Amusement and Awe Are Doing More at Work Than You Think

Dacher Keltner opens his lecture on engagement with a claim that sounds almost too soft to take seriously: if you want to boost engagement at work, cultivate positive emotions. Two in particular — the feeling of being amused and the feeling of awe.

The problem is that both of these look like the skippable part of work. Stewart Brown, who founded the National Institute for Play, defines play and mirth as a state that feels purposeless — inherently enjoyable, free of time pressure, improvisational. Awe sounds like a weekend thing, something you feel at the Grand Canyon, not at a Tuesday standup. So the instinct is to file both under "nice if there's time."

But the instinct is backwards, and the gap between how these emotions feel and what they actually do is the whole point. This isn't a semantic quibble: companies pour real budget into the symbols of positive emotion — the foosball table, the mandated gratitude channel, the offsite — precisely because they've misread why these emotions help, and a wrong diagnosis spends money making things worse. So the question worth answering is why the evidence treats the skippable-feeling part of work as load-bearing. The answer runs the other way: amusement and awe aren't mood-boosters bolted onto the side of real work — they're cognitive state-changers. They widen what you can think about, make you more curious, and (for awe) shrink the self enough to make you both more rigorous and more generous. The catch — the thing that separates this from a foosball table in the break room — is that the emotion has to be real. The moment a workplace mandates the good mood, the same emotions start doing damage instead.

This is the deep dive on the first half of the Engagement pillar I sketched in the four-pillar overview. The overview named playfulness as a lever. This post is about why it's a lever, and where the lever snaps off in your hand.

Positive emotions aren't moods — they're cognitive tools

The reason to take amusement and awe seriously at work has nothing to do with feeling pleasant. It has to do with what positive emotions do to thinking.

Keltner points to two mechanisms. The first is what Todd Kashdan, at George Mason University, calls curiosity — the state of feeling open and engaged with the people around you and the problems you're working on. Laboratory work that Keltner cites finds that positive emotions reliably move people into that state. The second mechanism is older, going back to Alice Isen's experiments and then Barbara Fredrickson's broaden-and-build theory: a burst of joy or amusement widens cognitive scope. You generate more alternatives to the problem in front of you, you take other people's perspectives more easily, you get more creative.

I unpacked broaden-and-build as the engine behind "happiness leads to success" earlier in this series. Here it does something more specific: it explains why a fleeting feeling can change the quality of an hour of work.

That reframing is what changed how I read the whole topic. A joke at the right moment isn't a break from the work. It's a thirty-second intervention on the cognitive state you bring to the work.

Amusement is engineered for thinking, not for comedy

Start with Brown's definition again, but read it the other way around. Mirth feels purposeless, free of time pressure, and improvisational — and those exact properties are what loosen rigid thinking. The free-form quality is the mechanism, not a side effect.

Keltner's observation from teaching in workplaces is that the people who joke around and tell funny stories at the right moments are doing something that looks like nothing and functions like a lot: they make people lighthearted, and lightheartedness frees up the interesting thought. The point was never to be funny. The point is the loosened state that being funny produces.

That distinction matters, because it tells you the goal isn't a comedian. The everyday tools are smaller than that:

None of these are comedy. They're permission structures for personality — the same thing the overview pointed at with Southwest's stand-up safety announcements. Once you stop trying to be funny and start trying to be loose, the list gets a lot more doable.

"Be funnier" fails — because you're probably aiming at the wrong style

Here's where a lot of advice goes wrong. "Bring more humor to work" lands as "be more like the funny person," and the funny person you're picturing usually isn't you. Jennifer Aaker and Naomi Bagdonas, who teach humor at Stanford's Graduate School of Business and wrote Humor, Seriously, argue that the fix is to stop chasing a generic idea of funny and identify your own humor style.

They map style on two axes: how expressive you are (do you broadcast your humor, or keep it subtle?) and how affiliative vs. aggressive it is (does it warm the room, or does it have an edge?). That gives four styles.

• Magnet (expressive, affiliative) — charismatic, not afraid to be silly, pulls a room toward warmth.
• Stand-up (expressive, aggressive) — bold natural entertainers, unafraid to ruffle feathers.
• Sweetheart (subtle, affiliative) — earnest and understated, uses humor mostly to lighten the mood.
• Sniper (subtle, aggressive) — edgy, sarcastic, nuanced, masters of the unexpected dig.

The useful claim here isn't that one quadrant is best. It's that copying a style that isn't yours is exactly why "I'm just not funny at work" feels true for so many people. A Sweetheart trying to do Stand-up bombs and concludes humor isn't for them, when the real problem was the target. Aaker and Bagdonas pair the map with a short set of moves — know your style, look for truth (the funniest material is usually just something true said plainly), start small, practice safe sets, and treat humor as a choice rather than a talent you either have or don't.

I liked this because it turns "be funnier" from a personality verdict into a skill with a starting point. You don't need to become a Magnet. You need to find the smallest true thing you can say in your own register.

We laugh less right when we'd benefit most

There's a reason this is worth being deliberate about, and it shows up in a curve Aaker and Bagdonas built from Gallup's global data (2006–2016): the share of people who report having smiled or laughed a lot yesterday falls off a cliff as we move through adulthood.

We start high in our early twenties, slide down through the years we spend deepest in work, bottom out somewhere in our seventies, and only climb back later. The trough sits right on top of the working years. Read against everything above, that's the argument for treating mirth as a practice rather than a vibe: the period of life when amusement does the most for engagement is exactly the period we let it drain away.

Three funny things: the smallest version of the practice

So what does "practice" look like without a comedy class? The simplest research-backed version is an exercise the Greater Good Science Center teaches called Three Funny Things at Work. Each day for a week, you write down the three funniest things you heard, saw, or did at work, describe how they made you feel, and — the part people skip — answer why it was funny.

The evidence that this small thing does anything comes from Sara Wellenzohn, René Proyer, and Willibald Ruch's 2016 randomized trial: participants who journaled about three funny things every evening for a week were less depressed immediately afterward and happier up to six months later, compared to a control group who journaled about early memories. One week of noticing, six months of lift.

Zooming out from the individual exercise to the workplace as a whole, Jessica Mesmer-Magnus and colleagues' 2012 meta-analysis pooled 49 studies of humor at work and found that positive humor was associated with higher work performance, higher job satisfaction, and better teamwork for employees and supervisors alike. The point of writing down three funny things isn't to become a funnier person by Friday. It's that the act of looking trains attention — over time you get quicker to notice the absurd and the warm, and noticing is most of the battle.

Awe: the emotion that makes you smaller in a useful way

Amusement loosens you; awe does something stranger and, to me, more interesting: it shrinks you. Put the pair together and the symmetry is the whole point — amusement shrinks the problem, awe shrinks you, and either way there's suddenly more room to think.

Keltner's Berkeley lab has studied awe across 26 countries, and the sources are consistent — we feel awe through inspiring people, through nature, through art forms like music and painting, and through contemplative practices. The surprise in the data is the frequency. Awe sounds rare, a Grand-Canyon-once-a-decade feeling. People actually report it two to three times a week, often at work.

And the effects split into two clean families — what awe does to your thinking, and what it does to how you treat other people.

What awe does to thinking

Keltner's summary of the cognitive side is that awe makes you more curious, less rigid and less dogmatic, and better at seeing patterns across broader sets of data. The strongest version of that claim comes from Sara Gottlieb, Keltner, and Tania Lombrozo's 2018 Cognitive Science paper, Awe as a Scientific Emotion. Across six studies — several with more than 300 people each, and a final one with over 2,000 — people higher in dispositional awe understood the nature of science more accurately, were more likely to reject scientifically unwarranted "purpose" explanations (the idea that lightning releases electricity in order to travel, or bees exist in order to pollinate), and leaned away from young-earth creationism.

The detail that makes this convincing rather than just flattering: it was specific to awe. The authors tested all seven positive emotions, and awe was the only one that showed the predicted pattern across all six studies. Put numerically, of the 42 chances the other six emotions had to show the same association, only 7 landed — and general positivity, like joy, often ran the other way. So this isn't "feeling good makes you smart." It's something particular to awe.

Their proposed mechanism is accommodation — and it isn't a new idea bolted onto the 2018 results. Keltner first named it with Jonathan Haidt back in 2003, defining awe as the meeting of two appraisals: perceived vastness, and a need for accommodation — the inability to fit what you're seeing into the mental structures you already have. Awe is triggered by something vast that your current model can't quite hold, which forces you to revise the model — and revising your model in the face of disconfirming evidence is the core move of scientific thinking. That's also where awe rejoins the thread running through this whole post. It isn't a mood; it's a change to the cognitive state you bring to a problem. Amusement loosens the model so more of it is reachable; awe strains the model until you have to rebuild it. Different mechanisms, same payoff — you walk away thinking differently than you were a minute ago.

What awe does to other people

The social side comes from Paul Piff, Keltner, and colleagues' 2015 paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, across five studies and 2,078 people. Their finding is that awe produces a "small self" — a sense that your own concerns are relatively minor against something larger — and the small self, in turn, makes people more generous and more ethical. Awe doesn't make you a better person so much as a smaller one — and a smaller self has its hands free to help.

The study I keep retelling is the last one. They had people stand for one minute either gazing up into a grove of 200-foot Tasmanian eucalyptus trees — the tallest hardwood stand in North America — or looking up at a tall building. Then an experimenter "accidentally" dropped a box of pens nearby. The people who'd looked at the trees picked up more of them (7.7 on average versus 7.0), reported lower entitlement, and felt they deserved less compensation for taking part — $3.57 versus $5.74. Sixty seconds of looking up moved measurable behavior.

And like the Gottlieb paper, the effect was specific. In an earlier study in the same paper, an awe-inspiring nature video left people willing to share more in a dictator game — about 5.2 of 10 units, versus 4.5 after an amusing clip and 4.3 after a neutral one — and awe-from-nature beat plain nature exposure, so it wasn't just "being outside" or "being in a good mood."

A skeptic should slow down right here, because this is exactly the genre of evidence that earned psychology a hard decade. Piff's paper is from 2015 — the same year a 270-author project tried to reproduce 100 well-known psychology findings and managed it for fewer than half, with the effects that did survive landing at about half their original size. And the awe numbers are small on their face: 0.7 of a pen, a couple of dollars in a dictator game. So why lean on them at all? The same reason both times: specificity. A good mood doesn't single out one emotion across six studies the way Gottlieb's data did, and a fluke doesn't make awe-from-nature beat plain nature the way Piff's did. A small effect that keeps pointing at the same narrow target is a different animal from a big effect that only showed up once. I hold these loosely — but loosely held isn't the same as set aside, and the specificity is what keeps them standing where flashier results from that era fell over.

Put the two families together — more rigorous and more humble, sharper analysis and more willing to share resources — and awe stops looking like a hiking hobby and starts looking like a surprisingly good fit for collaborative work. The practical version Keltner's group recommends is almost embarrassingly simple: take an awe walk. Go outside on a regular basis, somewhere that gives you a little wonder — and it doesn't have to be the Grand Canyon. It can be a good park, a city block you find beautiful, the field where your kid plays. Walk slowly, breathe, notice, and let the bigger perspective land.

And this isn't just a nice suggestion — it's been tested directly. Virginia Sturm's group at UCSF had older adults take a weekly fifteen-minute awe walk for eight weeks; by the end they reported more compassion and gratitude and less daily distress — and you could see the small self in their weekly selfies, where they shrank themselves in the frame to leave more room for the world behind them. The honest caveat is that the study was in older adults, not people mid-career at a desk, so the carry-over to a Tuesday standup is a reasonable expectation rather than a proven one.

"Isn't this just forced fun?" — the catch that breaks it

Here's the objection that has to be answered before any of this is usable. If amusement and awe are this good for work, the obvious move for a company is to manufacture them — mandatory fun, a chief happiness officer, a Slack channel for gratitude, a calendar invite titled "Mandatory Awe Walk, 3pm." And anyone who's lived through that knows it doesn't feel like the eucalyptus grove. It feels like a chore with a smile painted on. That's the catch in a sentence: the emotions that help are the ones nobody asked you to have.

The research agrees, and this is the most important nuance in the post. Alicia Grandey and colleagues' 2012 study, Free to Be You and Me, studied 359 health care providers across 48 hospital units. They distinguished surface acting — faking or suppressing what you actually feel — from genuine emotion. Surface acting is what mandated cheerfulness produces, and it reliably depletes people: it ran through to higher emotional exhaustion and burnout, because holding a mask is self-regulatory work and self-regulation runs down like a muscle. Mandated fun is the only fun with a cost of goods sold: the mask never rests the face, it tires it.

But the depletion wasn't fixed. Units with a climate of authenticity — where coworkers accept and encourage expressing how you really feel, including the negative stuff, backstage — broke the link between surface acting and exhaustion. In low-authenticity units, faking it strongly drove burnout (a hefty b = 0.94). In high-authenticity units, the same faking was statistically indistinguishable from zero, because people had somewhere to drop the mask.

That's the whole catch in one finding. The benefit of positive emotions at work comes from emotions that are real and largely bottom-up. The instant they're performed on command, you've swapped a cognitive tool for a depleting one — which is the same reason this series rejected "perpetual cheerfulness" as the definition of happiness at work in the first place. Grandey's other quiet finding fits here too: a peer-driven authenticity climate worked better than management-run "share your feelings" meetings, which just create one more performance to manage.

So the move for a manager isn't to schedule joy. It's to make it safe to be a real person — to let the actual jokes happen, to not police a Sweetheart for being quiet or a Sniper for being dry, to make space for an awe walk without turning attendance into a metric. You don't install the emotion. You remove what's blocking it.

Two tools, one condition

The clean way to hold all of it: amusement and awe earn their place not because they feel nice but because they change the cognitive state you work in — amusement by loosening it, awe by enlarging it. And both come with the same fine print. They're not features you can switch on for someone else. They're conditions you can make possible or impossible.

A few things I'm taking away

• Positive emotions at work matter for what they do to thinking, not for the pleasant feeling — they broaden cognitive scope (Fredrickson) and raise curiosity (Kashdan)
• Mirth's "purposeless, improvisational" quality is the mechanism, not a side effect — the goal is a loosened state, not actual comedy
• "Be funnier" fails because people copy a style that isn't theirs; Aaker and Bagdonas's four styles (Magnet, Stand-up, Sweetheart, Sniper) give you a starting point in your own register
• Gallup's data show we smile and laugh least during exactly the years we spend deepest in work — which is the case for treating mirth as a practice
• The Three Funny Things exercise is the smallest research-backed version — Wellenzohn and colleagues found one week of it lifted happiness up to six months later
• Awe is far more common than it sounds (two to three times a week, often at work) and splits into two benefits: sharper thinking and more generous behavior
• Gottlieb and colleagues found dispositional awe predicts more accurate scientific reasoning — and it was the only positive emotion that did, via "accommodation," the same belief-revision science depends on
• Piff and colleagues found 60 seconds of awe in a grove of tall trees increased helping and lowered entitlement — and awe specifically beat amusement, pride, and plain nature exposure
• The catch, from Grandey's hospital study: mandated good moods produce surface acting, which burns people out — unless there's a climate where it's safe to be real backstage

That last point is the one I'd defend hardest. It would be easy to read everything above as a to-do list for a workplace — schedule the awe walk, run the humor workshop, pin a gratitude thread. But the evidence points the other way, and it keeps pointing at the same catch: you cannot be ordered into the feeling that helps. The only thing a workplace can really do is get out of the way: make it safe to laugh at the true thing, safe to be quietly moved by something, safe to be the actual person who showed up. Do that, and the rest is just a Tuesday where you happened to look up.

One more thing, while you're looking up

If there's a frontier here, it's that nearly all of this evidence comes from labs and a couple of clinics, not from inside real companies. Awe survives a controlled trial — a 2025 randomized study found a structured awe practice measurably lowered depressive symptoms and raised well-being — but that was about people's health, not their workweek. Nobody has yet run the clean field experiment inside an organization: protect real amusement and real awe for a year, and does engagement actually move? Everything above says it should. But that's a bet, not a finding, and I'd rather flag it than dress it up.

For the far end of the scale, it's worth watching what the largest possible dose of awe does to a person. In Planetary Collective's short film Overview, astronauts describe looking back at Earth and feeling the self go quiet — the same small-self shift Piff measured in a grove of eucalyptus, turned all the way up.

You don't need the rocket, though. That's the actual point. A grove, a good park, a true joke at the right moment — the everyday doses are already in reach, and they're doing more than they look like they're doing.

Sources

• Keltner, D. — Lecture: "Cultivating Positive Emotions at Work," Science of Happiness at Work, BerkeleyX. Used for: the amusement-and-awe framing, the curiosity and broaden-and-build mechanisms, the awe sources and frequency, and the awe-walk practice
• Kashdan, T. — Curiosity research, George Mason University. Used for: the definition of curiosity as openness and engagement with people and problems
• Fredrickson, B. — "The broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions," American Psychologist (2001). Used for: the mechanism by which positive emotions widen cognitive scope
• Brown, S. — National Institute for Play. Used for: the definition of play/mirth as purposeless, time-pressure-free, and improvisational
• Aaker, J., & Bagdonas, N. — Humor, Seriously (Stanford GSB). Used for: the four humor styles matrix, the "humor as a choice" framing, and the Gallup global humor cliff
• Gallup (2006–2016) — global data on daily smiling/laughing. Used for: the humor-cliff curve across the adult lifespan
• Wellenzohn, S., Proyer, R. T., & Ruch, W. (2016) — "Humor-based online positive psychology interventions: A randomized placebo-controlled long-term trial," Journal of Positive Psychology 11(6). Used for: the Three Funny Things result (lower depression, happier up to six months)
• Mesmer-Magnus, J., Glew, D. J., & Viswesvaran, C. (2012) — "A meta-analysis of positive humor in the workplace," Journal of Managerial Psychology 27(2). Used for: the 49-study link between workplace humor, performance, satisfaction, and teamwork
• Gottlieb, S., Keltner, D., & Lombrozo, T. (2018) — "Awe as a scientific emotion," Cognitive Science 42(6). Used for: dispositional awe predicting scientific reasoning, the specificity-to-awe finding, and the accommodation mechanism
• Piff, P. K., Dietze, P., Feinberg, M., Stancato, D. M., & Keltner, D. (2015) — "Awe, the small self, and prosocial behavior," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 108(6). Used for: the small-self mechanism, the eucalyptus-grove field experiment, and the prosocial/entitlement effects
• Grandey, A. A., Foo, S. C., Groth, M., & Goodwin, R. E. (2012) — "Free to be you and me: A climate of authenticity alleviates burnout from emotional labor," Journal of Occupational Health Psychology 17(1). Used for: surface acting and burnout, and the climate-of-authenticity buffer that anchors the counterargument
• Greater Good Science Center, UC Berkeley / Greater Good in Action. Used for: the Three Funny Things practice instructions
• Keltner, D., & Haidt, J. (2003) — "Approaching awe, a moral, spiritual, and aesthetic emotion," Cognition & Emotion 17(2). Used for: the origin of the accommodation mechanism (perceived vastness + need for accommodation) and the tie back to awe as a cognitive state-changer
• Open Science Collaboration (2015) — "Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science," Science 349(6251). Used for: the replication-crisis counterargument — fewer than half of 100 studies reproduced, surviving effects at roughly half magnitude
• Sturm, V. E., et al. (2020) — "Big smile, small self: Awe walks promote prosocial positive emotions in older adults," Emotion. Used for: the field-tested awe-walk practice and the small-self-in-selfies finding, with the older-adult caveat
• Scientific Reports (2025) — "Awe reduces depressive symptoms and improves well-being in a randomized-controlled clinical trial." Used for: evidence that a structured awe practice holds up in an RCT, and the open question that no equivalent workplace field trial exists yet
• Planetary Collective (2012) — Overview (short film). Used for: the astronaut overview effect as the maximal-scale version of awe's small self