PERSON
Dacher Keltner
American psychologist (b. 1962), founder of the Berkeley Social Interaction Lab and the Greater Good Science Center, whose two-decade research program on awe established the empirical foundation for understanding how human minds accommodate to encounters with the vast.
Dacher Keltner is Professor of Psychology at UC Berkeley, where he has taught since 1996, and directs the Berkeley Social Interaction Lab. His research focuses on the science of emotion, power, and prosocial behavior, with particular emphasis on awe. His two-component model of awe, developed with Jonathan Haidt and published in 2003, established the framework that has generated hundreds of subsequent studies across cultures. His major works include Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life (2009) and Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life (2023). Keltner is the founding faculty director of the Greater Good Science Center, served as scientific consultant to Pixar on Inside Out and Inside Out 2, and is Chief Scientific Advisor at Hume AI, where he works to integrate emotion science into AI development.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Keltner was raised in a small Mexican town