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To hear Herodotus say it, a total solar eclipse in 585 BC ended a five-year war between ancient kingdoms in what is now Turkey.
Will another total solar eclipse on Monday end America’s partisan wars?
This idea may sound far-fetched until you talk to Paul Piff. The professor of psychology and social behavior at the University of California, Irvine has spent the better part of two decades studying what triggers us to put aside our personal needs and shift our focus to the greater good. .
He and other scholars have discovered that one of these is awe. It’s the feeling you get when you contemplate something so vast and mysterious that you’re forced to reevaluate your understanding of the world.
And nothing creates a sense of awe like watching the moon blot out the sun and a sunny day sink into eerie darkness.
“People talk about solar eclipses as one of the coolest or most shocking things they’ve ever seen,” Piff said.
Paul Piff, a psychology professor at the University of California, Irvine, who studies awe, posed in Long Beach last week. He used the 2017 total solar eclipse to study what makes people feel awe and how it changes their emotional state. He is planning another experiment based on Monday’s solar eclipse.
(Allen J. Scherben/Los Angeles Times)
In the run-up to the 2017 U.S. solar eclipse, Piff launched a study showing that people who were engulfed by the moon’s shadow experienced greater awe than those who didn’t see the sun disappear. did. Moreover, that awe seemed to make them closer to others, more open to different perspectives, and more likely to prioritize the needs of others over their own.
Piff believes he could tap into more of that sentiment this year, as a contentious presidential election threatens to turn political opponents into mortal enemies.
Awe, he says, “gives us a sense of connection to something bigger than ourselves: our community, our society, our world.” “Having people feel that way is critical to the survival and longevity of our species.”
Monday’s solar eclipse provides a new opportunity to assess the emotional state of the tens of millions of Americans expected to gather in its path. Piff will focus on whether people who experience this celestial phenomenon feel more connected to their fellow Americans from opposing political parties.
On August 18, 2017, Poolal Long, a fourth-grader at Clardy Elementary School, practices the proper use of eclipse glasses in preparation for the August 21 solar eclipse in Kansas City, Missouri.
(Charlie Riedel/Associated Press)
Jennifer Stella, a social psychologist who studies emotions at the University of Toronto, sees a reason for optimism: She said reverence is an ideal tool for trying to reduce political polarization.
Emotions such as gratitude and compassion tend to shift a person’s focus outward, but in such cases, the emotion is usually focused on one person, she says. Awe is unique in that it “creates a sense of interconnectedness, common humanity, and collective good.”
Piff and his colleagues found that the community-oriented mindset documented after the 2017 solar eclipse disappeared within six weeks.
What does it take to make it last?
If you’ve ever found yourself in a spiral of anger, paralyzed by fear, or overwhelmed by debilitating sadness, you may have wondered what the use of emotions is. Experts assure that they serve a useful purpose.
“Negative emotions narrow our attention and focus it on threats. Positive emotions expand our minds,” says psychologist Dutcher Keltner, director of the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, Berkeley. Told.
Keltner’s lab has studied positive emotions such as joy, compassion, gratitude, and love. But his favorite emotion is awe. (He also wrote a book about it, Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonders and How It Can Change Your Life.)
“Awe creates instability,” Keltner said. “You realize that your knowledge alone cannot explain everything.”
A person watches the moon pass between the Earth and the sun during a lunar eclipse in Bryce Canyon National Park, Utah, October 14, 2023.
(Rick Bowmer/Associated Press)
Awe is also a universal emotion expressed by people across countries and continents. No matter where we come from, when we feel awe, our eyes widen and our mouths drop open.
The fact that it has emerged in so many different cultures around the world is one sign of awe’s usefulness, Piff said. Additionally, society regularly ritualizes the way we engage in awe, whether it’s stepping into a majestic church or visiting the Grand Canyon.
When researching the effects of awe, Piff asks subjects to look up at the canopy of a towering eucalyptus tree, or watches a slow-motion video of dye falling into a glass of milk to help them feel awe. I urge you to do so.
Studies like this one by Piff and many others have shown that fear can make it harder to breathe, affect your heart rate, and cause goosebumps on your skin. It also reduces physiological signs of stress and suppresses the brain’s default mode network, which plays a role in certain types of self-focus.
“People who experience awe, in all kinds of ways, experience a variety of benefits, including better health, better meaning, more happiness, and a greater sense of purpose in life,” Piff said. .
It also encourages discovery and exploration, Keltner said.
“Awe provides the engine that updates knowledge,” he said. “It fuels the testing of new ideas. And we need that, and we need to constantly update our understanding of the world.”
Keltner collected stories about awe from 26 countries to look for common triggers. Nature, he says, is one of a broad category that comes up again and again, and “big ideas” is another.
A total solar eclipse checks both of these boxes.
Crowds look up at the moment of a solar eclipse in Salem, Oregon, on August 21, 2017.
(Marcus Yam/Los Angeles Times)
There is nothing inherently mysterious about the cause of a total solar eclipse.
Just as the Earth moves around the Sun, the Moons also move around the Earth, but their orbital planes are slightly distorted. Nevertheless, at least twice a year, the moon comes directly between the Earth and the sun, making it invisible in the daytime sky. And about once every 18 months, this celestial alignment occurs when the moon gets close enough to the Earth to completely cover the sun, meaning it completely covers the sun.
Although it seems like a frequent occurrence, on average only once every 375 years does a particular location on Earth fall into a total path. Being in the right place at the right time can be awe-inspiring in itself.
The idea of using solar eclipses as a natural experiment to study awe was first introduced in 2016 by Piff, who attended the Awe Summit, and by astronomers from the University of California, Berkeley, at the American University on August 21, 2017. The idea came to me when I heard someone say that the solar eclipse would be the first solar eclipse. It took him almost a century to create a complete route from coast to coast.
The idea to use solar eclipses as a natural experiment to study awe came to Paul Piff in 2016 when he attended the Awe Summit.
(Allen J. Scherben/Los Angeles Times)
It wasn’t immediately clear how to capitalize on this event. He could have sent researchers to locations along the eclipse’s path to observe crowds and conduct interviews. He could have distributed a questionnaire to people who said they witnessed the eclipse and asked them to complete it.
“None of the ideas really took hold,” Piff said.
Eventually, he turned to Twitter.
Nicholas M. Jones, then a graduate student, devised a way to identify Twitter users within a particular community based on the accounts they followed. This allowed him to create a sample of his 1.5 million tweets that were shared over a 12 week period by his 22,000+ people in selected cities along the path of wholeness. Ta.
Meanwhile, another graduate student named Sean Goldie led the creation of a custom dictionary of words to describe awe, including “transcendent,” “amazing,” and “surreal.” , often contained terms that indicated an awe-inspiring, community-centered outlook. The dictionary was used to assess the emotional breakdown of tweets collected by Jones and a sample of his 6 million tweets posted on the day of the eclipse.
Researchers found that Twitter users who were in a position to witness a solar eclipse were more than twice as likely to use words from the awe dictionary compared to those who missed the big event.
To a lesser extent, they were also more likely to express collective thinking, recognize the limits of their own knowledge, and use language that lends credibility to the opinions of others. The research team’s statistical analysis suggested that these emotions were partially caused by the awe they felt.
Furthermore, the tweets Jones collected showed that people who injected more awe-related words into their tweets on the day of the eclipse also used words infused with outward-looking, community-oriented emotions. showed that. However, the effect was short-lived.
The results of the study were published in the journal Psychological Science.
On August 21, 2017, a total solar eclipse will occur over Cerulean, Kentucky, with the moon covering the sun.
(Timothy D. Easley/Associated Press)
Jones, now a senior postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Irvine, said he has developed a method to determine the location of Twitter users to gauge the impact of mass shootings.
“The effects of studying negative events are very powerful,” he says. “I wasn’t expecting things to work out for something positive, but…they did!”
Posting on X, now known as Twitter, is no longer freely available to researchers. So Piff and his new collaborators are devising another way to collect data related to Monday’s eclipse.
They’re already finding people who plan to experience wholeness somewhere between Mazatlan, Mexico, and Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada. They want to get you to answer a few questions on your phone while the world temporarily goes dark, and then invite you to follow up in the next few weeks.
In another experiment, Piff had volunteers invest five minutes in a “daily awe intervention.” Early results suggest it extends the benefits of the initial great experience, he said.
People gather near Redmond, Oregon, to watch the sun as a total lunar eclipse approaches on August 21, 2017.
(Ted S. Warren/Associated Press)
“If people started paying a little more attention to the awe-inspiring things around them, it’s very likely that we’d have a more lasting impact,” Piff says.
He said he hopes that includes a shift in thinking that will help bridge the country’s increasingly toxic partisan divide.
Piff said there is no reason for events like the eclipse to change people’s partisanship, but they may make people more willing to compromise with political opponents for collective goals.
“Awe seems to induce more kind, sympathetic, and empathetic behavior,” he says. “It reminds us of something bigger that we’re a part of.”
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