The eclipse observed throughout Europe this week evoked different emotions among those who witnessed it, including awe. Awe is believed to be an emotion, a moral emotion, and according to some, part of the “other-praising” branch of the moral emotions. We know awe is important because moments when we truly feel it can create lifelong memories. The most intense feeling of awe that I experienced on the edge of Ireland’s Gaeltacht, among the wildness of Galway, was an experience of awe that aligns with one of the most common elicitors: witnessing something powerful in nature.
Any self-respecting discussion about awe includes Keltner and Haidt’s (2003) seminal article. The authors pioneered the psychological literature on the topic, drawing from a range of disciplines to compose what they felt was a sound definition of awe and a classification of its manifestations. In sum, they center two key experiences within awe, experiencing a vastness and a consequent need to accommodate what is experienced as it cannot be assimilated within existing cognitive structures. They also delineate versions of awe that can occur, including those arising from threatening experiences (e.g., witnessing a tornado) and transcendent experiences (e.g., feeling small within the cosmos). While religious experiences are included, with references to Hindu scripture and Christian teachings, religion is very much the junior partner to the primordial driver of awe, which, according to the authors, was an “emotional reaction of a subordinate to a powerful leader” (Keltner & Haidt, 2003, p. 306).
Believers in God — especially Jews, Christians, and Muslims — will likely find this explanation of why we feel awe to be inadequate. Keltner and Haidt themselves mention that they devised their approach “with some trepidation, in the absence of empirical evidence” (Keltner & Haidt, 2003, p. 311).
Awe Contested
In their review of 168 studies, Katz and Franz (2026) reported that 77% based their conception of awe on Keltner and Haidt (2003), with the majority of these failing to acknowledge the lack of empirical backing to their work: “In spite of Keltner and Haidt’s emphasis on the lack of empirical evidence for their approach, their work has been taken as a fixed definition of awe by the majority of the studies in the research field” (Katz & Franz, 2026, p. 85). Further, 80% of the studies relied on the term awe itself, with none of the quantitative studies verifying what the participants’ understanding of the term was (N = 125). Among the qualitative studies, however, the findings revealed various discrepancies between what the researchers understood awe to mean and how participants understood it. Despite these weighty concerns, Katz and Franz’s (2026) paper is perhaps the most robust evidence that despite recurring weaknesses in method and practice, the field is also self-evaluating and self-policing.
Coming back to Keltner and Haidt’s argument that awe was primordially driven by an emotional reaction to a powerful leader and its apparent rootedness in the idea that morality and moral emotions are primarily designed for social functioning, Katz and Franz (2026) also reported that cross-culturally, whether in Japan (Nakayama & Uchida, 2020), or Bulgaria, Greece, and Türkiye (White, 2017), awe was primarily associated with religious experiences and, explicitly, with God. Only in the USA did other experiences such as being in nature or finding a spouse drive understandings of the evocation of awe. In light of this, the need to interrogate the idea that awe was first and foremost a psychological mechanism by which subordinate members of a group could yield to a powerful and charismatic leader is apparent.
The division between an awe that is inspired by religious experiences and the awe that occurs in nature would have been strange to most pre-modern societies, including, and to an extent, especially, in the Western world. McGrath (2023) suggests that the transformation from Natural Philosophy to Natural Science plays a significant role in the divorce of conceptions of nature from theism, while Taylor (2007) focuses instead on the gradual secularizing shift from theism to deism, which relegated God’s role from being involved in an enchanted cosmos to God as the designer of nature’s machine. Most pre-modern intellectuals drew both theological and scientific inspiration from gazing in awe at nature, from Copernicus and Galileo to Kepler through to Newton (McGrath, 2023).
There appears to be rhyme between how awe is conceived – feelings of transcendence, belongingness, and connectedness – and situations in which it is evoked – religious and natural world experiences – and certain theological teachings. The relationship between Christian theology and witnessing nature is relevant as is the Quranic leitmotif instructing its readers to witness, seek, and contemplate nature as a means to know and feel God; awe is a central psychological phenomenon in this process, with both traditions having a stake in how awe is defined and understood.
As we stumble our way towards further understanding the complexities of this celestial emotion, epistemic humility seems warranted, while interdisciplinarity could help further enlighten this area of psychological inquiry. While we do not yet know exactly what awe is and why we possess the capacity to feel it, its memorability suggests it is important. For me, one of the rare moments when I truly felt awe was during a moonless, pitch-black night, camping on a beach in Galway and looking up and seeing the star-studded Milky Way for the first time. With full reflexivity, I can say that it is difficult to reconcile the longing for the divine that awe catalyzed within me in that moment with the explanation that this was a secondary elicitor of an emotion whose prototypical function was to be felt towards a powerful leader.
