By Dr. Katie Blake, PhD | Social & Cultural Psychologist, Travel Psychology Expert
The hotel sat on the edge of a cliff above the Maasai Mara, and in the evening I walked out onto the deck and just looked out at the horizon.
There wasn't much to see, at least not in the way you might expect. No elephants crossing, no lions stretched out in the grass. Just land, as far as I could see, running out to meet the sky while the light faded.
And yet I couldn't stop looking, because I knew what was out there. Somewhere in all that space, lions were hunting. Herds were moving. A whole world was going about its evening with no idea I was up on that deck watching it.
I remember feeling very, very small. And I remember that it felt good.
Psychologists have a name for that feeling. It's awe, and it may be one of the most powerful emotions travel gives us. It doesn't only happen in wild places, either. I felt a version of it in the cities of Africa, too, watching crowded roadside markets go by from a car window.
Here's what the research says about awe, why feeling small can be so good for us, and how to find more of it on your next trip and back home.
Awe Is What Happens When the World Is Too Big to Fit in Your Head
For a long time, psychology research mostly overlooked awe. That changed in 2003, when Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt published a paper in Cognition and Emotion that became the starting point for nearly all the awe research since.
They proposed that two things sit at the heart of awe. The first is perceived vastness, the sense that you're in the presence of something much bigger than you. That can mean physical size, like a canyon or a night sky. It can also mean something socially vast, like a person with enormous talent or influence.
The second is what they called a need for accommodation. The term comes from famous psychologist Piaget, and it describes what happens when an experience won't fit into the mental categories you already have. Your mind has to stretch to make room for it.
Plenty of big things are just big, and we walk right past them. Awe tends to show up when the vastness also outruns our understanding, at least for a moment.
Keltner and Haidt also noted that awe can tilt pleasant or unpleasant depending on what comes along with it: beauty, exceptional ability, virtue, the supernatural, or threat. We'll come back to that last one.
Looking back at that evening on the deck, I think both pieces were there. The land was vast, obviously. But what got me was everything I couldn't see. I knew there was a whole living world out there, hunting and grazing and settling in for the night, and I had no way to take it all in. My mind kept reaching for the edges of it and not finding any.
Feeling Small Turns Your Attention Outward
That feeling of being very, very small has a name in the research, too. Psychologists call it the small self.
In 2015, Paul Piff, Dacher Keltner, and colleagues published five studies with more than 2,000 participants in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. People who tended to feel awe more often were more generous in an economic game. When the researchers induced awe in the lab, people made more ethical choices and reported more prosocial values. In the final study, participants simply stood in a grove of towering trees. Afterward, they were more helpful and less entitled than people in a comparison condition.
The explanation, at least in part, was the small self. Awe seemed to shrink people's sense of their own importance, and that made room for other people.
Yang Bai and her colleagues took the idea on the road. In a 2017 paper, also in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, they approached tourists at two very different spots: Tunnel View in Yosemite, one of the most famous vistas in the United States, and Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco, a busy but fairly ordinary tourist stop. They asked people to draw themselves. The visitors at Yosemite reported more awe, and they drew smaller versions of themselves.
The pattern held for both American and Chinese participants, though it varied in strength and content across the two cultures. As a cultural psychologist, I find that detail fascinating. How small we feel, and what that smallness means to us, may depend a lot on how we were raised to think about the self in the first place.
Bai's team also compared awe with shame, another emotion that can make us feel small. The two weren't the same at all. Awe didn't make people feel lower in status, and it went along with feeling more connected to the people and groups around them.
That matches what I felt on the deck. I felt small and, at the same time, more a part of things.
Awe Doesn't Need Wilderness. A Crowd Can Do It Too
When most of us picture awe, we picture mountains, oceans, starry skies. Nature is a big part of the story. But some of my strongest memories of feeling small come from the opposite end of the spectrum.
In Kisumu, the city on the shores of Lake Victoria in western Kenya, I remember riding along a road lined with a market that seemed to go on forever. There was color everywhere. People were selling produce and roasted corn (a popular street food called mahindi choma in Kiswahili), goat meat hanging in glass butcher cases, jewelry, and handmade goods. Horns were honking and music was blaring, and people walked, waved, laughed, and called out to each other.
I couldn't have told you where the market began or where it ended. From the car window, it felt like the whole city was moving at once, and I was one tiny moving piece of it.
Remember that Keltner and Haidt said vastness can be social as well as physical. In his 2023 book Awe, Keltner draws on stories of awe gathered from people in 26 countries and names eight "wonders of life" that most often bring the feeling on. Nature is one. So are music, visual art, spirituality, life and death, and epiphanies. The most common source of all is moral beauty, the courage and kindness of other people.
Another of the eight is collective effervescence, a phrase the sociologist Émile Durkheim used for the electric sense of "we" that comes from being swept up in a crowd, a ceremony, or people moving together.
To be fair, I was watching the market through a car window, so I can't claim I was fully inside that collective feeling. But as I've come to understand it, a busy market can deliver vastness in the social sense: more lives, more stories, and more motion than one mind can hold. I think the Mara and the market gave me the same stretch, one from a landscape and one from a crowd.
The fullest version of collective effervescence I've ever felt came somewhere else entirely: Murrayfield Stadium in Edinburgh, at Taylor Swift's Eras Tour.
It was a summer evening in Scotland, which means the sun stayed up until late at night. When "Shake It Off" came on, the whole stadium was dancing and jumping, and I could feel the ground moving under my feet. I wasn't imagining it, either. The British Geological Survey later reported that the crowds' dancing at all three Edinburgh shows was picked up by earthquake monitors miles away.
Later in the night came "marjorie," a song Taylor wrote about her late grandmother living on in her memory. Tens of thousands of people sang it together while phone flashlights rose and waved across the stands. I looked up at the Scottish sky and felt connected to everyone around me. I also felt connected to my ancestors, who came from Scotland, and to my grandparents, who are no longer living. They were part of the reason I had made that trip at all. It was a pilgrimage of sorts, and I wrote more about that pull in The Psychology of Ancestral Travel.
Looking back, that one moment held almost all of Keltner's wonders at once: music, a crowd moving together, an open sky, and the people we've lost.
Awe May Be One of Travel's Best Stress Resets
We usually talk about travel and stress in terms of rest: sleeping in, logging off, lying by a pool. Awe offers a different route, and the research on it is promising.
In a 2015 paper in Emotion, Jennifer Stellar, Dacher Keltner, and colleagues asked more than 200 young adults across two studies how often they felt a range of positive emotions, including joy, contentment, pride, love, and awe. They also measured interleukin-6 (IL-6), a marker of inflammation. People who felt more positive emotion overall tended to have lower IL-6, and awe was the strongest predictor of all.
That study was correlational, and the researchers were careful to say they couldn't tell which came first. Lower inflammation might make people more open to awe, or the link might run both ways. Still, it's an intriguing hint that awe shows up in the body as well as the mind.
A second study goes a step further. Virginia Sturm and her team, working with Keltner, randomly assigned 60 healthy older adults to take a 15-minute walk outside once a week for eight weeks. Half were simply told to walk. The other half got a short introduction to awe and were encouraged to look for it as they walked.
The "awe walk" group reported more awe during their walks. Over the eight weeks, they also reported greater drops in daily distress. When they took selfies on their walks, they gradually took up less of the frame and showed more of the scenery around them, and their smiles grew bigger. The researchers titled the paper, fittingly, "Big Smile, Small Self."
This was a small sample of healthy older adults, so I wouldn't stretch it into a cure for anything. But I find it hopeful. If 15 minutes of looking for awe close to home can lift people's moods over time, it makes me wonder how much that evening above the Mara did for me.
Awe Makes Time Feel Roomier
One of my favorite findings in this whole area is about time.
In 2012, Melanie Rudd, Kathleen Vohs, and Jennifer Aaker published three experiments in Psychological Science. People who were led to feel awe, compared with people feeling other emotions like happiness, said they felt they had more time available. They were less impatient. They were more willing to volunteer their time to help others, they leaned toward experiences over material things, and they got a bigger boost in life satisfaction.
The researchers traced all of this back to one thing: awe pulls you into the present moment. When you're fully absorbed in what's in front of you, time stops feeling so scarce.
I recently wrote about the holiday paradox, the strange way a great trip flies by while you're on it and then feels long in memory. That research is mostly about how our minds tally up time after the fact, and Rudd's work is about how time feels in the moment, so the two aren't measuring the same thing. As I see it, though, they fit together nicely. Awe slows the moment down while you're in it, and novel, awe-filled days tend to leave rich memories behind.
My time on that deck was short. In my memory, it stretches out much longer.
Awe Has a Darker Side, and It Helps to Know It
The words awesome and awful come from the same root, and the research suggests that's no accident.
Keltner and Haidt wrote in 2003 that awe can be enlightening when we manage to make sense of something vast, and terrifying when we can't. In 2017, Amie Gordon, Jennifer Stellar, and colleagues tested that idea directly in a set of studies in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. They identified what they called threat-based awe: awe in response to something vast that also feels dangerous, like a tornado, a terrorist attack, or a wrathful god.
Threat-based awe turned out to be fairly common, making up somewhere between about one in eight and one in four of the awe experiences people described. It came with a stronger sense of powerlessness and less feeling of control. It also showed up in the body as the nervous-system arousal we associate with stress. In one experiment, people who watched an ominous video of swirling tornadoes reported lower wellbeing afterward than people who watched an uplifting awe video, or even a neutral one.
When I think back to the Mara, there was a little thread of that in it. Part of what made the view so powerful was knowing there were lions out there hunting. But I was safe up on that deck, so the danger stayed at a thrilling distance.
The market had its own edge, too. Noise, crowds, and constant motion can tip from exhilarating to overwhelming, especially when you're far from home and still finding your footing. That's part of what I wrote about in the psychology of culture shock.
If feeling small on a trip has ever left you more rattled than restored, nothing is wrong with you. The same vastness can land very differently depending on how safe and in control you feel. I explored that sense of control in The Psychology of Fear of Flying: Why Losing Control Feels Worse at 40,000 Feet, and it applies here as well.
You Can Go Looking for Awe
Awe can feel like luck, something that either happens to you or doesn't. The awe walk study suggests otherwise. Simply knowing what awe is and deciding to look for it made a difference. Here are a few ways to invite more of it on your next trip, and once you're home.
Find the high ground. Overlooks, rooftop bars, hotel decks, the top of a hill at the edge of town. Vastness is easier to feel when you can see a long way.
Go toward the crowd sometimes. Markets, festivals, a packed stadium, a street celebration. If you prefer calmer trips, you don't have to make this your whole itinerary, but one busy evening might surprise you.
Put the phone down for a minute. Rudd's research ties awe to being fully in the present moment. Take the photo, then look again without the screen.
Let yourself not understand. The need for accommodation is part of awe. Resist the urge to explain everything right away, and sit with what doesn't fit yet.
Watch people being good to each other. Moral beauty was the most common source of awe in Keltner's research. A stranger giving directions, a vendor laughing with a regular customer, a family looking after an elder. These moments count.
Take an awe walk at home. Fifteen minutes, once a week, with the simple intention of noticing something vast or surprising. The sky above your own street is still the sky.
I think about that deck above the Mara more often than I would have guessed. I think about the market in Kisumu, too, all that color and noise moving past the window, and about a stadium full of people singing under a Scottish sky that wasn’t quite ready to go dark. Each of those places made me feel small in the best possible way.
Maybe that's what awe really gives us when we travel. For a moment, the world gets bigger than our worries, and we remember we're part of it. And if you want to hold onto those moments after you're home, that's exactly what souvenirs are for.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is awe, in psychology?
Psychologists Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt describe awe as the feeling we get in the presence of something vast that our minds can't immediately make sense of. The two core ingredients are perceived vastness and a need for accommodation, meaning we have to stretch our understanding to take the experience in.
Why does travel make us feel awe?
Travel puts us in front of things we don't see every day: huge landscapes, unfamiliar cities, new ways of living. Novelty and scale are exactly what awe responds to, so trips tend to give us more chances to feel it.
What is the "small self"?
The small self is the sense that you, and your everyday concerns, shrink a little during awe. Research by Paul Piff, Yang Bai, and colleagues links it to feeling more connected to other people and behaving more generously.
Is awe good for your health?
Early research is encouraging. One study found that people who felt awe more often had lower levels of the inflammation marker IL-6, though it couldn't show cause and effect. Another found that weekly "awe walks" helped older adults feel less daily distress over eight weeks.
Can you feel awe in a city?
Yes. Awe isn't limited to nature. Crowds, markets, music, architecture, and the kindness of strangers can all bring it on. Keltner's research suggests that other people's goodness is actually the most common source of awe worldwide.
Why does awe sometimes feel scary?
Some awe comes mixed with threat, like watching a powerful storm. Researchers call this threat-based awe, and it tends to come with feelings of powerlessness. Whether awe feels thrilling or frightening often depends on how safe and in control you feel.
How can I feel more awe in everyday life?
Try a short weekly walk with the intention of noticing something vast or surprising. Look up, look out, put your phone away, and pay attention to people being kind to each other. You don't need to cross an ocean to find it.
If this resonated, I write about the psychology of travel — where we go and how those places change us — every week on Psychologie. Subscribe here to get it straight in your inbox.
Katie Blake, PhD is a social and cultural psychologist, travel psychologist, and writer based in the USA. She is the publisher of The Journal of Travel Psychology and the founder of The Postcard Société. She works with individual travelers and leading travel and hospitality brands on psychology-informed experiences and campaigns. Available for media inquiries, expert commentary, podcast appearances, and brand collaborations — visit drkatieblake.com/press.