Off the Deep End — What is awe-inspiring to you?
As a reporter I vet many of my thoughts and concerns through a filter of ? would anybody want to read this? Jokes aside, my fellow writers and I try to find stories people want to read, those they want to share and the kind they cut out and put on their refrigerator.
University of Pennsylvania researchers studied one of those filters to see what types of stories readers share, according to a New York Times article. Researchers checked The New York Times online list of most e-mailed articles every 15 minutes for more than six months. They analyzed the content of the articles and controlled for factors such as the placement in the paper or on the Web site.
I would have guessed that at gigantic newspapers like The New York Times, readers would share articles they think would interest the recipients, such as a story about immigration to my friend who immigrated to the U.S. and a cancer study to a friend whose parents have the disease.
It turns out New York Times readers preferred e-mailing positive articles and long articles on intellectually challenging topics.
This study, because it focused on New York Times readers, obviously had different results than that of the National Enquirer or FOX News.
“Perhaps most of all, readers wanted to share articles that inspired awe, an emotion that the researchers investigated after noticing how many science articles made the list. In general, they found, 20 percent of articles that appeared on the Times home page made the list, but the rate rose to 30 percent for science articles, including ones with headlines like ?The Promise and Power of RNA,”” The New York Times reported.
“?Science kept doing better than we expected,” said Dr. Jonah Berger, a social psychologist and a professor of marketing at Penn”s Wharton School. ?We anticipated that people would share articles with practical information about health or gadgets, and they did, but they also sent articles about paleontology and cosmology. You”d see articles shooting up the list that were about the optics of deer vision.””
The Penn researchers defined awe-inspiring as an “emotion of self-transcendence, a feeling of admiration and elevation in the face of something greater than the self.” They used two criteria for an awe-inspiring story: Its scale is large, and it requires “mental accommodation” by forcing the reader to view the world in a different way.
“It involves the opening and broadening of the mind,” write Dr. Berger and Dr. Katherine A. Milkman, who is a behavioral economist at Wharton.
“Seeing the Grand Canyon, standing in front of a beautiful piece of art, hearing a grand theory or listening to a beautiful symphony may all inspire awe. So may the revelation of something profound and important in something you may have once seen as ordinary or routine, or seeing a causal connection between important things and seemingly remote causes.”
Although I have yet to see the Grand Canyon, something that awe-inspired me was an article in Discover magazine about research that found humans are born to run.
Unlike many mammals, including primates, people are surprisingly successful endurance runners, according to the Discover magazine article. University of Utah biologist Dennis Bramble and Harvard University paleoanthropologist Daniel Lieberman “argue that not only can humans outlast horses, but over long distances and under the right conditions, they can also outrun just about any other animal on the planet ? including dogs, wolves, hyenas, and antelope, the other great endurance runners. From our abundant sweat glands to our Achilles tendons, from our big knee joints to our muscular glutei maximi, human bodies are beautifully tuned running machines. ?We”re loaded top to bottom with all these features, many of which don”t have any role in walking,” Lieberman says. Our anatomy suggests that running down prey was once a way of life that ensured hominid survival millions of years ago on the African savanna.”
In honor of humans” awesome ability to run, take a jog around the block or in the gym, race your child to the front door or play tag with some friends in the park.
Share awe-inspiring stories with friends and me, and maybe I”ll write about it.
Katy Sweeny is a staff reporter at the Record-Bee. She can be reached at kdsweeny@gmail.com or at 263-5636, ext. 37.
