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Martin Luther King. Steve Jobs. John F. Kennedy. Winston Churchill. Fine examples of politicians, leaders, business men that many would claim were very charismatic public speakers. But what is it that makes someone be perceived as charismatic?
Research suggests it’s not only about what you say, but equally well about how you say it. For instance, one’s pausing behavior, speech rate, overall intensity, disfluency use, and timbre all contribute towards perceived charisma.
In a previous post from 2016, I wrote about the speech characteristics of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton during the three national TV debates before the presidential elections in 2016. That analysis focused on the speakers’ timing: how much rhythm is there in their spoken utterances? Published results indicated that Hillary Clinton spoke with a more regular rhythm (compared to Trump), even with a specific preference for a three-beats-per-second syllable rhythm.
Carefully timing your speech is known to help intelligibility, memory, and even the overall liking of the speaker. Another recent post of mine shows that it can even help you be better understood in noisy settings, like a crowded bar. But can a more regular rhythm actually boost your charisma?
A new study used the speech from Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in a charisma-perception experiment. Audio clips from the third TV debate from both speakers were taken and first low-pass filtered. This sounds like overhearing someone speak in the room next door; you can’t really make out the words but you can clearly hear the sound of someone’s voice.
In an experiment, 20 listeners were asked to rate the low-pass filtered audio clips for charisma, basing their judgments on the sound of the speech, on a scale from 1 to 7. Interestingly, Trump’s voice was overall rated as more charismatic than Clinton’s voice. This could of course be due to a number of factors, such as the speaker’s sex, speech rate, or even listeners’ political preferences. However, results also revealed a correlation between the rhythm in the spoken utterances and the perceived charisma ratings: across all audio clips from both speakers, those clips with a more regular rhythm were also rated as more charismatic. This suggests that a speaker’s timing can influence how charismatic someone’s perceived to be.
So if you wanna boost your charisma, speak-with-a-rhy-thm!
