General Charisma Inventory

The concept of charisma was originally promoted by the Ancient Greeks as the charm, beauty, creativity, and overall appealing nature (including, in some cases, fertility) demonstrated by their gods and goddesses.

Later religions, including Abrahamic faiths like Judaism and Christianity, use charisma to refer to a capacity for leadership granted by God. Someone who essentially glows with moral correctness and religious righteousness will be able to attract and retain followers because they are thus blessed, and other people (who are, it’s implied, not thus blessed) can see that.

The term has also been used in non-religious contexts for a long time, and there’s evidence that Hellenistic Greeks would use it metaphorically when referring to a person, the implication being that they were in some way god- or goddess-like in their charm, beauty, etc.

But the secular usage of the concept really took off when German sociologist Max Weber used it in his books The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and Sociology of Religion in the early 1900s, after coming across the term in a religious text from about a decade earlier.

In Weber’s usage, ‘charisma’ meant what is today (in the field of sociology) called ‘charismatic authority,’ which suggests a charismatic person has a sort of superhuman ability to lead. This exceptionality is almost always referred to as an x-factor that is difficult to measure or even accurately describe: if you’ve got it, you’ve got it, and if you don’t, you don’t.

A study published in 2018 focused on attempting to formalize what charisma is by developing what they called a General Charisma Inventory: the traits that make someone charismatic, and measures of those traits.

They arrived at six core dimensions predicated on two main factors that seem to determine one’s charismatic measure.

Those two main factors are influence and affability, and the six dimensions are the ability to get along with anyone, the ability to make people feel comfortable and at ease, smiling at people, being able to influence people, having presence in a room, and knowing how to lead a group of other people. Those first three items are related to affability, while the latter three are related to influence.

The researchers behind that study also found that humans are pretty good at picking up on who’s charismatic and who isn’t, and that we tend to be persuaded by charismatic people more than non-charismatic people, even when the charismatic ones are making objectively weaker arguments.

Subsequent research has, so far, suggested that this trend crosses cultural and linguistic borders, and that many charismatic people have Dark Triad traits (especially narcissism), as that seems to influence their capacity to be influential while not affecting their affability.

There’s also evidence that charisma might be teachable (some of those six core dimensions, anyway), though this is still a relatively new field of inquiry, so all of these initial findings should be taken with a grain of salt (and an assumption that a lot of people will try to sell the promise of heightened charisma without having the data to back up their claims).