Charisma, the ability to attract and retain followers without benefit of formal authority, is more difficult to define than to identify. While we each seem able to identify charismatic individuals – and non-charismatic individuals – it is not clear what it is about an individual that influences our judgment. This paper describes the results of experiments designed to discover potential correlates of such judgments, in what speakers say and the way that they say it. We present results of two parallel experiments in which subjective judgments of charisma in spoken and in transcribed American political speech were analyzed with respect to the acoustic and prosodic (where applicable) and lexico-syntactic characteristics of the speech being assessed. While we find that there is considerable disagreement among subjects on how the speakers of each token are ranked, we also find that subjects appear to share a functional definition of charisma, in terms of other personal characteristics we asked them to rank speakers by. We also find certain acoustic, prosodic, and lexico-syntactic characteristics that correlate significantly with perceptions of charisma. Finally, by comparing the responses to spoken vs. transcribed stimuli, we attempt to distinguish between the contributions of “what is said” and “how it is said” with respect to charisma judgments.
Charismatic individuals have been defined as those who command authority by virtue of their personal qualities rather than by formal institutional or military power (Weber, 1947). How they acquire authority, however, is a question of considerable discussion. While some see charisma arising primarily from the faith of a leader’s listener–followers ( Marcus, 1967), others believe that it arises from particular individual’s gift of grace and an inspiring message, and triggered by an important crisis ( Boss, 1976). However, all who study charisma concur in believing that charismatic leaders share a particular ability to communicate. Leaders widely believed to be charismatic, such as Martin Luther King Jr., Fidel Castro, Adolf Hitler, and Pope John Paul II, are also particularly noted for their oratorical abilities.
In this paper, we investigate the language-based aspects of charisma. In particular we are interested in identifying aspects of what speakers say and how they say it as potential correlates of others’ judgments of their charisma, or lack thereof. We describe two perception experiments designed to identify possible acoustic, prosodic, and lexico-syntactic characteristics of charisma, one using spoken data and the other using transcribed and written materials from the same speakers. We correlate subjects’ judgments of this material with lexico-syntactic and acoustic and prosodic features of the assessed speech and with lexico-syntactic characteristics of the text tokens. Finally, we compare judgments from text transcriptions alone to judgments made from speech, to distinguish the contributions of how something is said from what is said in subject judgments of charisma.
Our motivation for this study is two-fold: on a scientific level, we are interested in determining whether speakers who are judged charismatic share certain acoustic and prosodic characteristics, and how these interact with lexical content and syntactic form. While communicative talent has been widely assumed in the literature on charisma to contribute to the charismatic appeal of an individual, there is no theoretical framework on the role that the form and content of charismatic individual’s speech or writings plays in overall charisma judgments. However, most of the specific features we have tested derive from claims or speculations in the literature about different characteristics of charismatic speech.
From a technological point of view, we believe that such research has potential applications in speech synthesis and speech understanding: first, a better understanding of the acoustic and prosodic characteristics of charisma in human speech could support the generation of more ‘charismatic’ synthetic speech for applications intended to be persuasive and compelling, such as commercial and political advertisements or telephone solicitations. Second, such an understanding might support the automatic identification of ‘charismatic’ speakers, who in turn are likely to be successful in attracting a political, military, or religious following. Finally, knowledge of how charismatic individuals speak has the potention to support the creation of online training systems that help individuals to become more charismatic speakers themselves.
In Section 2, we discuss previous research on charisma, particularly with respect to charismatic language, in the sociology, rhetoric, and natural language processing literature. In Section 3, we describe an online experiment we conducted to elicit subject judgments of charisma and other personal attributes of speakers of tokens of public speech. Section 4 describes a parallel experiment in which similar judgments were elicited from subjects based on transcripts of the spoken tokens described in 3. We conclude in Section 5 and describe future research in Section 6.
