Note: From the archives, with love. This was posted on Medium in early 2023 and touches on one of my research specialties—the relationship between charisma and emotion. Reposting it here for you for a couple reasons—one is that it’s one of my favorite articles. A second is that it’s congruent with some other things I’m thinking through.
On an otherwise normal afternoon in 1955 Robert Stein, a young editor at Redbook magazine, sat at a table in the Gladstone Hotel in Manhattan, slamming rounds of scotch in rapid succession and fighting back a rising swell of panic. He had bitten off far more than he could chew. Newly promoted and anxious to make a name for himself, he had sold his editor on a sensational story — an intimate, behind-the-scenes portrait of Marilyn Monroe.
Monroe, by that point, had retreated from the public eye. She was pursuing more serious acting roles, and the 1950s press had reacted with the predictable contempt they heaped on any woman who tried to transcend the role they had assigned her.
In response, Monroe had tried to create space for herself, but her seclusion made her all the more tantalizing. Magazines had taken to publishing unfounded gossip. Her name was so powerful that the hint of her was enough to send ratings soaring.
Robert Stein knew all this and gambled anyway, praying that Monroe would be open to something different. An actual interview? A brief glimpse into the life of the icon, behind the stage? If Stein could pull it off, it would be gold. If not… well, Stein spent several days sweating profusely. His job was on the line. The friend he was meeting at the Gladstone would either make his career or destroy it with a single phone call to Marilyn Monroe.
Stein’s gamble paid off. Monroe was happy to let them profile her. It later came out that she agreed, in part, because Redbook had treated her kindly when other magazines had ridiculed her. And thus Stein’s gambit culminated in one of those brief, poignant moments that are iconic in the lives of Hollywood royalty; Stein and his best friend, a brilliant but tormented photographer named Ed Feingersh, accompanied Marilyn Monroe for a trip around New York — just the three of them, as she let the two in on her day-to-day life.
That day is significant for many reasons. For 1950’s American readers, that day was a rare look at the real Marilyn Monroe. For Stein, that day is a painful memory; he was the only one of the trio who would live to see his 37th birthday. For modern Americans, that day resulted in several of the most famous photographs ever taken of Marilyn Monroe.
But there is one other reason that remains largely unnoticed to those outside of the scientific community. Over fifty years later, as he wrote about that day, Stein unwittingly uncovered a mystery.¹
The mystery predates Stein and Monroe. Social scientists have been trying to solve it for close to a hundred years. It is a mystery that I happen to care a lot about; I devoted five years of my professional life as a research psychologist to trying to solve it. People feel, intuitively, that it must have an answer, but when it comes time to put it to words, the words elude them.
And Marilyn Monroe, in a brief, scintillating moment outside of a New York subway in 1955, embodied that mystery in its entirety.
Strike a pose
Here’s how it happened. For most of that day, Stein and Feingersh spent their time not in the company of Marilyn Monroe, but in the company of her mild-mannered alter-ego — the driven, insightful, melancholy Norma Jeane Baker.
The name Marilyn Monroe was created by Baker and studio executive Ben Lyon in 1946, as she signed her first contract with 20th Century Fox. It was a glamorous stage name for a future star, though neither Baker nor Lyon knew at the time just how famous Marilyn Monroe would ultimately become.
Looking back, it is also evident that at some point Marilyn Monroe had become something more than a simple stage name. Fifty years later, as Stein recalled the story, he was struck by the fact that Monroe seemed to be two people — one of them was the star that everyone knew and adored. The second was Norma Jeane Baker; private, shy, and often overwhelmed.
Baker did not feel as deeply connected to Marilyn Monroe as the rest of the world. Throughout their trip, Baker alternated between being herself and being Monroe. One moment, in a bar alone, she was a solitary woman ordering a vodka, her beauty drawing the appreciative eye of the bartender but not his recognition.
The next moment, walking into a clothing store, she was the famous starlet being doted on by attendants and salespeople clamoring for her attention. If not two separate personalities, at the very least she had two separate personas.
As the three of them rode the subway, Baker sat in a corner of the train, largely inconspicuous to the subway crowd. Most of the New Yorkers on the subway had little time for strangers, engrossed as they were in the business of the day.
After disembarking and snapping a few photos in the subway station, Stein, Feingersh, and Baker emerged onto the New York City streets. Baker stopped for a moment, struck by a sudden inspiration. She turned playfully to the two men accompanying her.
“Hey, do you want to see her?” She asked. It was clear from her words that, like Stein, Baker also considered herself to be separate from her stage persona, as if Marilyn Monroe was a mantle that she could assume at will. Stein and Feingersh were intrigued and waited for her to continue. She smiled — there was a hint of mischief in her eyes.
Then she proceeded to flip New York on its head; the chaos she caused in the next sixty seconds is the stuff that Hollywood legends are made of.
In Stein’s words, all she did was take off her coat, fluff her hair, and strike a pose. It was an innocuous gesture. It was nothing at all. But at the same time, it was everything. A brief shift in her posture and tone, a playful shine in her eyes, and she was no longer Norma — she was Marilyn.
The effect ripped through the street like a bomb. Within minutes, Monroe, Feingersh, and Stein had to fight their way out of a crowd of New Yorkers who were ready to scrap the day’s business for the chance to be in the presence of a star.
The mystery of charisma
What is charisma? This seems like a simple question on the surface, but answering it is surprisingly difficult. It has stumped academics for close to a hundred years, ever since the term was first popularized by the sociologist Max Weber in his 1920 Theory of Social and Economic Organization.
Weber used the term to describe leaders who commanded followers by the force of their legendary presence. Today, we apply the term far more broadly than Weber ever intended. We use it to describe stars, grifters, presidents, and philanthropists. In all cases, however, it refers to something similar to Weber’s original meaning. Some people have a gravity about them — a quiet force, a little extra something — that draws others into their orbit.
That ‘little extra something’ is powerful. For that reason, there is an active community of organizational scientists who have spent decades trying to unpack the concept of charisma so that they can understand its secrets. It is, in fact, one of the most popular topics in the scientific study of leadership.
If this seems a bit odd to you, consider; throughout history we have examples of leaders who have commanded extraordinary devotion from their followers, compelling them to trust and obey, to go above and beyond, through the sheer power of their character. This is distinctly different from normal forms of leadership, which rely on things like money or fear to motivate people.
From a leadership perspective, the ability to command respect and loyalty must have a powerful appeal. It exists beyond the domain of what financial incentives can reach. If you are an employer, you can buy an employee’s time and compliance with a paycheck. Getting them to care, or inspiring them to grow beyond the parameters of their contract, is an entirely different prospect.
Since the 1970s, then, there has been an active market for science that seeks to take the mysteries of charisma and chart its mechanics in a way that can be easily understood and, hopefully, taught.
Unfortunately, the science is a mess. Scholars have only begun the process of disentangling it properly over the last ten years. At the core of this mess is a simple conundrum. It’s a trap that both scientists and laypeople run headlong into when they are trying to define charisma:
It is nearly impossible to precisely describe what it is that people do that makes them charismatic.
Most of us are easily able to recognize charisma, and that is enough for us to be able to use it in a meaningful way in conversation. For example, there is no question that Marilyn Monroe was charismatic, or that her brief stunt in the middle of New York City — outshining the sky on an overcast day in 1955 — was a prime example of her charisma.
The problem comes when a person is asked to move beyond recognizing charisma into giving a formal definition of it. What is it that Norma Jeane Baker did that day, exactly, that transformed her into Marilyn Monroe? There is no question that she did something. Was it the pose? The fluffed hair? The sudden confidence?
It could have been any or all of those things, of course. But it is equally clear that none of those actions by themselves is sufficient to contain the charisma of Marilyn Monroe. If someone else had done them on that specific day, at that specific time, in that specific place, the very best that they could have hoped for was puzzled glances from businessmen on their way to work. If anyone flocked to them at all it would have been pigeons — and then, only if they were posing with a loaf of bread.
The best scientific attempt at a formal definition of charisma is probably that of Dr. John Antonakis, an organizational researcher at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. In a paper published with several colleagues in 2016, he defined charismatic leadership as a leadership style where the leader tries to attract followers by appealing to their emotions and values.²
It is a damn good definition, but it has a caveat: Antonakis had to acknowledge that, by his definition, a “charismatic” leader can fail to attract followers. That doesn’t sound charismatic at all, does it? Is it really charisma if it doesn’t work? What separates the true charismatic from the street corner prophet? Both appeal to emotions and values, after all; why do people devote their lives to one, but refuse to devote even a moment to the other?
The core of charisma
An easy way to start untangling this problem is to study how we use the word charisma in language, to get a sense of its underlying conceptual shape. For example, try comparing the following two sentences:
Norma tried to be irritated but it didn’t work.
Norma tried to be irritating but it didn’t work.
The two sentences are identical except for a single suffix, but that suffix gives each of them a unique shape, in terms of how we interpret them. In the first sentence, Norma tried to do something, but she failed to perform her intended action. In the second sentence, Norma also tried to do something, but whatever actions she may have taken, she failed to have her intended effect.
This dual pattern shows up throughout the English language. As it turns out, there is one class of descriptive words that we use to describe people’s characteristic patterns of action and behavior. Energetic, poised, brave, bothered — all of these are connected in some way to a person’s actions.
There is also a second class of descriptive words that we use to describe the effects that a person has on the people around them. Charming, irritating, inspiring, terrifying — none of these words has meaning separate from the reactions of others. Would a person be terrifying if nobody around them reacted with fear? Or charming if nobody was charmed? The life of these words dwells outside of the person they are used to describe.
So, which class of words does charismatic fall into?
It seems evident to me that it falls into the second class. A charismatic person has a certain effect on the people around them. The exact nature of the effect is also something of a mystery, but it is a much easier mystery to crack than the question of what behavior counts as charismatic.
For my money, I would say the effect is emotion. Not just any emotion, mind you; there is no charisma involved in a jump-scare on Halloween, or in provoking somebody to anger by intruding on their boundaries. Some emotions are so simple to elicit that anyone can do it, charismatic or not.
Other emotions, however, can be evoked by appealing to the higher functions of our brain. These emotions are intimately connected to the neurological processes responsible for making sense of and reacting to the social world around us. It is possible for other people to make us feel these emotions through the way they communicate with their body, and their words, and all of the subtle channels of meaning that exist in the quiet spaces between action and speech.
Hope, inspiration, admiration, and courage. Compassion and camaraderie. Complex forms of fear and anger. Shame, and pride, and serenity. And, above all — raw, unbridled excitement. People can be provoked into feeling all of these emotions by the words and actions of others. That’s the domain of charisma. A charismatic person can work their way rapidly past all of the defenses that we deploy to keep others from making us feel. Once they’re past those defenses, they take us on a wild ride.
Still, it would be nice to know how they do it.
The blonde bombshell
There is a way that you and I could think about charisma that would allow us to describe it as a behavior. But it requires an imaginative leap from the world of simple actions in the physical world to the more nebulous and invisible realm of ideas, and needs, and beliefs, and dreams.
We could say that a person is charismatic when they have the ability to match a need or desire that exists in the mind of another person. If that’s a bit confusing, consider:
Needs, desires, and dreams are immense sources of latent energy. Most people desire to have meaning in their life. They desire to feel brave and attractive. They desire power, or success, or love and approval.
They want other things too. They crave clarity, and stability, and a meaningful vision for the future. They want a clear path forward. They want to stop feeling miserable. They crave the chance to feel fully alive, coveting those moments that fill their nerve endings with lightning and put a bit of thunder in their hearts. Most people don’t get to feel those things, with the exception of a few treasured moments that linger as precious memories.
How much enthusiasm would you feel if, one day, you bumped into someone who represented a path through which you could fulfill your deep desires for meaning, or belonging, or achievement? What wave of energy would be unleashed from behind those sealed doors deep in your soul, if only someone came along with a key that matched that lock?
Maybe a charismatic person is someone who matches the unmet needs of the people around them, either by chance or by design. Norma Jeane Baker had built up a persona — Marilyn Monroe — that meant something to the citizens of New York in 1955. Monroe meant glamor, excitement, fame, and beauty.
For most of her day out with her reporter friends, Stein and Feingersh, Baker didn’t match this persona. She was a beautiful but shy woman who didn’t represent anything at all in the minds of the people around her.
But for a brief, playful moment on the street outside of the subway, Norma Jeane Baker took off her coat, fluffed her hair, and struck a pose. In that moment, she matched an unspoken image that existed in the minds of the crowd around her.
She matched the Marilyn Monroe that they had built in their imaginations, and by matching, she presented herself as an opportunity to fulfill their dreams and desires, if only for a moment. The crowd that day was a tightly coiled mass of latent dreams, needs, and wants, just like us. They dreamed of being in the presence of someone famous. They needed a little bit of extra excitement to their day. They wanted to have an amazing story to bring home to the family that evening.
And suddenly she was there on the street outside the subway. She was the key that opened all of those locks. She was the brief atomic shock that caused all of those impossibly strong internal bonds to cascade into unrestrained fission, releasing all of that shackled energy at once.
There was a reason they called Marilyn Monroe a bombshell.
The path to charisma
What does that mean for you and me, however? Well, for one, it might mean that if you want to be charismatic, you ought to be asking yourself a different set of questions.
Most writers who try to peddle the secret to charisma offer their readers a framework that focuses on how to act. Be warm and confident. Be extraverted. Be a good listener. Ramp up your energy as much as you can.
These things can certainly have a charismatic effect, but they will never serve as a complete answer to the question of charisma because the peddlers are trying to answer a fundamentally flawed question; what can I do to be more charismatic?
As if charisma was generated by something other than the act of connection.
There’s a better approach. You could turn your attention to the needs and desires of the people around you, and you could start asking much more powerful questions about how to match the unspoken needs of other people.
You could ask yourself how to elevate the people that you meet, so that their day after meeting you is just a little bit better and more exciting than it was before. You could ask yourself how to inspire your friends and acquaintances to be the bravest version of themselves. You could ask yourself how to help other people feel powerful, or attractive, or interesting. You could ask yourself, what can I do to inspire the people around me to bloom?
Those questions are difficult, too. But they are also questions that you can answer — and if you are able to answer those questions, the charisma will probably follow naturally.
References
¹ Stein, R. (2005). “Do You Want To See Her?” American Heritage, 56(6). Read the article at: https://www.americanheritage.com/do-you-want-see-her
² Antonakis, J., Bastardoz, N., Jacquart, P., & Shamir, B. (2016). Charisma: An ill-defined and ill-measured gift. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 3, 293–319.
Do charismatic people have more mirror neurons?
Would be interesting to put them into an fMRI and see. Maybe they are better at modelling other people's needs/wants/desires and thus something in US senses that and responds to it... And we call that response "charisma"?
"a person is charismatic when they have the ability to match a need or desire that exists in the mind of another person"
Bingo! Charisma isn't just about behavior. It's about a relationship.
Excellent analysis, James. Made me think of Ulysses and the sirens. Sometimes charisma is a gateway to both pleasure and madness.