Awe, the Small Self, and Prosocial Behavior

The Empirical Case for Ego-Dissolution

Piff and colleagues’ 2015 paper is the most rigorous experimental demonstration to date that awe produces a measurable contraction of self-focus and that this contraction, in turn, increases prosocial behavior. The research design is notable for its methodological diversity: five studies employing different induction methods (nature exposure, autobiographical recall, virtual reality, and a naturalistic grove-of-eucalyptus paradigm) converge on the same finding. When participants experience awe, they report feeling smaller, less important, and more connected to entities larger than themselves — and they subsequently behave more generously, more ethically, and more cooperatively. The critical finding is that this prosocial effect is mediated specifically by the “small self” — the felt diminishment of personal significance — rather than by positive affect generally. Joy, amusement, and pride do not produce the same pattern. Awe alone shrinks the ego and expands the moral circle.

The Small Self as Creaturehood

For depth psychology, the “small self” is not a new discovery but a new measurement. Rudolf Otto described the encounter with the numinous as producing a sense of “creaturehood” — the awareness of one’s own finitude and dependence before something wholly other. Jung observed repeatedly that the ego’s encounter with the Self produces a paradoxical experience: the ego feels simultaneously diminished and enlarged, reduced to its proper proportion while gaining access to resources that exceed personal consciousness. Piff’s data capture the diminishment half of this equation with precision. What the experimental paradigm cannot capture — and what depth psychology insists upon — is whether the diminishment serves merely social functioning or whether it opens toward something ontologically deeper: an encounter with the archetypal ground of being that restructures the personality from within.

Prosociality as Surface, Individuation as Depth

The paper’s consistent finding that awe increases generosity and ethical behavior is socially significant but psychologically incomplete. Thomas Moore’s Care of the Soul argues that the soul’s needs and society’s needs are not always aligned — that attending to soul sometimes requires withdrawal, descent, or the embrace of experiences that serve no prosocial function. If awe’s value is measured exclusively by its prosocial outputs, the depth dimension is lost. The alcoholic entering the First Step — “We admitted we were powerless” — experiences a radical form of the small self that is not prosocial at all in its initial phase; it is devastating, humiliating, and isolating. Yet it is precisely this crushing diminishment that the recovery tradition identifies as the gateway to transformation. Piff’s prosocial awe and the addict’s annihilating powerlessness may share a common psychic structure — the ego’s encounter with something that exceeds its capacity for control — but they differ enormously in depth, duration, and transformative consequence.

What the Data Illuminate

This paper matters for the depth psychological tradition because it demonstrates, with experimental rigor, that the ego’s deflation is not pathological but functional — that the psyche operates more ethically, more generously, and more relationally when the self is experienced as small rather than inflated. This is empirical confirmation of a principle that Jung, Hillman, and the entire individuation tradition have maintained: that ego-inflation is the fundamental obstacle to psychological development, and that the encounters which reduce it — whether with nature, with the numinous, or with one’s own suffering — serve the soul’s deepest purposes. Piff gives the principle a number. Depth psychology gives it a name: the work of becoming who one already is.