Most of us will have experienced the allure of a charismatic individual in our lives. Few have experienced the feeling of being charismatic, where your desires, beliefs and actions are having a disproportionately powerful influence on those around you. But when people try to break down how it feels to experience it, they veer into cryptic comparisons. “When she [Elizabeth Holmes] speaks to you, she makes you feel like you are the most important person in her world in that moment,” Tyler Shultz, a whistleblower who worked at Theranos, told CBS News. “She almost has this reality distortion field around her that people can just get sucked into.”
About a meeting with Leo Tolstoy, Maxim Gorky wrote: “I can not express in words what I felt rather than thought at that moment; in my soul there was joy and fear, and then everything blended in one happy thought: ‘I am not an orphan on the earth, so long as this man lives on it.’”
Reflecting on her rare experiences of charisma across 25 years of interviewing notable figures, the newspaper columnist Maggie Alderson wrote: “I still don’t understand what creates the effect. … If not fame, beauty, power, wealth and glory then what? It must be innate. I find that quite thrilling.”
“Something magical and dangerous, something unfathomable, is afoot when charisma is present.”
[---]
As Mazzarella reminded me, people also use charisma to talk about the most admired and inspiring figures in their lives and the charismatic teachers they’ve had. “There the implication is that this person helped me to become myself or transcend myself in a way that I wouldn’t otherwise have been able to do,” he said. “That’s what’s interesting about charisma: It touches the darkest fundamentals of human impulses while having the capacity to point to our highest potentials. Charisma has these two faces, and it’s the fact that we seem to not be able to have one without the other that is so uncanny and disturbing. Inspiring charismatic figures can become exploitative, manipulative or violent. Violence gives way to liberation, or liberation gives way to violence. The problem is not just that we have a hard time telling the good charisma from the bad charisma, but that one has a way of flipping into the other.”
[---]
For over a decade, Antonakis has been experimenting with ways to break charisma down into its composite parts, therefore making it measurable and teachable. He believes it can be the great leveler in a world obsessed with physical appearance. His resulting definition is that charisma is “values-based, symbolic and emotion-laden leader signaling.”
Along with a team of researchers, he boiled it all down to 12 “charismatic leadership tactics,” or CLTs for short. The CLTs include nine verbal techniques — like the use of metaphors, anecdotes, contrasts and rhetorical questions — as well as three nonverbal ones like facial expressions and gestures. Anyone trained in these CLTs, he said, can become more “influential, trustworthy and leaderlike in the eyes of others.” He and his team developed an artificial intelligence algorithm, which they trained on almost 100 TED talks, that can identify the charismatic quality of speeches. The algorithm is called “Deep Charisma” but Antonakis calls it his “charismometer.”
- The Secret History And Strange Future Of Charisma
No comments:
Post a Comment