Awe’s effects on prosociality require analysis over time
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| Year of publication | 2019 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | It has been argued that the costs of monumental architecture and ceremonies are more than offset by their prosocial effects – effects that stem, at least in part, from the awe these entities elicit. Numerous psychological experiments have produced findings suggesting a connection between awe and prosociality. According to the popular "small self" model of the relationship between awe and prosociality, awe-inspiring stimuli, by virtue of their vastness, suppress the observer’s personal needs, thus encouraging prosociality. In this presenation, we begin by describing an experiment in which we monitored prosocial behaviour rather than reports about how much one would, in theory, donate to charity, only to find that this behaviour (time spent on a boring voluntary task) was less pronounced among people who had just seen a video of awe-inspiring nature. Religiosity appeared to provide a buffer against this apparent restlessness following awe. While noting the potential relevance of religiosity to how experiences of awe are interpreted, we concluded that the awe-prosociality relationship might be one that develops over longer time frames than those involved in a laboratory experiment. In the second part of the presentation, we describe an analysis of how a facet of prosociality - reported sense of connectedness to people in the local community, one's country and the world - is affected over time by interest in (and, presumably, also exposure to) impactful visual art and music. We explore this awe-prosociality relationship among groups of people differing in religiosity and socioeconomic status, with this subgroup analysis being made possible by the fact that we use data from the New Zealand Attitudes and Values Study - a survey study following a large group of people representative of the New Zealand population over the past 7 years. |
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