Anatomy of charm

For several weeks in a row I dealt with the question of what science can say about the power of charm. Why do some people have charisma, and others - no? Why are we so easily under its influence? Charming people can fascinate you and make us feel better. They can inspire us to improve ourselves. But they can be dangerous. They use charm for their own purposes in order to strengthen their power and manipulate others.

Scientists have something to say about charisma. Charming people are fed by our emotions and are able to turn off our logical thinking. They hypnotize us. But research shows that charisma is not just a property of any person. It is created by our senses, especially when we feel insecure in tense times. I will tell you about these studies and outline the opinions of the neuroscientists, psychologists and sociologists who conducted them.

But first, I want to tell you about the attractive preacher who has amazed audiences in churches throughout America for decades through the sacred words of Jesus. Then he lost faith and now preaches how to live happily without God. That for scientists is a study of charm, for Bart Campolo [Bart Campolo] is life.
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Bart campolo

I first read about getting rid of Campolo's faith in The New York Times Magazine in December. “He was an extreme extrovert, he felt very well, speaking in front of the crowd and in private conversations, found a common language with everyone, from the regulars of village clubs to the lost souls, whom he often fed in his own house,” wrote Oppenheimer Mark. Campolo's father, Tony Campolo, one of the most popular US evangelists over the past 50 years, who consulted Bill Clinton during the scandal with Monica Lewinsky, today gathers people into movements to promote the words of Jesus about love and redemption.

Who can know more about the power of charisma, able to fascinate and deceive, than the son of a preacher, repulsed from faith? Campolo, 53, advising young people as a “humanity chaplain” at the University of Southern California for free, did not disappoint. He was frank, open, energetic and astute - well, just like an evangelist preacher.

Max Weber, a German sociologist of the early twentieth century, wrote that charisma is a quality that distinguishes a person "from ordinary people", a defiant impression of him as "endowed with a supernatural, superhuman, or at least exceptional gift or quality." According to Weber, such qualities are “inaccessible to the ordinary person, they are treated as a gift of God, or as properties to be followed by imitation, and thanks to them they are considered a leader.”

Campolo had long believed in it. “I was convinced that charisma comes straight from God,” he told me. "It was a gift." And when he began to lose faith, "I went through all the stages of apostasy on my way to heresy, and gradually lost the ability to believe in all of this." He began to preach that charm may be an innate quality, but it is not supernatural, and it can be used at will. “It can be used to get a woman into bed, to convince people in the church, or to sell insurance,” says Campolo. Moreover, this quality, at least in part, can be acquired and improved.

John Antonakis, a professor of organizational behavior, a director of a doctoral program in management at the University of Lausanne, who has studied charismatic speakers for many years, told me this. “The charm technique can be learned,” he says. Antonikis defined a set of what he calls “tactics of charismatic leadership” (TCL), varying from the use of metaphors and storytelling to non-verbal communication, for example, open posture and living, symbolic gestures at key moments. He showed that all these techniques helped win 8 of the last 10 presidential elections. “The more TCL is used, the larger the leader looks like in the eyes of others,” he says.

Tony Campolo masterfully mastered all the tactics. In the 1970s and 80s, Bart Campolo and his father traveled the country in a tattered sky-blue Dodge Coronet, preaching where it was necessary. Campolo admired how his father did. “My father was one of the most charming people in the world,” said Campolo. “I have met black preachers and people like my father who can move up and down across the whole spectrum, give whispers to which you unwittingly listen, tell a joke, a tearful story, a fierce accusation. He was able to do it all. ”

Many of the most important lessons in the profession of Bart began after Campolo Sr.'s sermons ended. Father asked Bart about what he saw, what worked, what didn't work, and why. Type how to estimate present.

“You're trying to figure out which of those present will be the most difficult,” says Campolo. “Suppose you are on a college campus, and in the back row is a group of athletes.” If you do not work for them, they will disturb you all evening. ” So before you get up and start talking, Campolo tells you, you go to the back of the room and talk to potential bullies. “You can say: 'Hey, dude, why did you choose this particular school? How did you get here? ” You are trying to pull them over to your side even before you get up on the stage. ” Or you try to find them during a conversation, meet with a look, speak specifically for them.



Campolo cited another example. “I remember once my father and I went to a music festival, where we saw almost 10,000 children on the hillside. Frisbees fly everywhere. Any distractions around. And he says: "Y-yes, it will be difficult." And then he said: “I will rise now, and my first story will be hard and emotional. If I try humor, they will not laugh, because they will not hear the laughter of others. In such a space, you need to throw away humor and look for emotional resonance. Such a group can be loaded, but not stirred.

Campolo said his father had a natural gift of leadership. But he was sure where this gift came from. He says that his father, like another well-known charismatic leader, desperately needed the love of others.

“My father was a long time spiritual leader of Bill Clinton,” says Campolo. - They were and remain good friends. I was once in DC with my father, and he said, "Listen, I'm going to meet with the president, do you want me?" Everyone says that being in a room with Clinton, they feel that they are the only person in the world. He has such an opportunity, a charm that makes you feel that he really sees you, feels your pain. He and my father lost their fathers at an early age. I think this created a lot of uncertainty. Sometimes it seems that such people need a standing ovation every ten minutes to feel support. From there, and takes the charm. It is connected with the emotional mask of a man. "

But charm has two parts. This is the relationship between the person having it and the people responding to it. The flame will ignite only when the spark meets with fuel. Charismatic speech in front of a mirror is not very inspiring. But put a man in front of a crowd, and it will be a completely different spectacle.

Emotions serve as a catalyst. In an article in the journal Science from 2005, psychologist from Princeton, Alexander Todorov, described how he showed people two photos of competing candidates to Congress and asked them to evaluate the competence of candidates only on the basis of their appearance. Estimates of people formed in just seconds, with 70% accuracy, predicted which candidate would win the election.

“We very quickly decide whether a person possesses properties that we attach importance to, for example, attractiveness and competence, although we haven't said a word with him yet,” Todorov said at the time. “Apparently, we are designed to draw such conclusions quickly and without reflection.” Using fMRI, Todorov showed that quick decisions have a powerful emotional charge, and that they are associated with the activity of the tonsil, a primitive brain structure responsible for the “fight or flight” response.

Jochen Menges, who lectures on organizational behavior at the University of Cambridge, calls the effect of charm on emotions "the effect of awe." He came up with the concept while working on his doctoral dissertation in 2008, when he traveled to Berlin to listen to Barack Obama's speech, hoping to get new insights into how alchemy of charm works. When Obama climbed onto the stage and announced that he was not only a citizen of the United States, but also a citizen of the world, Menges felt captured. For a few minutes he forgot why he came - he turned into a follower.



Looking around, he was surprised. In the materials he read about charisma, it was said that leaders show their focus, forcing people to experience pleasant emotions. But it was not a lively and energetic crowd. She froze in place, hitting a trance. At the end, the woman sitting next to Menges spoke in a fit of emotion about how “awesome”, “wonderful” and “amazing” it was. But when Menges asked her to name three things she liked in the lecture, she could not do it.

In a report on TED, Menges explained that charismatic leaders cause us reverence. “And since we admire them so much, we hold back our emotions in an instinctive attempt to show them respect, to recognize their highest status,” he says.

Recreating the “awe effect” in the laboratory — involving subjects in visualization and in the description of charismatic figures, and then showing them emotionally loaded videos — Menges demonstrated something very deep. Although the external signs of the subject's emotions could have been suppressed, the subjective feeling of emotions by people who felt “reverence” was about the same as those of those who did not feel it. It was even more, because they simply suppressed it in an automatic attempt to show respect. Psychologists have long known that when we suppress the expression of emotions, these emotions not only increase in intensity, but also cause cognitive harm.

Menges found that students were more likely to report that they could retell the content of lectures given by people who used the techniques of speech associated with emotions than the content of lectures given directly and without any charm. But the written tests showed that in fact people who listened to charming speakers had much less memory than those who listened to speakers without charisma. And still, choosing which lecturer to go to the cafe to discuss the ideas expressed by him, the students almost never follow the boring speaker, and almost always follow the charming one.

This does not surprise Richard Boyacis, who studies organizational behavior, psychology and cognitive sciences at Case Western Reserve University. Using fMRI, Boyacis and Anthony Jack, an experimental psychologist, have shown that emotional speakers excite nerve pathways called the Passive Brain Network (SPRRM). This network connects several areas of the brain (including the amygdala), and is associated with waking dreams, thoughts of other people and memories of the past. Interestingly, its activation negatively correlates with the contours associated with analytical thinking - working with executive functions, planning, reasoning, attention and problem solving. “The problem is that these two networks practically do not overlap,” says Boyacis. “They suppress each other.”

But turning off sanity does not end the effect of charisma - scientists have found that under suitable conditions, charismatic people - especially if their charm is based on perceiving them as leaders - can lead people to an almost hypnotic state.

In 2011, a team of Danish researchers led by Uffe Schjødt, a neurobiologist at Aarhus University, studied the brains of people who endured one of the most extreme demonstrations of the influence of charm — charismatic treatment. For this, 18 truly believing Christians were recruited, whose religion involved intercessory prayers (mostly Pentecostals ). They all admitted that they believe in the existence of people with the gift of a healer. Also in the experiment participated 18 people who do not believe in God, and were skeptical of the healing power of prayer.

Both groups were supposed to listen to 18 different prayers, performed by three people. At the same time, different subjects were told that these people were either not Christians at all, or ordinary Christians, or they were Christians, known for their gift of healing. In this case, the performers were unremarkable religious people, randomly received 6 prayers each.

Researchers have found strong differences in the brain activity of people, depending on their assumptions about the artist. When listening to prayers uttered by non-Christians, Christians sharply increased the activity of analytical parts of the brain. But if they listened to a performer who, in their opinion, had the gift of healing, this activity sharply fell. In the atheist group, no such changes were observed. The researchers drew parallels with similar experiments on subjects immersed in hypnosis, noting that hypnosis, if it works, usually occurs after a massive deactivation of the frontal lobe of the brain - in fact, the transfer of executive functions to the hypnologist. They also found that “the more strongly the Christian participants deactivated their executive and social cognitive networks of the brain, the more they evaluated the speaker’s charisma after listening”.

Schiodt explained the discoveries in the context of the theory of "predictive coding platform". The brain, in fact, is an automaton for recognizing sequences, and it constantly deals with predictions. Our sensations are a combination of previous expectations, expressed in the form of these automatic predictions, and real feelings. As long as the sensory information coincides with the predictions, the brain is calm. In the case of dissonance, the brain recalculates. But when we get to people who, in our deep conviction, possess special skills or abilities — that is, implicitly deciding that we trust them — we unconsciously muffle our ability to think analytically.

“If you are in a premonition of God or you have met with a charismatic or religious expert, then you believe in everything that happens, and this will lead you to a certain state, so you will not try too hard to show skepticism and check what is happening,” says Schiodt.

If charisma is a spark, and the audience tuned to it is fuel, then the correct sequence of events reveals the full explosive power of charisma. In Charisma in Politics, Religion and the Media, David Aberbach, in the book Charisma in Politics, Religion, and the Media describes the turning points in history that provided the foundation for key events and events that occurred thanks to charismatic leaders.

“Charisma touches some deep strings of society, and this is not always obvious,” Aberbach told me. - The bottom line is that in the life of a country or a group there are unpredictable elements, and in difficult moments certain people, who remained in the shadows before, come to the fore. They represent the perfect thing needed to overcome a crisis. It is a union of what is happening inside and outside the group. ”

Aberbach says that the charismatic leader “frees a person from the pressures of life stress. If in such conditions you join a group, you feel protected. But the prerequisite is human vulnerability. When people feel safe, they have no need for salvation, and even more so for a charismatic connection with each other. But when they are vulnerable, there is the possibility of charismatic affection. Under certain conditions, it can be very dangerous. ”


Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Adolf Hitler

Aberbach, a scientist from McGill University and the London School of Economics, compares Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Adolf Hitler - two sides of a historical coin - in describing examples of charisma. Both of them grew up on the needs of the Depression era for their nations. Both illustrate the power of influence that a charismatic leader is capable of having.

“Roosevelt personified the ability to fight adversity,” says Aberbach. - He fought against them in his personal life, and could represent a nation fighting against difficulties. He could represent the group by personal example. In this sense, he was charismatic. I think that's the point. A nation or group is looking for a person who represents them at a certain moment, moreover subconsciously. ”

In the case of Hitler, Aberbach says, “Many people felt better when they heard him. Often this is forgotten, because videos often present him as some kind of delirious madman. But he transferred people to other spheres, to a different plane of existence, they felt unity with Germany, felt national pride, and an aggressive hope for the future. ”

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