Sun-Hwa Kim and Seeun Kim ran two experiments on donation intentions toward heritage sites and national parks, published in the Journal of Travel Research in 2026. Their starting point is that awe is not one state. There is the wonder kind, the vista and the scale and the beauty. There is also the dread kind, the same vastness with a threat in it, the burning canopy and the collapsing structure. Both are awe. They do not behave the same way.

What they found is an interaction, not a main effect. Positive awe raised donation intentions when it was paired with a desirability appeal, the kind of message about why the outcome matters. Negative awe raised donation intentions when it was paired with a feasibility appeal, the kind that spells out how the work actually gets done. The mediating path differed too: positive awe ran through a small self, negative awe ran through an expanded self and a heightened sense of personal capability. Pair them the other way around and the advantage disappears.

Alongside that, a finding that should relieve anyone who has been nervous about scale. Megan Edwards, Katelyn Mendenhall, Christopher Sanders and Laura King ran four within-person experiments using videos, writing prompts and images, published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin in 2026. Awe reliably enlarged people’s sense of the world. Its effect on felt self-size was inconsistent. And felt personal significance did not drop; in most studies it rose. Their sentence is the one to keep: awe shrinks the self without making one feel insignificant.

Put those together and the common worry inverts. The risk in showing a donor how big the problem is was never that they would feel irrelevant. The risk is the ask you make next.

There is imaging evidence for what awe is doing. Michiel van Elk and colleagues scanned participants watching awe-eliciting, positive and neutral videos, published in Human Brain Mapping in 2019. During awe, activity fell across default mode network regions including the frontal pole, angular gyrus and posterior cingulate cortex. That network is the self-referential hub, the machinery that runs the background commentary about who you are and how this relates to you. The authors read their own data plainly: a key feature of awe is reduced engagement in self-referential processing.

In Neurogiving I spend most of the identity chapters on how giving reinforces a donor’s self-concept, how an appeal that reflects the donor back to themselves outperforms one that does not, and how the warm glow is partly a reward for confirming a self-image. All of that runs through the same self-referential machinery awe turns down. This is not a contradiction. It is a different gear. Identity appeals work with the donor’s existing story. Awe works by briefly interrupting it, which is exactly why it can reach someone whose story does not yet have your cause in it.

The honest caveat: this is a small imaging study using video clips, not appeals, and the field has since become far more careful about what awe reliably causes. More on that in Pro.

Your organization already manufactures awe. It just does not count it as fundraising.

Make the list. Every moment in the past twelve months when a donor plausibly experienced something vast: the first walk through the facility, the aerial footage in the gala video, the preserve at dusk, the warehouse floor, the archive, the NICU, the wall of case files. Beside each one, mark which kind it was. Wonder, or dread. Be strict, because most organizations find they have been mixing both into the same three minutes of video and calling it emotional range.

Then write down what you asked for within forty-eight hours of each moment, and classify the ask the way Kim and Kim did. A desirability ask argues why this outcome is worth wanting. A feasibility ask argues that this is achievable, here is the plan, here is what it costs. Count how many of your pairings match.

The pattern to look for is the one your team already describes without knowing what it is: the visit that went beautifully and produced nothing. Check whether those were wonder moments followed by feasibility asks, which is what usually happens, because the natural thing to do after someone is moved is to reassure them that you are competent.

Research Sources

Also in Lab Notes Pro this week

Pro takes the skeptical pass, which is the one worth paying for here. A 2026 PLOS ONE paper reports six awe-induction studies, including three direct replications, totalling more than two thousand participants, and finds almost nothing on prosocial and ethical outcomes even where the small-self manipulation check worked. A 2024 meta-analysis of 57 effect sizes across 20,997 people finds a moderate association and a cultural moderator that should change how you read every awe study out of one hemisphere. A 2025 longitudinal study finds the quiet ego mediates the awe-to-prosocial link while the small self does not. And a VOLUNTAS experiment found that virtual reality raised empathy significantly and moved donations not at all, which is the most expensive lesson in this issue. Then five program contexts, three failure modes, the donor’s view from a chartered bus, and a two-by-two experiment you can run inside one appeal.