Dacher Keltner: Awe, Power, and the Science of Positive Emotions

Biography

Dacher Keltner was born in 1960 and grew up in California, where his interest in emotion was formed early, in part through his family's involvement in the science of it — his brother is the psychologist James Gross, and the household was one where feelings were discussed as matters of serious interest. He studied at the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned his doctorate in social psychology in 1989, and he has spent his entire career there, rising to become one of the most influential researchers on emotion in the world.

His early work was on the expression and perception of emotion, in collaboration with Paul Ekman, and on the social functions of embarrassment and laughter — an unpromising-sounding subject that turned out to be rich. He showed that embarrassment is not a failure of social functioning but a signal of commitment, and that laughter is less about humor than about social coordination. These themes — emotion as a social instrument, evolved for connection rather than merely for feeling — organized everything that followed.

The turn toward happiness research came through his collaboration with Jonathan Haidt, with whom he studied the "elevating" emotions, and through his leadership of the Berkeley Social Interaction Lab, where he and his students mapped the facial expressions, vocal signals, and bodily responses of awe, compassion, love, and gratitude. In 2001 he founded the Greater Good Science Center at Berkeley, which translates the science of well-being into practical resources and has become one of the most influential institutions of the modern happiness movement.

His books have carried the research to a wide public: Born to Be Good (2009), which argued that human beings are built for kindness; The Compassionate Instinct (2010), with his colleagues at the Greater Good Science Center; and Awe (2023), which synthesized two decades of research on the emotion he has made his own. He continues to teach and research at Berkeley, where he directs the Berkeley Social Interaction Lab and the Greater Good Science Center.

For the study of happiness, Keltner matters because he reconnected the science of well-being to the oldest questions about human nature. His research on awe, power, and compassion argues that the good life is not a private achievement of the individual will but a social achievement of the species — that human beings evolved to find their deepest well-being in connection, wonder, and care.

Key Ideas

Awe Science

Awe, Keltner's signature subject, was until recently one of the least studied emotions in psychology. His research program changed that. Awe, as he defines it, is the emotion we feel in the presence of something vast and mysterious that we do not fully understand — a mountain range, a great work of art, a crowd of people acting in concert, the night sky, the birth of a child. The experience has two central features: a sense of smallness in the face of something greater, and a challenge to our existing mental models.

The findings are striking. Awe makes people feel more connected to others, more humble, and more generous; it slows time, reduces stress, and activates the vagal system associated with social engagement; it even reduces markers of inflammation. Keltner's lab has shown that awe can be found in everyday life — in trees, in music, in moral beauty — and that seeking it out is a practice available to everyone. His work has restored wonder to the science of well-being and given empirical form to an experience that the mystical and philosophical traditions had described for millennia.

Power as Status

Keltner's account of power is a direct challenge to the Machiavellian view. Power, he argues, is not the capacity to dominate others but the capacity to influence them, and influence is granted, not seized. Drawing on a wide literature and his own studies, he shows that people rise to power not by intimidation but by attention to others, generosity, and the building of trust; that power is a matter of status — the respect and good reputation one holds in a group — rather than coercion; and that the famous "corruption" of power is really the corruption of those who lose the empathy that earned them their standing in the first place.

The argument has direct implications for well-being. If power is connection, then the pursuit of dominance is a strategy that isolates and damages — a finding that matches the research on narcissism, materialism, and the unhappiness of those who treat people as instruments. Keltner's account gives empirical teeth to the ancient criticism of the will to power and to the modern discovery that relationships are the strongest predictor of a flourishing life. He asks us to understand influence as a form of service rather than conquest.

Compassion and Evolution

Keltner's most ambitious claim is about the origins of compassion. Against the assumption that human nature is fundamentally selfish and that kindness is a veneer, he argues that caring for others is part of the species' basic design. The argument runs on several tracks at once: infants respond to distress with concern before any training; the nervous system contains dedicated circuits for caregiving and for being soothed by care; and human survival, across evolutionary time, has depended on cooperation more than on competition. Compassion, on this account, is not the exception to our nature but one of its foundations.

The evidence he marshals includes the vagus nerve — the ancient "wandering" nerve that calms the heart and the gut and is activated by connection and care — and the physiology of compassion, which is distinct from the physiology of stress. The view connects the science of well-being to the ethics of compassion found in every major moral tradition, and it has practical consequences: if compassion is built into us, then practices that cultivate it — mindfulness, loving-kindness meditation, service — are not fighting our nature but completing it.

Positive Emotions

Keltner's broader contribution is to the functional study of the positive emotions. Where the tradition treated joy, gratitude, love, and amusement as mere signals of well-being, Keltner and his colleagues treat them as instruments of it: emotions that evolved because they build the resources — the relationships, the knowledge, the resilience — that a flourishing life requires. His work on gratitude showed that the emotion strengthens the bond between giver and receiver and motivates the repayment of kindness; his work on love located it in small moments of shared positive emotion rather than in grand passions.

The functional account connects his research to that of Barbara Fredrickson, whose broaden-and-build theory it complements, and to the broader positive psychology movement. But Keltner's version is more explicitly social: positive emotions are the emotional vocabulary of cooperation, the states that make it possible for groups of imperfect people to work, play, and care together. The science of well-being is, in his hands, a science of the social emotions.

Legacy

Keltner's legacy is visible in the transformation of the field he entered. When he began, the study of positive emotions was marginal to psychology; today, awe, gratitude, and compassion are established research programs with journals, conferences, and funding. His role in that transformation is direct: his papers on awe, his functional analyses of embarrassment and laughter, and his collaborations with Haidt on elevation helped create the modern science of positive emotion. The Greater Good Science Center, which he founded, has carried the findings to millions of readers and practitioners.

For the study of happiness, his significance is the rediscovery of the social. The early positive psychology movement was sometimes criticized for an individualistic bias — as if well-being were a matter of the isolated mind's techniques. Keltner's work makes that criticism impossible to sustain. From his account of power as status to his physiology of compassion to his demonstration that awe dissolves the boundaries of the self, his research shows that the deepest well-being is found between people, not inside them.

The criticisms of his program are the standard ones for the field: effect sizes are often small, samples skewed, and the translation from laboratory to life uncertain; the evolutionary arguments are reconstructions that resist direct testing; and the enthusiasm for the positive can underplay the legitimate functions of negative emotion. Keltner, like most serious researchers in the area, accepts the first two points and insists on the value of the enterprise despite them.

What is secure is the achievement of giving scientific form to experiences that had been left to poetry and religion. Awe, wonder, and compassion — the states that the moral traditions placed at the center of the good life — now have measures, mechanisms, and practical practices. That is a contribution that will outlast most of the debates of the field.

Related Learning

Continue with the science of positive emotions: Barbara Fredrickson on broaden-and-build, Jonathan Haidt on elevation and the moral emotions, and the Dalai Lama on compassion and secular ethics. Read Haidt's The Happiness Hypothesis alongside Flourish and The Art of Happiness. Then explore what is well-being, what makes people happy, and gratitude vs happiness. The full sequence is organized in the Happiness & The Good Life learning path.

Sources

• Keltner, Dacher. Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life. New York: Penguin Press, 2023.
• Keltner, Dacher. Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life. New York: W.W. Norton, 2009.
• Keltner, Dacher; Haidt, Jonathan; and Shiota, Michelle N. "Social Functionalism and the Evolution of Emotions." In Evolution and Social Psychology, edited by Mark Schaller, Jeffry A. Simpson, and Douglas T. Kenrick, 115-142. New York: Psychology Press, 2006.
• Stellar, Jennifer E., and Keltner, Dacher. "Awe and Everyday Life." Cognition and Emotion 31, no. 4 (2017): 644-655.