To be human is to fold into social collectives. The biggest challenge for collective engagement is to subordinate one’s self-interest in the service of the interests of others. In this talk, I drew upon theories in previous emotion and cultural research to investigate the factors that help people from different cultures balance self-interest with the needs for social engagement. In particular, I will describe a series of studies demonstrating that the experience of awe—an emotional response to perceptually vast stimuli that induces a need for cognitive accommodation—through rendering the self smaller, promotes stronger sense of collective engagement. In addition, I will also discuss how the small self effect introduced by awe can be universally experienced while also differs in some respects—elicitor, magnitude, and content—from culture to culture.