"Scarlett O'Hara was not beautiful....
....but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm as the Tarleton twins were."

This is the first line of "Gone With the Wind." Laura's comments responding to "Do Women Try Harder" reminded me of this line - the essence of the Southern Belle was charm, or (as we would say today) charisma. There are other ways to put it: "je ne sais quoi", "he has a certain something", "what is it about her?"

Men respond to it as well as women do, in my experience (more honestly, I respond to it as well as any women I know do.) Laura labels it a sort of "personal status", and that seems right. Once hooked by charisma, it's easy to wonder things like "how can she not be aware of how cool she is?"

I'm trying to think of a suitable analogy for the interpersonal role of charisma, and I think "savoriness" works - the umami flavor whose taste buds were only discovered a few years ago. Chefs and gourmands were well aware of the savory quality in food before it could be pinned down as a real phenomenon. Perhaps similarly, you can point to beauty, outgoingness, wealth, power, humor, etc., etc. as "attractive", but they don't tell you what "essence of attraction" is. Charisma is "essence of attraction" - it's attractiveness stripped of specific context and added to an otherwise normal appearance and personality.

But there still has to be a certain "something" in the charismatic individual's personality that makes them that way. "Self confidence" or "assurance around others" is how it usually gets described, but it seems to me that this is another way of saying "success breeds success". It also ignores uncharismatic outgoing people. Not every used-car salesman is charismatic.

How about this: the charismatic person gives you the feeling of emotionally connecting with them, without giving you a handle you can use to move them. It's the feeling of being a small planet in orbit around a large one: the laws of physics tell you that both bodies are moved from their path, but the large one deviates imperceptibly. Charismatic people have more social mass than the rest of us.




- posted by Scott @ 6:57 PM