We asked Channel Four viewers/web users to take part in an on-line experiment to explore how people view charisma - many thanks to the thousands of you who participated.
Professor Richard Wiseman is working on a paper on charisma. It is likely to arouse plenty of interest in the scientific community as well as in the media, so do keep an eye out for it. Your involvement will certainly have helped to shed light on the mystery of charisma and how we perceive it.
The charisma experiment is still live and is a fun way to think about how we perceive charisma (see below for 'How it works').
If you have already participated and are want to read Professor Wiseman's initial findings, please scroll down to 'Initial Results.' We would advise you not to read his report before taking part as this might influence your decisions!
The Charisma Experiment – How it works:
Study the photographs of 18 aspiring science presenters and give each person a 'charisma rating' based solely on appearance. The scale runs from 1 to 5 (1 being the lowest charisma rating and 5 the highest). So, giving a rating of 5 would suggest they are Mr or Mrs Charisma.
After giving each person a rating, you then have the opportunity to watch video clips of four of the 18 presenters in action. Once you have viewed each brief presentation, please give them a charisma rating and, if your decision has changed between looking at their photo and watching them on video, have a think as to why you came to this conclusion – you can read more about the findings of the experiment below. To begin the experiment, click here.
Findings Update - May 2007
In trying to define someone’s charisma it’s easy to hone in on their flashing eyes, alluring smile and the way their words just seem to draw everyone in. But it’s likely too that this amiable pied piper of people has some less obvious mannerisms that send out all the right signals to others.
Psychologists have shown that if we spend just two minutes in total silence with a charismatic person we pick up on their mood. They have an uncanny ability to infect people around them with their emotions, without even having to say a word.
Even the non-verbal behaviours of a charismatic person can act as powerful hidden persuaders. So Dr. Karen Pine, Professor Richard Wiseman and Lucinda Faucher, from the University of Hertfordshire, have been looking at what the Famelab contestants do. And one thing they do quite a lot is gesture. In fact, most of us find it hard to speak without moving our hands too. But could these hand gestures contribute to a person’s charisma?
Of course, the psychologists could only look at the hand gestures of contestants whose hands were free during all of their presentation. Those who were holding a prop or demonstrating something most of their time couldn’t be included. But that still left around 40 contestants presentations to be put under the microscope. Did the most charismatic people gesture more during their 3 minutes than the ones judged as less charismatic? When the psychologists compared the judge’s charisma scores with the contestants gestures there was a clear link. Contestants judged as most charismatic used far more hand gestures. In fact some used as many as 85 during their short talk. And the ones who scored low on charisma with the judges were also the ones who gestured less.
But before we conclude that to be more charismatic we just need to wave our hands around, the findings proved more subtle than that. The psychologists looked closely at what type of gestures the contestants made. The ones most closely linked with charisma were iconic gestures. Iconic gestures reflect the meaning of the word that is being spoken. An example is making a twisty turny hand motion when describing something that is twisty turny. So the point the person is making can be seen as well as heard. In this way it tickles the audience’s visual as well as their auditory senses. Its possible that this may make them feel more drawn in to what the person is saying. Also, psychological research has shown that extra information can be given in gesture that isn’t in the spoken message. So a person might describe something as moving but convey the twisty turny way in which it moves with their hand gestures. Using gesture is a subtle way of getting more information across to the audience in a short time.
The person with charisma undoubtedly uses subtle changes in their face and voice with great mastery to persuade and charm an audience. But it may not stop there. The way they use their hands, without it even being noticed, also makes a powerful contribution to the overall effect.
The Charisma Experiment – Initial Results
Presented with 18 head and shoulder photos of FameLab contestants, users were asked to give charisma ratings to each, based purely on their appearance. There was then an opportunity to watch video clips of four of the contestants and users could see if perceived charisma levels changed as a result of seeing the contestants in action.
Every science communicator entering FameLab had to present a brief talk on a science subject of their choice. To make an impact, they would not only have to present their subject in an informative way, but they would also need to win over the audience and judges using inter-personal skills and charisma.
We wanted to know if it was possible to determine charismatic potential based just on how the person looked. Subconsciously, judging people on appearance is something we all do pretty much every day. However, it's not often that we are asked actually to evaluate people's charisma levels.
Professor Richard Wiseman of the University of Hertfordshire, a prominent psychologist in the field, conducted both this on-line charisma experiment on Channel4.com and a parallel off-line experiment which involved asking the FameLab judges to give charisma ratings to the various contestants.
Analysing the online experiment data, Professor Wiseman found that in the off-line experiment conducted during the FameLab competition when the judges were rating the contestants' charisma levels they were basing their judgements on a wide range of information, including, for example, the applicants' facial looks, their clothes, body language and the way they spoke, as well as the content of their presentation. In the Channel4.com experiment by contract viewers had just stills of their to go on. So it is interesting that there is a significant degree of agreement between the ratings made by the judges and the participants in the Channel4.com experiment.
This suggests that judgements of charisma are based, to a very large extent, on facial appearance. As yet, Professor Wiseman and his team don't know exactly what it is that makes one person look more or less charismatic than another. Hypotheses include that it may well be related to their attractiveness, or whether they have an expressive face. It is with these questions in mind that they will now analyse the data in more detail.
The second part of the Channel4.com experiment involving presenting people with short video clips of just four of the contestants in action and asking them to re-rate their charisma again gave rise to a strong correspondence between the ratings assigned online and the decisions made by the judges during the live competition. This suggests that, although it is difficult to say just why we find certain people charismatic, we know it when we see it and there tends to be a marked consensus as to who is and isn't charismatic.
Professor Wiseman's view is that "the data from the Channel4.com experiment looks fascinating. We have only done the first phase of analysis on the information submitted by everyone who was kind enough to take part, but it is already yielding some really interesting findings."
"At the moment we understand very little about the psychology of charisma – the results of this and similar experiments will start to reveal important insights into both why some people have that magic X factor, and how others can develop it."
