The awe-prosociality relationship: evidence for the role of context

ABSTRACT

People in a state of awe have been found to perceive their needs as small while also expressing intentions to act in a prosocial way, benefitting others at personal cost. However, these findings come largely out of the USA and have focused on intended rather than real prosocial behavior. We propose a contextual model of the awe-prosociality relationship predicated on the constructed theory of emotion, according to which emotion categories and cost–benefit analyses of possible subsequent actions differ across cultures and in line with enduring individual differences. To test the model, we conducted a laboratory study (N = 143) examining whether costly volunteering behavior is higher amid awe in the Czech Republic, a country where social psychological studies have often produced different results compared to the USA. Awe-inspiring and neutral primes were validated in pilot studies (N = 229). As is possible under the contextual model, awe-inspiring primes elicited not more, but less, prosocial behavior, with the relationship being moderated by various facets of Openness to Experience. Individuals higher in the Feelings facet of Openness were also found to be more awe-prone. A call is made for a cross-cultural investigation of the awe-behavior relationship that accounts for complex phylogenetic relationships between cultures.

KEYWORDS:

• Awe
• small self
• constructed emotion
• culture
• cooperation
• Openness to Experience

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Jan Horský, Monika Bystroňová, Anestis Karasaridis, and Eva Daňková for their invaluable help with data collection for this project. We are also incredibly grateful to Martina Hřebíčková, the author of the Czech version of the NEO-PI-R scale, and her colleague at Testcentrum Publishers, Václav Havlůj, for their kind preparedness to share preliminary copies of the Openness to Experience scale of the Czech version of the NEO-PI-3 scale. We also thank Sarah McKerchar for awe-inspiring assistance with a round of revisions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Notably, our study was conducted in 2015 – years prior to worldwide attention being cast on the dangers of caves, amid an international rescue mission in Thailand to save a group of boys trapped in a cave (“The full story of Thailand's extraordinary cave rescue”, 2018).

2 https://www.socscistatistics.com/effectsize/default3.aspx

Additional information

Funding

The study was funded by an internal grant from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History (Jena, Germany) and supported by the research infrastructure HUME Lab Experimental Humanities Laboratory, Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University. RK acknowledges support from the Evolutionary and cognitive research of religion grant [grant number MUNI/A/1444/2020].