People really do respond emotionally to acts of moral beauty, and these emotional reactions involve warm or pleasant feelings in the chest and conscious desires to help others or become a better person oneself. A new discovery in Sara’s study is that moral elevation appears to be different from admiration for nonmoral excellence. Subjects in the admiration condition were more likely to report feeling chills or tingles on their skin, and to report feeling energized or “psyched up.” Witnessing extraordinarily skillful actions gives people the drive and energy to try to copy those actions.27
