Keltner was raised in a small Mexican town and across rural California by counterculture parents — a biographical detail that shaped his interest in emotion as both scientific object and meaningful human experience. He earned his PhD from Stanford under Paul Ekman, the pioneer of modern emotion research, and brought to Berkeley the Ekmanian emphasis on cross-cultural universality combined with a sociological attention to power and institutional context.
His research program has operated at the unusual intersection of rigorous empirical method and philosophical ambition. He has measured awe through facial coding, physiological signatures, self-report, and behavioral experiments, while simultaneously engaging the philosophical tradition running through Burke, Kant, and William James. The combination is what makes his framework applicable to questions — like the AI transition — that exceed any single methodological approach.
His engagement with AI is notable for its refusal of the false binary between celebration and resistance. As Chief Scientific Advisor at Hume AI and founding scientific advisor at West Co., he participates in AI development rather than standing outside and critiquing its results. His collaboration with former student Alan Cowen produced the computational emotion research underpinning empathic AI — the discovery that the human voice conveys at least twenty-four emotions without words, that facial expressions map onto at least twenty-eight distinct emotional states, that these mappings hold across cultures and can be modeled by machine learning.
His recent work on imagination — the Possible Worlds Theory published in the Annual Review of Psychology in 2025 — argues that imagination is central to human social life and that play, spirituality, morality, and art are all exercises of the capacity to construct possible worlds. This positions a further element of the ecology of wonder: AI challenges us to define and protect imagination, not because AI will replace it, but because a culture optimized for efficiency may stop exercising it.
Keltner earned his PhD from Stanford in 1989, joined UC Berkeley in 1996, founded the Greater Good Science Center in 2001, and has been Chief Scientific Advisor at Hume AI since the company's founding by Alan Cowen. His public work includes the Greater Good podcast, the Greater Good Magazine, and extensive collaboration with arts and entertainment including Pixar.
Empirical awe. Operationalized what Burke, Kant, and James described philosophically.
Two-component model. Vastness plus accommodation, published with Haidt in 2003.
Small self research. Documented the specific ego-reduction and prosocial consequences of awe.
Empathic AI. Participated in AI development through Hume AI rather than standing outside it.
Possible Worlds Theory. Recent work on imagination as central to social life and threatened by optimization cultures.