor affected post-experimental measures.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the John Templeton Foundation [grant number 38668].