Everyday Awe
Keltner's awe diary studies challenged the peak-experience paradigm that had dominated earlier research. Participants recording their awe experiences over weeks reported awe multiple times per week, and the triggers were not grand vistas but small things: the way light fell through a window, a child's unexpected question, a piece of music heard in passing. These everyday awe experiences share the two-component structure of peak awe but at reduced intensity — modest vastness, incremental accommodation. Their significance lies in accumulation: repeated small stretches keep the cognitive architecture supple, producing over time a person better prepared for the next encounter with genuine vastness. For builders working with AI, everyday awe is the mechanism through which accommodation occurs continuously — dozens of small adjustments per day that collectively restructure understanding in ways no single peak experience could.
In the AI Story
The dominance of peak-experience awe in earlier research was a methodological artifact. Researchers designed studies around the most dramatic triggers — the Grand Canyon, religious ecstasy, extraordinary music — because these produced the largest measurable effects. But the research on diary studies revealed that awe's most important work may be done through its everyday form: frequent, small, and cumulative.
The developmental importance of everyday awe lies in its exercise function. Like muscle strength or cardiovascular fitness, the capacity for awe atrophies with disuse and strengthens with regular exercise. A person who regularly experiences everyday awe becomes more awe-prone — more likely to experience awe at smaller stimuli, more flexible in her accommodation, more rapid in her cognitive restructuring. The capacity is trainable.
For builders working with AI, everyday awe is abundant. Each interaction in which the tool exceeds calibrated expectations — not dramatically, but enough to register — produces a minor instance of vastness and demands minor accommodation. The cycle is self-reinforcing: the expanded framework produces more ambitious prompts, more complex problems, more impressive responses, another instance of everyday awe. Over days and weeks, the accumulation produces cognitive transformation that no single peak experience could have achieved.
Keltner identifies a specific quality that distinguishes the most developmentally productive everyday awe from merely pleasant experience: surprise-within-the-familiar. The musician who discovers a new harmonic possibility within a scale she has played for decades. The chef who finds an unexpected flavor combination. The expert encountering AI is in a privileged position for this specific form of awe, because expertise has built the conceptual infrastructure that makes hidden depths perceivable.
Origin
The awe diary methodology was developed by Keltner's Berkeley lab through the 2010s, with key publications by Yang Bai, Michelle Shiota, and others. The 2021 paper by Gordon, Stellar, Anderson, McNeil, Loew, and Keltner in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology established the frequency and diversity of everyday awe across multiple populations.
Key Ideas
Frequency. Awe happens multiple times per week in the lives of ordinary people — not once a decade at the Grand Canyon.
Same structure. The two-component model applies to everyday awe as it does to peak awe.
Accumulation. The developmental effects come from repeated small exercises of the accommodation capacity.
Surprise-within-the-familiar. The characteristic awe experience of expertise — connections visible only to those with deep frameworks.
Trainable. Awe-proneness strengthens with exercise and atrophies with disuse.
Appears in the Orange Pill Cycle
Further reading
- Gordon, A. M., Stellar, J. E., Anderson, C. L., McNeil, G. D., Loew, D., & Keltner, D. (2017). The dark side of the sublime.
- Bai, Y. et al. (2017). Awe, the diminished self, and collective engagement.
- Keltner, D. (2023). Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder.