A sideways look at economics
On a recent trip to Northern Ireland, my fellow Fathomites Ingrid and Ellen and I went on a hike to the Giant’s Causeway. It is a unique formation of rocks, tall hexagons of stone towering over the water at the very top of Northern Ireland, with beautiful green hills surrounding it giving the landscape a dramatic look. It is no wonder that the place has been a source for folklore – legend has it that the Irish giant Fionn Mac Cumhaill created the causeway to get across the Irish Sea and fight the Scottish giant Benandonner, who ripped the causeway up as he fled. The feeling I had walking around and taking it all in was similar to the feeling I got when I visited Machu Picchu in Peru, or when I read my first Kazuo Ishiguro novel, or even in the depths of the pandemic when I was able to set foot in Richmond Park after not having left central London for months. I felt awe – an emotion that is difficult to define but very powerful, and that has been shown to have economic implications.
We all feel awe when we stop and notice something about our surroundings, and it changes our perspective. We lose ourselves in an experience, it shifts our focus outside ourselves and makes us feel small. It doesn’t necessarily need to be caused by a world heritage site such as the Giant’s Causeway, it can be just stopping and noticing the flowers on a bush outside your house that you walk past every day. It can be moral too – seeing or participating in a selfless act, such as helping a stranger with some luggage, can also trigger this type of feeling.
The feeling of awe has been important to the evolution of human society, as it connects the individual to the collective; it makes us think of ourselves less as separate people and more as part of a society or a group, part of something larger than just individuals. Dacher Keltner and Michelle N. Shiota conducted an experiment[1] which involved asking one group of students to look at a large replica of a T-rex skeleton in the museum of palaeontology on their campus, while another group looked in the opposite direction, just down a hallway. They then asked all participants to fill out a form requiring them to finish the sentence “I am …” 20 times. Even though the first group only looked at the skeleton for about 30 seconds, they were more likely to give answers that highlighted themes of common social identity, like “I am human”, “I am a mammal”, “I am a part of X culture”. Even such a short exposure to something awe-inducing had shifted the participants’ perspective!
Because of this change in focus, the feeling of awe has been connected in various economic studies to pro-social behaviour. Piff et al. (2015)[2] highlighted this link; they asked participants to report how likely they were to experience several positive emotions in their everyday life, among them awe, and then asked them to participate in a ‘dictator game’. The dictator game is a classic game within behavioural economics, which in its most basic form involves two people, with one person assigned to be the “dictator” and given a certain endowment, like £10, and told to unilaterally decide whether to keep all of it to themselves, or to give an amount to the other participant. The experiment found that even when correcting for other positive emotions and demographic variables, differences in predispositions to awe tended to predict generosity in the game – those who were more likely to experience awe also wanted to give more. The researchers ran several other experiments and continued to find that inducing awe in the subjects tended to increase ethical decision-making, generosity and pro-social values, while decreasing feelings of entitlement.
Not only will introducing more awe-inducing experiences into your day-to-day life make you more likely to act pro-socially, it also boosts happiness and reduces stress and anxiety. Anderson et al. (2021)[3] took a group of students and a group of military veterans rafting for a week, and showed them a beautiful stretch of river where they could see fish and trees and be out in nature all day. They measured their emotions and cortisol levels, finding that stress levels in both groups had been reduced, while the veterans reported feeling 30% less PTSD. This is believed to be because awe stimulates the vagus nerve, the main nerve in our parasympathetic nervous system, which when activated slows our heart rate and breathing, lowers blood pressure and promotes digestion. It is even linked to our immune system!
In these times, and especially for those of us living in large, busy cities, it is easy to slip into an awe-deprived routine. But it turns out that just taking a few minutes to look at a tree, help out a neighbour, or listen to some enjoyable music is a simple way for us to introduce more calm and happiness in our lives, and to make us nicer people too. Sounds like a win-win for everyone to me. Inspired by all this research, I have booked my first horse-riding lesson in over two years. Even though there is an undeniable risk that I will fall off within the first 10 minutes, at least it will make me less of a self-absorbed person in the process!
The Giant’s Causeway / pic by Linnéa Hjelm
[1] https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/why_do_we_feel_awe
[2] https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2015-21454-002
[3] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29927260/
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