The Anatomy of Charisma
nautil.us
nautil.us
> 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.
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 [2] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/causation-mani/
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
[2] 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"
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."
There are times when it's very important to distinguish between 0.999998 and 1, and times when it's very important to treat the difference as negligible.
Have you ever played with an analog computer? I think you'll find it interesting. Modular synthesizers are essentially lego for analog computation, and you can find completely analog sequencers and so on. It takes some time to get the hang of this, but learning to build self-sustaining chaotic attractors is both enjoyable and interesting. The demo version of teh software here will get you started if you are not near a place with a decent music store: http://www.nordkeyboards.com/downloads/legacy/nord-modular-g...
Your brain is not a perfectly precise or reliable organ, but it's taken you this far.
Analog computation is definitely interesting, but at least in terms of theory and standard practice, it's worlds apart from digital computation. Put another way, though this may be even more obscure, the problem with analog computers is that they're application-specific. "Digital" computers are still analog computers under the hood, and their application is simulating set theory (so the "universality" of computation is contingent on set theory being universal). My point here, really, is that, if you make that not the case, then you're just saying, what if we didn't use digital computers at all? An interesting enough question, but then you really do have to study analog computers, and whatever you come up with will be totally unrecognizable to current computer science.
In any case, my original point is that brains can't be formal systems, as a comment on the supposed "rational brain." Formal systems don't work out in practice for a lot of reasons, and many of them are exposed by the actual experience of computer science. Returning to analog computation would just mean agreeing with me.
...and it took only four billion years of evolution. (Or maybe 100 million years of mammalian evolution, or 20 of primate evolution, or 200 thousand years of human evolution. Whatever you pick, it's slow.)
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_and_Raven's_bases_of_po...
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.
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.