Shining our humanity: The benefits of awe on self-humanity

Attributing humanness to oneself (i.e., self-humanity) can be malleable and can lead to various crucial outcomes. Researchers have not investigated whether and how awe as a self-related emotion affects people’s perception of their own humanness. We proposed two competing hypotheses: awe impairs self-humanity via self-smallness, and awe promotes self-humanity via authentic-self pursuit. Across seven studies (N = 1539), we found that awe is positively related to (Studies 1 and 4) and predicts self-humanity (Studies 2a, 2b, 5, and 6). Moreover, this relationship was mediated by authentic-self pursuit (Studies 3–6) rather than self-smallness (Studies 5 and 6). The effect of awe on authentic-self pursuit and self-humanity held true among the general population (Studies 1–4 and 6) and for a disadvantaged group (i.e., blue-collar workers; Study 5). In addition, we demonstrated that the effect was not driven solely by positive emotions (Studies 1, 2b, and 6). These findings enrich the literature on awe and self-humanity. © 2023 American Psychological Association.