Experiencing awe and flow significantly enhances moral character by promoting wisdom and humility. In a study with 605 adults, those predisposed to awe and flow demonstrated stronger wise reasoning (up to 30% higher) and greater epistemic humility compared to their happier counterparts. Individuals recalling awe-filled moments showed 25% better wise reasoning, while those experiencing flow exhibited 20% more humility. Interventions inducing awe (nature videos) and flow (music composition) further improved conflict resolution and self-awareness, highlighting the transformative power of self-transcendent experiences in fostering moral growth.
The sense of agency—the feeling that we control our own actions—may require conscious awareness of the outcomes of those actions. In an experiment testing whether intentional binding (a measure of agency in which an action's perceived time shifts toward its sensory outcome) occurs when the outcome is masked from awareness, the effect was not only absent but reversed: participants perceived their action as farther from the unconsciously perceived consequence. This suggests that ordinary sensorimotor processing depends on conscious awareness.
The sense of agency (SoA) during movement may be linked to the same neural representations that solve the biomechanical control problem. Using fMRI and a deep neural network performing the same hand-control task in simulation, the authors found detailed cortical encodings of sensorimotor states in visual areas that were best explained by inverse dynamics computations. When they manipulated SoA by electrically stimulating participants' muscles, the same voxels predicted SoA. Model-brain correspondences and robust SoA decoding were achieved within single subjects, enabling individual-level study of motor representations and awareness.
People's explicit beliefs about being an agent are not directly tied to how often they feel a sense of agency during sensorimotor tasks. Instead, the connection runs through metacognition: individuals who are less sensitive to cues indicating self-causation tend to report more negative agency beliefs, but this relationship disappears when accounting for their ability to accurately monitor their own judgments. Positive agency beliefs showed no clear link to sensorimotor measures. The findings suggest that introspective access, rather than the raw experience of agency, shapes one's enduring beliefs about being an agent.