Feeling small might be the point
Researchers sent people to stand under sixty-foot trees, and something specific and measurable happened to how they treated strangers afterward.
The psychologist Dacher Keltner and his colleagues at Berkeley have spent two decades studying awe — the reaction to things too vast to fit your existing categories, a canyon, a cathedral, a night sky. Their consistent finding is that awe does something almost no other pleasant emotion does: it shrinks your sense of self.
In one 2015 experiment, they had participants stand and look up at a grove of towering eucalyptus trees for one minute, versus a control group who stared at a tall building. The tree-gazers reported feeling smaller relative to their surroundings — and, immediately afterward, were measurably more likely to help a stranger who staggered and dropped a folder of papers, and less likely to endorse selfish, entitled statements.
Keltner's group calls this the small self effect, and it appears to be the mechanism doing the work: awe doesn't make you generous by making you happier. It makes you generous by making your own concerns briefly, genuinely quieter. The discomfort of feeling insignificant, it turns out, is doing something useful the whole time.