Why do we feel small in front of an enormous view?

Their own bodies came out smaller. People who felt more awe estimated their body as smaller than people who felt less. A tendency to be absorbed in the experience predicted stronger awe, and an instruction to concentrate on the stimulus increased it further. The estimate concerns body perception, not a physical change and not necessarily humility.

To ask whether “feeling small” is more than a metaphor, you first have to define the feeling. Awe is treated as a response to something vast that does not fit the frames you have, and therefore demands that understanding be revised. Those two components, scale and the need to update, separate it from ordinary admiration.

The measurement is the clever part. Instead of asking people whether they feel small, which invites the answer, they were asked to estimate the dimensions of their own body in numbers. Whoever felt stronger awe estimated their body as smaller, on a measure that does not depend on understanding the idiom.

Two things strengthened the link. First, people inclined to be absorbed in the experience reported stronger awe with nothing special done to them, so a personal trait is at work and not only a stimulus. Second, an instruction to concentrate on the stimulus raised awe, which puts attention inside the mechanism rather than the size of the view alone. Part of the evidence comes from a field experiment in front of a real landscape, and part from the controlled version indoors.

And some restraint is due. A size estimate is indirect, it describes body perception rather than the body, and certainly not humility or a change of character. Awe is also not always pleasant: the same feeling before a storm or a vast structure can be threatening, and the context decides.