Image: Josue Evilla
In Brief
Crafting Charisma
- Charisma was traditionally thought to be an attribute of the leader, but it is primarily an attribution made by followers.
- Charisma centers on the capacity for a leader to be seen by followers as advancing group interests. Its spell can be broken if leaders are discovered to be acting for themselves or for an opposing group.
- Charismatic leaders cultivate narratives in which their sense of self comes to be seen by followers as emblematic of their shared group identity.
The President pulled himself up the long ramp to the platform of his railway car.... Friend or foe, those who saw him at this moment could not help being moved at the sight of this severely crippled man making his way up with such great difficulty—really propelling himself along by his arm and shoulder muscles as his strong hands grasped the rails at the side of the ramp.
Franklin D. Roosevelt's whistle-stop train tours in the presidential campaigns of 1932 and 1936, as described here by his speechwriter Samuel Rosenman, have become the stuff of legend. By any measure, they were highly successful. According to Breckinridge Long, Roosevelt's ambassador to Italy, the crowds who flocked to see him “passed any bounds for enthusiasm—really wild enthusiasm—that I have ever seen in any political gathering.” This gusto spilled over to the ballot box, and in 1936 Roosevelt won the election by 11 million votes, taking every state bar Vermont and Maine. A range of academic studies, most notably an influential analysis by Dean Keith Simonton of the University of California, Davis, published in 1988 in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, identify Roosevelt as the most charismatic of all U.S. presidents.
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4 Comments
Add CommentOMG, if only Freud had known about this - oh wait, 100 years ago, he DID!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisVery soon, scientists will announce the discovery of.... the Moon!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisyes promytius you are right and Robert Michel,(German,Italian) wrote a book about this in 1915. I wonder if Reicher and Haslan are plagiaristers or plagiators.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCurious about charisma, which is necessary for social dominance, I have observed that there seems to be, like Chomsky and Pinker's postulates concerning behavior modules, a distinct evaluative process in women, for instance, (outside of their social intercommunications) which differentially favors individual males.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis is obviously not necessarily due to testosterone production or related anatomical differences, as a great number of males not exhibiting such traits do seem to have developed inordinate following in comparison to others.
The reasons are surely multivariate, and although I haven't seen the article, the somewhat sociopathic [my adjective. I tend to regard social deception, though common in many species (check frequency-dependent traits)] manufacturing of charisma as exactly that, in my jealous eyes!
So a study on how and by whom such manufacturing in a population or community occurs will be highly interesting, as it isolates and analyzes one of the relevant variables.
By the way, Freud guys, Darwin was challenged by numerous critics, and so felt he had to develop an hypothesis called sexual selection.Since much Much much research has been done in this and Freud was quite impressed by Darwin's work, revising his clinical ideas in light of it. Check out that research.