Charisma perception from text and speech

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.