The construction of awe in science communication

Abstract

Awe is a frequently represented and commonly experienced emotion in science communication. According to a popular account of this emotion, awe is an innate and universal human affective experience that occurs when a person evaluates a target as vast, forcing a shift in their worldview. This shift is portrayed in science communication as resulting in an enhanced interest in the scientific material at hand. Based on the latest research in affective science, however, we challenge this narrow version of awe in science communication and instead advocate a broader account of this emotion in line with a constructionist perspective. We argue that there are a variety of awe types in science communication, each with different forms and functions in relation to the mandates within the multiplicity of contexts in this cultural space. We also contend that people’s awe experiences result from their previous interactions with this emotion and the unique affordances provided by the science communication situation.

Keywords

awe construction culture emotion science communication

From Humboldt’s Kosmos to Sagan’s Cosmos, emotions such as awe and wonder are frequently evoked in the communication of science. Typically, such affect-laden language is used to describe the objects investigated by scientists, the genius of particular individuals, the resulting products and ideas of their endeavors, and/or various scientific milestones. Despite their prevalence in popular science content, however, little empirical work has systematically investigated the usage of these emotions in science communication.

According to many researchers, the human awe response is innate. Keltner and Haidt (2003), for example, argue that awe is an adaptive emotion that served our species’ ancestral needs to subordinate to powerful others and maintain social cohesion. Such an account holds that awe is a “natural kind” (Barrett, 2006a), meaning that it has an observer-independent set of features such as characteristic facial and vocal displays (e.g. Shiota et al., 2003), a distinct set of appraisals (i.e. evaluations; e.g. Shiota et al., 2007), and/or a unique pattern of nervous system activation (e.g. Shiota et al., 2011). Such nativist models of awe also contend that this emotion is culturally universal (e.g. Cordaro et al., 2016).

The conceptualization of awe as a natural kind and universal emotion is based on what has been called the classical view of emotion (Barrett, 2017a). Classical accounts argue that emotions have an “essence,” which can be a well-defined causal mechanism (e.g. a certain set of appraisals) or output (e.g. a unique facial expression) that make each discrete instance of emotion recognizable among other emotions and different from other mental processes (e.g. Ekman and Cordaro, 2011). This framework, whether explicit (e.g. Gottlieb et al., 2018; Helsing, 2016; McPhetres, 2019; Valdesolo et al., 2017) or implicit (e.g. Campbell, 2016; Sideris, 2017), has also underpinned descriptions of awe and wonder that relate to the communication of science.

Recent advances in affective science, however, have called the classical view into question. According to the alternative constructionist view, emotions are contextual phenomena whose forms and functions emerge from the interaction of evolutionarily endowed domain-general processes (e.g. categorization, memory, and language), in which culturally relative emotion knowledge, learned from experience, is used to construct meaning, make inferences, and mobilize the body toward goal-directed action (Barrett et al., 2014; Hoemann et al., 2019; Wilson-Mendenhall et al., 2011). In other words, emotions are not innate, with clear, common, species-wide features, but instead are seen as flexible and emergent throughout the course of an individual’s life, assuming the forms and functions that fit their sociocultural context (Barrett, 2017a; Mesquita et al., 2017).

In the present article, we argue how, rather than being innate, awe¹ is largely a construction of science communication. Of course, awe is not limited to this context. Representations of this emotion are important to a number of other domains as well (e.g. religion, tourism, and art). However, within science communication, awe is uniquely shaped by the values, norms, beliefs, and ideals deemed important to this “culture,” and due to the different, and even conflicting, mandates that operate within this space, it takes on a variety of forms and functions. Moreover, we argue that people’s experiences of awe in their consumption of science communication are a function of their previous experiences with this emotion and the affordances provided by their immediate context.

We begin with a brief summary of the literature on awe, which has been the subject of increased scholarly attention over the past few decades. We then review how science communication has treated awe and speculated about its forms and functions. In doing so, we show how the constructionist view is a plausible alternative to the classical (nativist) approach. We conclude by briefly considering some of the implications of this theoretical proposal for academics studying awe-related emotions, as well as for practicing science communicators who wish to draw on these emotions to enhance their work.

1. The classical view on awe

Not until relatively recently, when Keltner and Haidt (2003) published a conceptual review of awe, have scientists attempted to operationalize this construct. In that landmark piece, the authors argued that awe is an inborn (i.e. unlearned) state that results from an individual evaluating something as vast (either literally or metaphorically) that defies expectations, and which in turn leads to a necessity of accommodating this discrepant data within their existing mental schemas. For example, the authors describe tornadoes, grand vistas, cathedrals, and some scientific theories (e.g. the theory of evolution) as prototypical awesome stimuli. This nativist view of awe has since been widely accepted as axiomatic.

Since Keltner and Haidt’s pioneering work on awe, other scholars in the cognitive sciences have attempted to describe and elaborate on other various features of this emotion. These include the elicitors of awe (e.g. the Grand Canyon, music, religious experiences; Yaden et al., 2019), the appraisals that people make in response to stimuli (e.g. vastness, threat; Gordon et al., 2017; Shiota et al., 2007), the elements of an awesome event that are particularly relevant to the self (e.g. feelings of smallness, connectedness; Piff et al., 2015; Van Cappellen and Saroglou, 2012), the attitudes and beliefs that occur when people are in awe (e.g. humility, supernatural beliefs; Johnson et al., 2019; Stellar et al., 2018), and the observable behaviors and expressions that awe induces (e.g. open drop-jawed mouth, the “wow” vocal burst, etc.; Cordaro et al., 2016; Shiota et al., 2003). Many scholars working in this area argue that there exists a cross-cultural core set of features (e.g. a prototype) that characterizes awe experiences (e.g. Bai et al., 2017; Cordaro et al., 2016).

Scholars have also attempted to decipher the common function of this emotion. Some of this research has framed awe as an evolved adaptation. Keltner and Haidt (2003), for instance, hypothesized that awe evolved to facilitate group cohesion by promoting submission to hierarchies. Chirico and Yaden (2018), by contrast, suggest that awe works to signal to the individual that they are in a safe environment (i.e. one with a proper vantage point to detect threats, as atop a cliff). Others, however, have conjectured that more immediate roles are served by this emotion. This includes reducing stress and increasing wellbeing (Anderson et al., 2018), augmenting the systematic scrutiny of messages (Griskevicius et al., 2010), and making people more humble (Stellar et al., 2018), creative (Rudd et al., 2018), or prosocial (Piff et al., 2015). Overall, findings suggest a wide range of roles for awe that includes both evolutionary and proximate functions.

Despite the broad, and seemingly variable, swathe of data from the foregoing studies, most researchers in the field of awe continue to claim that there exists a standard awe experience, one that is both observer-independent and universal. By contrast, we argue that nativist assumptions about awe are less likely to reflect the reality of this emotion than constructionist claims, which contend that awe is learned, hugely variable, and highly context dependent.

2. The classical view of awe in the communication of science

The notion that scientific objects, ideas, people, and events—or the presentation of such using aesthetic or rhetorical devices—can automatically trigger people’s innate “awe response” is a deeply held one. Because scientific products and practices are sometimes “vast” in size (physically and conceptually), and sometimes violate people’s expectations, they are argued to instantiate the kinds of core appraisals that constitute a prototypical awe episode (Valdesolo et al., 2017). Science communication researchers have identified appeals to awe-like emotions in various media, including science photography (Kessler, 2012), science television (Campbell, 2016; Helsing, 2016), popular science literature (Gross, 2018; Sideris, 2017), science journalism (Fahnestock, 1986; Perrault, 2013), and children’s science literature (Bell, 2008). These scholars have described representations connoting awe in vastly large objects such as the Apollo program (Nye, 1994), images of galaxies (Kessler, 2012), and the Large Hadron Collider (Gross, 2018). In fact, whether intentional or not, some science communicators appear to use stylistic choices of color, contrast, and scale to create a sense of aggrandizement, presumably to elicit awe in their audiences (Campbell, 2016). Kirby (2015) suggests that there is even an overabundance of awe in contemporary science communication, observed in the works of popularizers such as Brian Cox and Neil deGrasse Tyson.

More recently, cognitive scientists have begun to explore the role of awe in teaching and communicating science. Investigators in this area have assumed that awe is a so-called “epistemic emotion,” which functions to generate curiosity and can be instrumentalized to enhance people’s interest and attitudes toward science (e.g. McPhetres, 2019; Valdesolo et al., 2017). This corresponds to the intuition held by many in science communication who have assumed that awe and wonder enhance people’s interest in the subject (Davies, 2019). A small body of evidence supports this interpretation. For example, McPhetres (2019) reported increased science interest in participants exposed to “awe-inducing” prompts. Likewise, Gottlieb et al. (2018) found that dispositional awe correlated with higher science knowledge, belief in evolution, and less tautological thinking. These authors concluded that people who regularly experience awe tend to have a more scientific mindset. Together, such results ostensibly lend credence to this rather narrow version of awe as having epistemic utility for science communication purposes.

In general, the foregoing view of awe is derived from a classical view of emotions. Whether it does so implicitly, assuming that the capacity to experience awe is something that everyone is endowed with and science communicators simply trigger these emotions by presenting “awe-inspiring” scientific artifacts, rhetoric or aesthetics (e.g. Campbell, 2016; Fahnestock, 1986; Gross, 2018), or explicitly (by invoking a specific theory of awe; e.g. Gottlieb et al., 2018; Helsing, 2016; Valdesolo et al., 2017), the actual nature and function of awe in the communication of science has not been sufficiently interrogated. Below, we argue that, when it comes to the emotion of awe, shifting the conceptual framework toward the constructionist view of emotions is warranted.

3. A paradigm shift in the study of emotion

The study of emotion is arguably undergoing a paradigm shift (Barrett, 2017b). Recent reviews and meta-analyses of the recognition and production of facial expressions (Barrett et al., 2019), patterns of autonomic nervous system (ANS) activation during emotional episodes (Siegel et al., 2018), and neuroimaging techniques (Lindquist et al., 2012) have challenged the longheld assumption that there are discrete observer-independent sets of co-occurring features for distinct human emotions. Evidence also suggests that, rather than having an inborn differentiation, children appear to acquire emotional categories as a result of learning-related concepts (Hoemann et al., 2019). More important, perhaps, are recent findings of culture-specific ways in which people perceive, express, and experience emotion (e.g. Boiger et al., 2018; Gendron et al., 2018), echoing the claims of anthropologists who, decades earlier, stressed the cultural relativity of emotion (e.g. Lutz, 1988).

In response to such findings, several constructionist models of emotions have appeared over the past two decades, moving the field away from the classical view and establishing a solid multidisciplinary approach in the science of affect (e.g. Barrett, 2017a, 2017b; Barrett et al., 2014; Hoemann et al., 2019; Mesquita et al., 2017; Wilson-Mendenhall et al., 2011). These models have in common the idea that emotions emerge from the interaction of domain-general processes (e.g. language, memory, and affect) operating within an ever-changing context to serve situation-specific goals. Emotion terms such as “awe” are not natural kinds but rather folk categories, learned over the course of a person’s lifetime of repeated use of that category in their particular culture (Barrett, 2006a, 2006b, 2012, 2017a; Hoemann et al., 2019). Following this constructionist view, we argue that (a) awe is an abstract and conceptual category; (b) cultures represent awe as a function of their values, norms, ideals, and goals (i.e. cultural mandates); (c) awe is culturally learned; (d) awe has multiple forms and functions; and (e) people’s brains construct awe ad hoc using their previously acquired knowledge of this emotion type to achieve a particular goal in a particular situation.

Emotion categories (e.g. love, happiness, and joy) are abstract categories as a result of having no concrete perceptual features that allow people to infer their properties (Barrett, 2012; Hoemann et al., 2020). Like all abstract categories, emotions require language for their formation and use. Words “bootstrap” conceptual knowledge, serving as a kind of statistical anchor around which the category is learned and stored in memory (Barrett et al., 2007). For example, infants can learn some categories as a result of their experiences with perceptual regularities of the world, such as “transparent objects” based on inferences made through their interactions with objects that have such properties (Smith and Gasser, 2005). By contrast, it is only through the use of the emotion word disgust that a child learns that different situations (e.g. spitting out bitter food, touching a snail, and an immoral behavior) correspond to the same category. Thus, an emotion word (e.g. the word awe) can refer to a highly disparate set of environments, appraisals, behaviors, expressions, cognitions, and feelings (Barrett, 2017a; Barrett et al., 2019; Siegel et al., 2018).

Emotion categories such as disgust, fear, love, and awe, are also conceptual categories, in that what makes one instance similar to another is the function or goal that these attend to (in the case of disgust, removing us from a repulsive object; Barrett, 2012; Hoemann and Barrett, 2019). Yet there is no one-to-one correspondence between function and emotion category (Hoemann et al., 2019; Wilson-Mendenhall et al., 2011). An emotion can have a multiplicity of functions, depending on the particular contexts in which it is used. As Hoemann et al. (2019) argue for the case of anger, for example:

[. . .] instances of anger can be associated with the goal to overcome an obstacle [particularly when the obstacle is another person], to protect against a threat, to signal social dominance or appear powerful, to affiliate and repair social connections, to enhance performance to win a competition or a negotiation, or to enhance self-insight. (p. 1833)

In that sense, the alleged function of an awe experience in science communication of generating curiosity and interest through the need to accommodate new information (e.g. Valdesolo et al., 2017), may be only one of the many functions that this emotion can assume.

The forms and functions of an emotion category are based in part on the collective intentionality that a group of people assign to them (Barrett, 2012, 2017a; Hoemann and Barrett, 2019). According to constructionist models, cultures (i.e. groups of people bonded by learned and shared systems of meanings) give form and functions to emotion categories in ways that are consistent with their cultural mandates (Mesquita et al., 2017), which are aggregates of values, ideals, norms, beliefs, and identities shared within a cultural space and that help people navigate the social world around common goals. The features of an emotion (e.g. elicitors, appraisals, and behaviors) are permeated by these culture-specific networks of meanings, delineating the functions that an emotion takes in a particular context, by sorting out recurring situations and promoting the proper flow of social life. For example, in cultures that are highly competitive, individualistic, and autonomous, such as the United States, the emotion of anger is assigned forms and function related to aggression. By contrast, in cultures where people have more egalitarian attitudes and beliefs, or where saving face is important, such as Belgium or Japan, anger may have other outcomes, such as self-blame and restraint (Boiger et al., 2013, 2018). The different anger types that each culture exhibits are a reflection of their cultural mandates.

Such culturally mandated forms and functions of emotions are represented in the many cultural practices and products of that society, for example, in children’s books and linguistic utterances (e.g. Boiger et al., 2013). Throughout the individual’s life, and particularly in childhood, socialization processes serve to enculturate and acculturate ingroup members with the “affective dye” of salient emotion types (Barrett, 2017a; De Leersnyder, 2017; Gendron and Barrett, 2018; Hoemann et al., 2019). The varieties of awe that are represented in a culture, we then argue, are ultimately a reflection of that culture’s values, ideals, norms, beliefs, and identities, and people learn these varieties in their interactions with these representations.

An individual’s emotion experiences are the result of a process known as categorization or situated conceptualization (Barrett, 2006a, 2017a; Barrett et al., 2014). Categorization refers to using previously acquired knowledge to assign meanings to the elements of a situation (e.g. settings, agents, internal states), allowing inferences to take place (Barsalou, 2012; Wilson-Mendenhall et al., 2011). People’s knowledge of an emotion category corresponds in good measure to the cultural types that they have learned in their interaction with the emotion category in their culture.² People then construct an emotion episode when their brains categorize a changing element or relation of an unfolding situation using this knowledge of emotion (Barrett, 2006b, 2017a; Barrett et al., 2014). Once a situation is categorized using emotion knowledge, it constructs a series of inferences about the elements at play, recruiting cognitive, motor, physiological, and attentional resources to prepare a person to achieve a situated goal (i.e. it is enactive and embodied) (Barrett et al., 2014).³ An emotion episode thus reflects the availability of knowledge accumulated in prior experiences with the emotion category in relation to the relevant information about a dynamic and complex present moment (Barrett, 2017a; Barrett et al., 2014).

We posit that awe, like all other emotions, is an abstract and conceptual category and therefore has multiple types that correspond to the particular mandates of the cultures (and subcultures) in which this emotion is represented. People learn awe as a result of the developmental context in which they are enculturated and the uniqueness of the social interactions and cultural artifacts they encounter. Their experiences of awe thus reflect the knowledge they have acquired throughout life and the situations they find themselves in. According to this perspective, the stereotypical open-mouth display and “wow” vocal burst, or the feelings of smallness and connectedness that may accompany the exposure to astonishing scientific content, is not an innate response, but a constructed one.

The category awe is present in many different sociocultural contexts, including not only science communication, but also religious communities (e.g. Krause and Hayward, 2015), the art world (e.g. Konečni, 2008), and the tourism industry (e.g. Coghlan et al., 2012), each of which has their own distinctive representations of this emotion based on their own cultural mandates. In what follows, we focus on the forms of awe in science communication when it comes to its multiple instantiations and possible functions.

4. Varieties of awe in the communication of science

Within science communication, awe is typically portrayed as having two core characteristics. First, some take it to be a “natural” emotional response to large physical or conceptual objects within the domain of science. Second, it is seen to enhance interest in science by making people more curious in the subject matter at hand. In reality, however, representations of awe in science communication do not always meet these criteria. A constructionist view of awe allows for an understanding of the discrepant and idiosyncratic depictions of awesome stimuli and their diverging functions as they occur within various science communication contexts.

One of the paradigmatic elicitors of awe in science communication, routinely used in science documentaries, is the sweeping panoramic view from the top of a mountain, plane, helicopter, or drone. Known colloquially as “the magisterial gaze” or “the Olympian perspective” (Campbell, 2016; Sage, 2008), this aerial vantage is so stereotypical that it is often used by experimenters to elicit awe in participants (e.g. McPhetres, 2019). Mountains, however, may not have always had this natural appeal as a place of awe and wonder. According to Nicholson (1997), to a seventeenth-century European traveler, mountains were rather “warts, blisters, imposthumes, when they were not the rubbish of the earth, swept away by the careful housewife Nature—waste places of the world with little meaning and less charm” (p. 62). It was when artists, writers, and naturalists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries rediscovered the vocabulary of the “sublime,” that mountains were culturally endowed with such awe-inspiring properties (Nicholson, 1997; see also Weiskel, 1986).

Today, representations of mountaintop sublimity that use the magisterial gaze abound in science communication (Campbell, 2016), and people regularly describe experiencing awe when seeing mountains or standing at the top of them (e.g. Rudd et al., 2018). As Nicholson’s example illustrates, panoramic views and mountaintop vistas are not intrinsically awe-inspiring, but the awe we associate them with today—like, we suggest, the awe we associate with black holes, the theory of evolution, the Large Hadron Collider, and Einstein’s genius—is a historically contingent characterization that has become a part of the representational repertoire of the culture of science communication.

Furthermore, not all the “awesome” subjects of science communication targets are vast, immeasurable, or extraordinary. To the contrary, representations of awe and wonder are also frequently linked with the small, the beautiful, and the quotidian. Outside of science, this rendering of awe-inspiring situations has a long history. Within poetry, literature, and philosophy, otherwise banal targets have inspired creative endeavors and romantic notions of awe and wonder. For example, the writings of American Transcendentalists, along with the works of Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Wittgenstein, Merleau-Ponty, and others, cast the rudimentary commonness of life and the beauty of the minute as awe-filled (Economides, 2016; Vasalou, 2015). In the communication of science, perhaps Rachel Carson best captures this approach, writing frequently of everyday, but emotionally evocative and powerful, encounters with small and picturesque objects in nature (Carson, 2017; Moore, 2005).

Expressions of awe relating to mundane elicitors—flowers and clouds, a mathematical formula, birdsong, rainbows, and so on—are in fact ubiquitous in the communication of science.⁴ Similarly, in everyday conversation, people regularly report feelings of awe in their interactions with objects and situations that are small, beautiful, familiar, and rather ordinary, rather than large and imposing (e.g. Graziosi and Yaden, 2019; Silva and Bering, in preparation).⁵ This suggests that the stereotype of awe as being exclusively elicited by the evaluation of something as large, complex, and vast may not be entirely accurate. Rather, awe is evoked also (or differently) in situations that are on an altogether different scale.

A straightforward “function” of awe in stimulating curiosity, and thereby increasing people’s interest in science, is also far from obvious. Scholars have hypothesized various other roles for this emotion as well, many of which are relevant to the communication of science. These include captivating audiences (Fahnestock, 1986), generating escapism (Jeffries, 2003), framing the sciences as sublime (Campbell, 2016), communicating existential, ethical, and aesthetic concerns (Helsing, 2016), reframing people’s relation to the natural world (Moore, 2005), making science into a quasi-religion (Sideris, 2017), and reinforcing national identity (Nye, 1994; Sage, 2008), among others. According to the constructionist view, the function of any given emotion and the goals it assumes in any given situation reflects a set of cultural mandates. Hence, the foregoing list of awe-related roles is a product of the many subcultures within science communication, each with differing values, goals, norms, and ideals.

For example, Perrault (2013) argues that science communicators assume distinct roles, distinguishable by their differing views of the nature and role of science in society. “Science boosters” such as Richard Dawkins promote a traditional-idealist view of science, which can lead to beliefs in scientism and technocracy. According to Perrault (2013), science boosters exploit the wonder of science in an effort to praise it and boost its image as a glorious endeavor, a type of hype that can potentially backfire. This type of instrumentalization of awe by some science communicators was also observed by Gross (2018), who identified atheism and materialism as ideological driving forces, and Sideris (2017) who observed how the emotions of awe and wonder are utilized by some to consecrate science “as a new global myth” (p. 83). Likewise, Moore (2005) observed how Rachel Carson uses these emotions to promote an ethics of care and concern for the environment. In short, the different mandates permeating the many subcultural spaces in which science is communicated determine the roles that awe, wonder, marvel, and all other such emotions serve.

Early science communicators, such as Erasmus Darwin, Humphry Davy, and Alexander von Humboldt, were steeped in the naturalistic milieu of wonder and the sublime of the Romantic era (e.g. Holmes, 2008). Their work was peppered with the vocabulary of awe, and evocative scenes of discovery, exploration, and invention colored their writings. On the other side of the Atlantic, discourses of the sublime and wonder were also put to use in the communication and popularization of new technological achievements such as the railroad, the electric dam, and the skyscraper (Nye, 1994). Awe has continued to crop up as a thematic device over the past two centuries in the communication of science, and can be traced through the works of luminaries such as Harlow Shapley (Palmeri, 2012), Rachel Carson (Moore, 2005), and Carl Sagan (Helsing, 2016), among others (see Gross, 2018).

As a result of this legacy, many contemporary science communicators operate as though the emotion of awe is a natural kind, that science is a special conduit to accessing this emotion, and that awe can be used to motivate people’s interest in science. The reality, however, is likely far more complicated. We argue for a broader conception of awe, one that acknowledges the impressive “range” of awe in science communication. Adopting the constructionist model for future empirical work in this area will accommodate not only a wide variety of awe elicitors (i.e. big, small, beautiful, and quotidian) and functions (i.e. raising interest, changing beliefs, and entertaining audiences), it will also encompass the array of feelings, behaviors, expressions, cognitions, and all the other rich elements of an emotional episode.

5. People’s experiences of awe in science communication

Following the constructionist view, people’s emotional reactions to science communication vary greatly from person to person. This is presumably the result of differences in their past experiences, along with the particular affordances of the situation in which the science communication occurs. Rather than specific kinds of scientific stimuli (e.g. rockets, the theory of relativity, and dinosaur bones) “releasing” an innate emotional response, experiences of awe are contingent upon the individual’s prior encounters with this affective state and the many idiosyncrasies of the situation they find themselves in. People learn and practice emotions in the cultures they navigate through their lifetime. The frequency and depth of exposure of a person to a culture (i.e. acculturation) predicts how closely they will construct and experience the emotion types prevalent in that culture (see De Leersnyder, 2017). Someone raised in a particular religious tradition where certain representations of awe are frequent, will construct and express this emotion in accordance with the value-laden scripts of that community. The same can be said for those who consume science communication.

We argue that those who participate in this culture learn the types of awe that are common to its products and practices, and will experience awe in accordance with such cultural meanings. In a study by Smith et al. (2011), for example, professional astronomers and astronomy enthusiasts broke out into focus groups and their responses to astronomical images were analyzed. Whereas professional astronomers showed “interest” toward the images, astronomy enthusiasts expressed their “awe and wonder” at the same objects. Although seemingly minor, this difference highlights the effects of acculturation, in which emotions are shaped by the cultural spaces occupied by these two groups of participants.

The affordances of any given science communication event also influence the occurrence and/or experience of awe. Because people constantly transact with the dynamic aspects of an unfolding situation, including external elements (e.g. the setting, actors, and objects present) and their internal states (e.g. interests, memories, identities, motivations, other emotions, and goals; Wilson-Mendenhall et al., 2011), emotions do not occur in a vacuum, but instead emerge within a highly complex and multifaceted set of circumstances.

Davies (2019), for instance, interviewed science communicators and attendees at a science festival. Although the former attempted to engage audiences by eliciting feelings of wonder and curiosity, the author observed a disconnect between their beliefs and festivalgoers’ actual experiences, with the latter reporting not only the intended emotions in response to the scientific presentations, but other emotions as well, including boredom and irritation. This study highlights the “negotiated” nature of people’s constructed emotions with their immediate context: festivalgoers showed many different positive and negative affective states in relation to the affordances of the science exhibitions and their own idiosyncrasies.

Awe experiences are thus products of one’s unique situational and sociocultural experiences with this emotion, not just push-button reactions to a given science communication event. The constructionist view provides not only a framework through which to evaluate the different types of awe represented in the communication of science, but also enables us to explore how people from different walks of life engage with evocative science subjects.

6. Implications of the constructionist view of awe in science communication

A constructionist view of awe can help science communicators to identify the multiple forms and functions of emotion-laden content, enabling them to tailor and refine their messages for specific communities and to achieve their specific communicative goals. Instead of over-relying on tired old tropes to instantiate awe (e.g. the Hubble image, the LHC, and the theory of relativity) and expect these to automatically trigger people’s curiosity and interest, it frees the science communicator to creatively explore novel ways of capitalizing on this powerful brand of affect. Whether it is to entertain their audience, change people’s behaviors, build community, challenge authority, or any other communicative goal they have in mind, practitioners can adjust their representations of awe in science to the contexts at hand.

Furthermore, explaining the origins of the universe, describing the theory of evolution, or presenting some other scientific content, could certainly elicit feelings of awe and wonder. But these communication efforts can also produce frustration, anxiety, boredom, anger, sadness, or any other affective state in those who have not been immersed in the cultural systems that surround science communication. Science communicators can broaden their beliefs and expectations of their audiences to include an awareness of their affective lives. This extra layer of cultural sensitivity can contribute toward practitioners being able to appeal to a larger diversity of audiences, particularly underserved communities that may experience negative affect around science (Humm et al., 2020).

Researchers should also consider the implications of the broad version of awe in science communication presented here. As with most of the literature on awe, the study of emotions in science communication has taken the classical view (e.g. Feldman and Hart, 2015), whereby emotions such as fear, shame, or guilt are treated as discrete, prototypical units. A constructionist view, by contrast, views emotions as much richer, nuanced, and multifarious. Thus, whether we are designing experiments to capture people’s emotional reactions, or observing how these emotions are represented in artifacts, taking the variability of form and function into proper account will improve our empirical methods and results (for some ideas, see Quigley et al., 2014).

Context should also be at the center of a new research agenda on awe in science communication. Beyond focusing on one aspect of the situation in which awe is experienced, such as its outcomes (e.g. McPhetres, 2019), we can use methods that capture the richness and situatedness of phenomena at the microlevel (e.g. Barsalou, 2019) and articulate these with macrolevel patterns of cultural and social life such as institutions and cultural values. Constructs such as cultural mandates (Mesquita et al., 2017), scientific capital (Archer et al., 2015), or emotional discourses (Lutz and Abu-Lughod, 1990) could serve as stepping stones in the elaboration of such linkages between the micro and macro contexts. Moreover, delving into the history of awe, cataloging the appearance of the various types and functions that it has assumed through the ages (e.g. Daston and Park, 1998) will be central to the contextualizing project. For this, we advocate an interdisciplinary approach to the study of awe (and other emotions) in science communication that effectively combines quantitative and qualitative methods (Johnson and Onwuegbuzie, 2004) and embraces complexity, syncretism, and a holistic view of emotions.

Finally, by adopting the constructionist view, we should take seriously the proposition that the way in which we communicate emotions constructs people’s affective, psychic, and social reality (Barrett, 2017a; Lutz and Abu-Lughod, 1990). In their consumption of science communication, people are learning affective knowledge that can shape their subjective lives. Emotion types, moreover, are not just regulated by the cultural mandates of the specific culture, but these themselves have the ability to create and reaffirm norms, values, and beliefs (Harding and Pribram, 2002). The “misuse” of certain emotion types, including some for awe, can perpetuate cultural mandates that are unfair, unequal, exclusionary, and hierarchical, propagating beliefs that could potentially be creating the conditions for harm (e.g. Jaggar, 1989; Lutz and Abu-Lughod, 1990). For example, anthropocentric values of dominance and control over nature, which stand behind many of our current environmental crises, could be reinforced by an embrace of a certain type of blind wonder and awe for science (Sideris, 2017). The constructionist view opens the way for acknowledging and studying the political and ethical implications of the way in which we as researchers and communicators use and promote this emotion.

7. Conclusion

In this article, we have adopted a constructionist view of emotions to challenge some of the existing beliefs surrounding its occurrence in science communication. The theoretical framework presented here will hopefully support a broader empirical examination of the various forms and functions this powerful emotion assumes, as well as provide practical insight into the diverse ways in which it can be used to enhance science communication efforts.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to Jamin Halberstadt and Katie Hoemann for their comments on an earlier version of this manuscript.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iDs

Daniel Silva Luna

Jesse M. Bering

Notes

Author biographies

Daniel Silva Luna is a PhD candidate in Science Communication at the University of Otago. He researches the representation and experiences of awe and wonder in science communication. He holds an MSc in Science Communication from Imperial College London.

Jesse M. Bering is a Research Psychologist and Director of the Centre for Science Communication at the University of Otago. An experimental psychologist by training, his primary research area is the cognitive science of religion. He is also an award-winning popular science writer having published various books including The Belief Instinct (2011), Why Is the Penis Shaped Like That? (2012), Perv (2013), and Suicidal (2018).

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