Charisma is a costly signal

Abstract

A key assumption in modern conceptualizations of charisma is that it is a costly signal. It thus should be easier for intelligent individuals to produce this signal: it requires one to be creative, communicate in symbolic ways, have the needed expertise, and be consistent in one’s values and actions. At this time, it is unclear whether this assumption holds. Using data from an incentivized laboratory experiment (n = 1,998 general population) and two field settings (n = 134 public service leaders and n = 41 U.S. presidents), we show that individuals’s charisma signaling scores strongly correlate with their scores on intelligence. A change of a standard deviation in intelligence was associated with changes in charisma signaling of 7.89 % (Study 1), 11.01 % (Study 2), as well as 5.70 %, 6.80 %, and 12.23 % (Study 3), respectively. In addition, Studies 1 and 2 showed that scores on personality dimensions—whether the big five or the big six—do not correlate with charisma signaling. Our results lay the foundations for explaining a mechanism for why charisma signaling is a potent motivational tool and thus have important theoretical and policy implications.