People seek many different things in a spiritual experience, a fact attested to by the variety of religions and rituals practiced around the world today. But if there’s one motivation that all faiths seem to share, it’s a desire for transcendence—a wish to rise above mundane concerns and commune with a higher or more complete entity. When we worship, we look to shift our perspective away from the trivial toward the big picture, to put ourselves in context of a larger whole. Can design help us do this?

In short, yes. Design won’t make believers out of atheists, but it can certainly provide conditions for deepening the experience for the spiritually inclined. Researchers studying awe, an emotional state closely linked to transcendence, believe that a key trigger is a sense of vastness. Encountering objects or spaces that are extremely large in scale, from Ayer’s Rock to the Grand Canyon, stimulates what psychologists call a need for accommodation—a need to take this new experience and fit it into our existing mental models, stretching them in the process. As our mental models struggle to accommodate the power behind works of great scale (both natural and manmade), we feel smaller by comparison. Our focus broadens, which effectively minimizes our daily preoccupations. The builders of the great cathedrals, the Angkor temples in Cambodia, and Easter Island’s famous moai statues all understood, whether explicitly or intuitively, the power of great scale to inspire this perspective-shifting, spiritual sense of awe.

Scale can be particularly effective when the exaggerated dimension is height. Earthly existence naturally has a vertical orientation, defined by the gravitational force that holds us to the earth. Upward directionality is associated with lightness, air, and spiritual thoughts, while downward brings connotations of heaviness, earth, and physicality. Some religions conceptualize this vertical dichotomy as a moral one, with heaven above earth and hell below it. And many religions conceive of the spirit as a weightless entity, which is freed upon death from its gravity-bound body. Defying this downward pressure by turning our gaze upward naturally leads many of us to a more spiritual frame of mind. Structures that are upwardly expansive feel more conducive to worship than those with low, dark ceilings. This effect can be enhanced by adorning the ceiling with elements that cause the gaze to drift upward, such as lighting fixtures, ceiling frescos, or skylights.

Turning the gaze upward has another effect: It allows more light into the eye, and light is another aesthetic element that can enhance our spiritual experience. Light is a common metaphor for deities and a proxy for their blessing. In Genesis, God’s first act after creating heaven and earth is to proclaim “Let there be light.” When a religion wins a convert, they say he has “seen the light,” and the object of spiritual quests is “enlightenment.” Many early religions, such as those of ancient Egypt and Greece, featured gods of light or sun as primary deities. It makes sense that light would be so prominent a feature in worship, considering its significance to our survival. Light was certainly on the minds of gothic cathedral builders when they developed the practice of using flying buttresses. By taking pressure off of the walls, these exterior structures allowed for taller, lighter cathedrals with vast expanses of glass windows that were previously impossible. Structures of worship are at their most sublime not just when they’re bright, but when they also call attention to the light and focus our gaze on it. Stained-glass windows are one way architects of religious structures have done this. Others work with natural light. A particularly beautiful example is Osaka’s Church of Light, designed by Tadao Ando. The cuts in the expansive structure shape the light, giving it form and presence. The result is an expansive space with a transcendent glow.

There are other aesthetics more specific to different religions that can enhance the experience of prayer and spiritual contemplation. Features such as the structure’s shape, color treatments, and level of adornment all vary according to belief systems. But these three elements—scale, height, and light—seem to have deep roots in human nature or cultural practice that make them particularly conducive to achieving spiritual communion. Can you pray meaningfully in a dimly lit, underground cave? Surely the answer is yes. But an expansive, well-lit space is more likely to put you in a prayerful mood.

Ingrid Fetell is a designer and writer currently working on Aesthetics of Joy, a book about design and positive emotion.

I confess that as I approach 70 years old, and become more and more aware that I am not going to be in this world for that much longer, my answer becomes more and more ambiguous or hazy. Frankly, I find increasingly that I think or say: “Not really my problem anymore, chum!”

I worry about things like education and health care, but I realize that I am now more or less out of the equation, whatever I think. So I don’t bother myself too much. Having said this, at a more personal level, I do care about things I have produced or worked on—be they my children or my books. I care about the country to which I belong, and at some general level, I care about the globe on which I have lived. Nothing is going to last forever, but if I can now do things to help the future, then I am prepared to do so. If I can write something about the environment that is useful, then I will do so.

In fact, at the moment I am writing a book on Gaia, the hypothesis that the world is an organism. Obviously, this does have implications for global warming and such issues. I would lie if I said I am just writing for the future, but I do hope that what I write may help some people in their thinking. So in this sense, I care about the future because generally I care about the things I love right now. And that seems to me to be as good an answer as any.

Michael Ruse is a professor of philosophy and director of the Program in the History and Philosophy of Science at Florida State University.

The question assumes that gullibility (foolish behavior resulting from duping by one or more other people) is a stable personality trait, which a victim brings to every manipulative social interaction. Undoubtedly, some people are more vulnerable to being duped than others, but all of us—even a gullibility expert (me) who was swindled by Bernie Madoff—can be duped under the right circumstances.

In my recent book Annals of Gullibility, I proposed a four-pronged causative theory of gullibility, and of the broader construct of “foolish” (risk-unaware) behavior. The four factors are “situations,” “cognition,” “personality,” and “affect/ state.” A gullible act results from some combination of these factors, with the probability of being duped depending on the number and strength of the forces coming to bear in a given episode.

Situation refers to the strength of the social “pull” to behave gullibly. In a recent affiliation scam targeting Amish, the fact that the scammer was Amish and that leaders of the tight-knit Amish community supported it made it likely that any given member of that group would fall for the scheme. Social pressure also explains why there are few people who join religious sects—even of the more “wacky” kind—different from that of their parents. It also explains why anyone foolish enough to be interrogated by the police without the presence of an attorney is at risk of confessing to a crime, whether or not he or she committed it.

Cognition refers to one’s “tacit knowledge” of the risky actions being proposed or of the nature and motives of those who propose them. Lack of education, naivete borne of worldly isolation (the Amish mentioned above), low social insight (ability to spot deception cues), brain impairment, and low intelligence all increase the likelihood of behaving gullibly. For these reasons, we do not allow children or young adolescents to make certain decisions, and we put protective arrangements in place for vulnerable elderly or impaired individuals. Gullibility is considered by some (such as Richard Dawkins) to be an inherited trait that enables children to survive (by obeying their parents when they tell them to stay out of the road) but which makes them vulnerable to magical and unprovable beliefs, such as the existence of a personal God.

Personality refers to those traits in an individual that incline him or her to say “yes” when self-interest or reality should cause him or her to say “no.” Among these traits are high interpersonal trust, social neediness (loneliness), low willpower, a dependent orientation, low self-esteem, etc. This is a major reason why some people are more gullible than others. But for it to play a role, one or more of the three other factors has to be present. As to why some people are less able to stand up to deceptive social pressure than others, I think childrearing plays a major part. It is for this reason that I believe that certain religious-oriented childrearing experts (John Rosemond, James Dobson, Gary Ezzo) are doing children a disservice when they encourage parents to break their children’s will and deny them the opportunity to become autonomous individuals with their own worldviews and lifestyle preferences.

Affect/state refers to biological factors that push someone to gullible actions or lessen someone’s ability to resist such lures. Examples of affective factors are fear, anxiety, and greed (especially important in falling for Ponzis), while examples of state are exhaustion (why interrogations often start at night), lust, and intoxication. Affective and state factors typically are present when smart people do dumb things, as we are much more likely to behave stupidly when “not in our right mind.”

Gullibility is a complicated phenomenon, for which there are multiple explanations. As a rule, trusting and believing others is the best way to live one’s life. However, survival in the world requires us to recognize and be cautious when signs are present that someone who professes to be our friend is actually the devil in disguise.

Stephen Greenspan is a clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of Colorado and an emeritus professor of educational psychology at the University of Connecticut.

In our studies, we induced elevation by asking participants to watch a seven-minute clip of The Oprah Winfrey Show, which often features people overcoming adversity and generally encourages viewers to “live your best life.” Thus, the participants in our studies weren’t actually exposed to a good deed in real life, but only to a brief TV clip. So it would be easy to self-induce elevation by watching films that involve people doing good things for others. Or reading a book with such content might be inspiring as well.

Perhaps on an even more simple level, you could imagine a person performing an act of moral excellence and form mental images of the person and their behavior. In fact, in some of our other work we found that simply thinking of a significant other, and imagining all the ways in which that person is wonderful, produced effects of social support similar to those that are invoked when you actually have a friend stand next to you. That work showed that people judge a hill to be less steep when they have a friend by their side (compared with when they’re alone)—and, interestingly, the same effect occurs after they go through an imagery task during which they think of a person special to them. In other words, thinking of certain things can sometimes be as powerful as “the real thing.”

Simone Schnall is a lecturer in the department of social and developmental psychology at the University of Cambridge.