
The Anatomy of Charisma - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/issue/45/power/the-anatomy-of-charisma
======
Veen
It's fascinating to me that modern psychology and neuroscience often confirm
the beliefs of ancient rhetoricians like Aristotle and Cicero. What they're
essentially describling in this article is the scientific underpinning of some
aspects of classic ethos and pathos appeals.

> We decide very quickly whether a person possesses many of the traits we feel
> are important, such as likeability and competence, even though we have not
> exchanged a single word with them

Competence is called phronesis - practical wisdom - by rhetoriticians, and
demonstrating it is an important part of an ethos appeal. Antonakis, who is
cited in the article talks about charismatic leadership tactics, which aren't
much different to what's discussed in renaissance comportment guides,
including the body language stuff.

The worrying thing is that logos, the rational aspect of persuasion, is
demonstrably the least effective technique - also a common thread in classical
rhetoric.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modes_of_persuasion#Ethos](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modes_of_persuasion#Ethos)

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Owloid
I think that a view not represented enough about our "rational brain" and our
"intuitive brain" is that rational thinking can only rarely lead to useful
information in a reasonable time. Determining causation using the scientific
method is more robust, but is a massive effort that usually can't be carried
out by individuals. Perhaps we would benefit from being able to control the
extent of our intuition on the decisions we make, but there's a reason why we
specialize and only deeply think about specific areas.

~~~
colorint
The "dual-track hypothesis," the belief in "rational" and
"emotional/intuitive" modes of thought, is really based on pretty flimsy
evidence (e.g., [1] discusses interpretation of fMRI in the context of moral
psychology). It seems more like the sort of thing that people really want to
believe, and it's something people have wanted to believe far longer than fMRI
or EEG have been around.

And the trouble with the scientific method is that it's wedded to ceteris
paribus, the "all things equal" assumption. (In philosophy, this is called the
manipulationist theory of causality, e.g., [2].) This is the core reason that
complex systems present such a problem for scientists---it is, if you will,
the real reason economics is such a trainwreck. People want explanations to
look like, "A causes B if, when you manipulate A, all other things equal, that
drives changes in B." But if a system is fully contingent on itself, then
that'll never work out.

That's the value of intuition: it's not that it's fast or feasible or
individual, it's that the scientific method runs out of gas in highly-
contingent situations. To put it in a computer science perspective, the
clasically undecidable problems (the halting problem and the decision problem)
will always stand in the way of robust automatic code generation, and yet we
write code anyway. We can do that precisely because the formal methods we go
on about don't describe how we actually are, and that's always going to make
people both smarter and stupider than we seem.

[1]
[http://colinklein.org/papers/DualTrackWeb.pdf](http://colinklein.org/papers/DualTrackWeb.pdf)
[2] [https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/causation-
mani/](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/causation-mani/)

~~~
paulsutter
You're the one conflating intuition and emotion.

Intuition is closer to recognition. Recognizing a person from the way they
walk, recognizing a dangerous situation, recognizing a combination of clues
whether to trust a person, recognizing a pattern to predict a future outcome.

Intuition is very powerful and obviously prone to bias[1], as predicted by the
No Free Lunch theorem[2].

Kahneman describes rational thought as a crosscheck to intuition, and that
seems highly reasonable. Emotion is a whole different category. You don't need
an fMRI to experience these distinctions yourself. In fact I'm baffled if you
don't.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_free_lunch_theorem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_free_lunch_theorem)
"if an algorithm performs well on a certain class of problems then it
necessarily pays for that with degraded performance on the set of all
remaining problems"

~~~
colorint
I'm ultimately conflating emotion and intuition because I don't think they're
very different, and by extension, I don't think emotion and intuition are very
different from "rationality." Whether to trust someone is a feeling you get
from being around them; danger is one's sense of a situation. Likewise, the
way we feel about things is dependent on what we know about them, which is to
say, our past experiences with those things or things similar to them (and,
for that matter, "similar to" is the same sort of sense about things).

This is probably better seen from a couple other angles. Probably the most
interesting thing, since you bring up cognitive biases, is that confirmation
bias can be the only way we approach information. If not for confirmation
bias, we'd be incapable of talking about "signal" and "noise," or else we'd
wonder, how do you tell the difference?

Or to go deeper, it's known at this point that formal systems aren't decidable
in their application (i.e., the entscheidungsproblem), so it's just not
possible that rationality is like a formal system. But then, what is it? My
view is that it's just the same thing as intuition (the sense we have of
things) but more of it, which goes under the charitable name "abductive
reasoning."

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javitury
This article talking about charisma and a pastor's son reminds me of a book. A
few months ago I stumbled upon "Handbook of Leadership Theory for Church
Leaders - Drury Writing": [http://www.drurywriting.com/sharon/Handbook-
LeadershipTheory...](http://www.drurywriting.com/sharon/Handbook-
LeadershipTheory-Pastors.pdf)

What I loved was how it related academic leadership theory to a field seldom
covered but in which leadership is very important. Also it is very easy to
read for non academic people.

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teslacar
Does power create charisma or does charisma create power?

~~~
kxyvr
I like the taxonomy of French and Raven's bases of power:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_and_Raven's_bases_of_po...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_and_Raven's_bases_of_power)

In this framework, I tend to associate charisma with referent power, which
deals with power through identification, admiration, and respect. This could
be Bill Clinton's ability to feel your pain or Donald Trump's ability to tap
into a sense of nationalism.

To answer your question more directly, the answer is no. Referent power is one
kind of power. There are many others. Certainly, this is all debatable and not
cut and dried, but I do like the bases of power linked to above as a way to
create a vocabulary to talk about it.

------
munificent
Fascinating article.

That "awestruck effect" where you basically switch off your executive function
and delegate it to someone else is, I think, a fundamental piece of human
psychology that we don't talk about very much. Maybe this just reflects the
bias of academia aligns highly with liberalism and individualism, but I don't
recall seeing it discussed very much, and certainly not much discussion of
_why_ our brains might support that feature.

(Granted, I'm just a lay person, so maybe there's tons of material on this I
simply haven't seen.)

Here's a simple hypothesis:

Obviously, in many cases _not_ delegating your executive function is a good
thing. The others around you might not have your best interests at heart, and
people that were too easily subjugated may have found that their subjugator
took all of the nearby potential mates and left them none. So we'd expect
people to naturally try to take care of themselves, and evolve a tendency to
do that.

At the same time, many things in the lives of our ancestors were not zero-sum
and cooperation is mightily effective at increasing the fitness of all members
of the group. However, coordinating that cooperation itself takes resources,
as anyone who's been stuck in a committee knows. Actually getting a big group
of people who are fighting for their own rational self-interest to agree and
align is _really expensive_.

So maybe this brain feature is a sort of hack to short-circuit committee hell
and let us operate efficiently as a group without all of the back-and-forth
needed among a collection of rational actors. It's a way for us to form a sort
of human Voltron quickly and give control to one person. If that person really
does have the best interests of the entire group at heart, that can be a win
for all participants.

Of course, you take on a huge risk when you do this. Delegate your executive
function to the wrong charismatic leader and you get, literally, the
Holocaust. It's unsurprising therefore that we don't always do this, and that
there seems to be wide variation among people in how susceptible they are to
being a delegatee, and how skilled they are at persuading people to delegate
to them.

It _may_ even be a net win to support this feature when some of the
participants invididually lose out. There's a lot of research into the
evolutionary basis of altruism and it seems like the two aren't incompatible.
It may be that among our long lost ancestors, tribes whose leader could whip
the members into a fury to the point where some knowingly battled to the death
survived better and passed on more of their genes (which were likely shared
across many related members of the tribe) than those that were more
individualistic and egalitarian.

The rate that humans are willing to be drawn into a charismatic leader, versus
being critical of them may reflect the rate that doing so is a winning game on
aggregate.

~~~
anigbrowl
You'll enjoy a book called _The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of
the Bicameral Mind_ by Julian Jaynes. The theory put forth therein is highly
questionable, but too interesting not to play with.

~~~
munificent
Ah, yes. That's been on my to-read list for a long time. So many books, so few
hours!

~~~
anigbrowl
You'll so enjoy it; even if it were completely wrong it's so beautifully
written that it would still be worth reading.

