Bill von Hippel, professor at the University of Queensland, on how the ability to think and respond quickly makes someone seem more charismatic.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I’m Sarah Green Carmichael. Today, I’m talking with Bill von Hippel at the University of Queensland. He worked on an article for HBR about charisma and new research on charisma. And his findings involve research he did that shows that when people can think quickly and respond quickly to questions, they are seen as more charismatic. Bill, thank you so much for talking with us.

BILL VON HIPPEL: Thank you, Sarah.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: All right. So first, let’s talk a little bit about how fast is fast. What’s the difference between slow answers and quick ones?

BILL VON HIPPEL: It’s really just a few hundred milliseconds. And if you think about it, a few milliseconds may seem awfully quick. But if you tell somebody something important and whenever they pause, even if just for half a second, that pause can carry a ton of meaning. And so if you tell me something that’s potentially socially important or fraught with social desirability concerns, like you say, oh, Bill, I should probably tell you I’m gay, if I have a pause before I answer, even if I say the right thing, you may no longer believe that the right thing is how I really feel. And so if you’re fast, you have the advantages that you can pause, so to speak. You can rifle through a bunch of possible responses in your mind and give the appropriate one before anyone can detect that you actually paused, whereas if you’re slow, well, any pause that you do is going to be easily evident to everyone.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Well, so it’s interesting to me that in your research, you distinguish between IQ and speed because wouldn’t a quick thinker also just naturally have a higher IQ?

BILL VON HIPPEL: That’s right. So in fact, the strongest predictor of IQ is mental speed. It’s used in all the IQ tests. And when you look across huge samples, the best predictor of somebody’s overall IQ on average is how fast they are. But it’s still not the same thing. It’s an important component of IQ. And so we thought, well, IQ clearly is going to carry a lot of the variants. It’s going to explain a lot of charisma. But maybe speed will explain a little bit beyond that. It turned out to be the opposite. The only reason that IQ matters at all to charisma is because of speed.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Let me wrap my head around this a little bit. Does it matter if you give a fast answer and it’s wrong?

BILL VON HIPPEL: It doesn’t matter if it’s wrong. And so in our research, we only measured speed by asking very simple questions. So we would say to you, name a precious gem. And of course, everyone can name a precious gem. Your job is just to answer it as quickly as you possibly can. Now, every once in a while, in somebody’s effort to be really fast, they would say something wrong, like you might say quartz. Well, it’s really not a precious gem. And so when we went back and looked through it though, the wrong answers weren’t really relevant because they were so rare.

Now, I think that if you put somebody under pressure and they say something really stupid really fast, well, then that’s not going to come across so well. And so for us, charisma is mental quickness separated from accuracy because, of course, in our design, accurate wasn’t really a problem. My guess is that there are some people out there who are very fast and always wrong, and their friends don’t regard them as very charismatic. I think fast and reasonably on target makes you charismatic.

Now, let’s keep in mind though that some people are charismatic who everyone disagrees with. Donald Trump is a great example. Although a lot of people agree with him, a lot of people find him appalling. And yet, they find him compelling. They want to hear what he has to say. So just because you don’t agree with somebody doesn’t mean you don’t find them charismatic. It just means you don’t quite know where they’re going to go next and you’re interested to find out. That’s what charisma really is.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Let’s talk a little bit more about that definition of charisma. Is that something that you had to define going into the study? Did you use a working definition? How did you think about that going in?

BILL VON HIPPEL: Yeah, so we really weren’t sure what to make of charisma. And so rather than trying to define it, we relied on people’s own interpretations. And so we simply brought people into the laboratory who were in groups of friends. We basically wandered around campus. Whenever we saw a small group of friends chatting, we invited them to come in and be part of our research. And of course, sometimes they’re interested. Sometimes they’re not.

But now, we’ve got people who know each other pretty well. They’re all having lunch together or whatever. And then we ask each friend about each other. Now, we do it in private so that they don’t feel compelled to say nice things about their friends. But each, one at a time, we say, how charismatic is Joyce.

And then what we usually found was a great deal of consensus. If one person thinks Joyce is charismatic, they all do. And alternatively, if one person thinks she’s not, they all agree. Now, they might quite like her. They might think she’s a lovely person. But there’s a great deal of agreement on whether, in fact, she was charismatic or not.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: That’s so interesting. And it’s not just about of being popular. Right? It’s not just about being social and glib.

BILL VON HIPPEL: No, exactly right. I mean, if you think about it, the perfect leader is somebody who’s highly charismatic, who you also regard as kind and strong and all those other things. But charismatic can be completely on its own. I think a lot of psychopaths are charismatic.

I think a lot of people who we actually would not enjoy in person at all are charismatic. They’re just compelling. We find them interesting, and we find them engaging. What we hope for, of course, is somebody’s charismatic and nice and friendly and smart and all those positive traits. But charisma alone can carry you a long way. And I think our political leadership is a good example of that.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: So let’s talk a little bit more about the dark side of charisma here because this is something that I know a lot of people really wish that they had more of. And I can guarantee you, if we publish something on hbr.org that was like, “Seven Ways to be More Charismatic,” it would do very, very well. But yet, it sounds a little like creepy when you put it that way.

BILL VON HIPPEL: Well, it’s not creepy per se. It’s simply one of many traits. And so I can use my intelligence to whatever degree I have it, either for evil or for good. Right? And charisma is the same. If I’m a highly charismatic person, then because people find what I say compelling, because they want to listen to me, because they want to be around me, I have the potential to be a really transformative leader.

And I think that’s a big reason why people want to be charismatic because they know they can draw people to them and they know that whatever ideas they do have, they can convince people that this is the strategy they ought to adopt. So a charismatic leader can convince people to do something that an un-charismatic leader simply can’t.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Well, let’s come back to this idea of the importance of speed a little bit. I’m wondering, is it something about that these people are more confident and so they just blurt out the answer more quickly. What is it that’s really leading to that speedy response?

BILL VON HIPPEL: That’s a good question. Lots of people wondered whether it was really speed per se that enables charisma. Or is it other aspects of your personality, for example, being confident, and so willing to blurt things out quickly?

And so we tried to address that in a variety of ways. First of all, when we asked them these speed questions, we made them simple, like, “name a precious gem,” because of course, anyone can do that. So it’s not really an assessment of confidence.

We also took other measures to speed as well though. So we showed people patterns and said, are they the same or different. And they responded as quickly as they could. And we even went so simple as to show a dot on the right or left hand side of the screen. And you simply respond as fast as you can.

Now, along with that, we also measured things like confidence and various other personality factors to see if we could predict what really looked like a speed response. And it didn’t matter what we measured. It always came down to the fact that it was speed per se.

Now, speed per se does a lot for you though. Speed is a sign of good neural connections, that your mind is interconnected and works well together. And it’s also a sign that you have the capacity to draw things out of your memory that are going to be the most useful in a particular circumstance.

And so if you ask me the a difficult question or if we’re engaged in social banter, I need to be witty maybe, or I need to quickly defuse a situation, or I need to put you in your place, I might need to do a lot of things socially. And none of those things can be accomplished if I take too long. So if you insult me and I sit there fuming and a minute later come back with my witty answer, well, it’s not witty anymore. It’s sort of pathetic that I’m still thinking about it. And so we don’t really think about this on an everyday level, but in actual fact, the speed of our response is critical for an enormous number of the kinds and social interactions that we engage in.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: So where are you going to go next with this research? You’ve got this cool finding. What is the next step for you in this line of inquiry?

BILL VON HIPPEL: Yeah, so the next step for us is to try to build a more complete story of what it is that enables social intelligence. Now, we’re interested in this in general, but also very much from an evolutionary perspective because if we go back a million years ago into our ancestors and look at homo erectus, they took over the known world. They dominated the world from Nepal all the way across to Morocco and from Scotland down to South Africa, despite having a brain that’s much smaller than ours. And so then the question is, why did our brain grow so much after we were already so successful.

And what most scholars believe is that it was actually social pressure that led us to become so smart because smart isn’t free. Our brain uses 20% of our metabolic energy just when it’s sitting there doing nothing. And so that’s biologically costly for us to have such a big brain. And it’s enormously biologically costly for every one of our mothers to have to birth somebody with that big of a brain.

And so then the question is, well, if social pressures are what caused this, maybe a lot of the mental abilities that we have actually evolved for social reasons and not to solve abstract problems. And so what we started to do is, following that line of reasoning, look at a variety of mental abilities that we think may well play a role in social functioning.

So we’ve got this work on mental speed. We’ve got similar work we published last year where we looked at people’s ability to detect changing contingencies. When the rules change, how quick can you notice that change? And we’re now starting to look at a number of other similar cognitive functions, all of which, we think, play a critical role in social functioning.

So for example, people who detect changing contingencies more readily are better negotiators. They notice when their partner in a negotiation maybe feels a little bit differently than they do about the object that’s for sale or that they’re trying to buy. And they end up walking away with more of the money. They’re better able at getting people to cooperate with them.

And so we believe that in combination with mental speed and things like an ability to detect changing rules, there’s a number of other of these basic mental abilities that we hope to eventually put together into a comprehensive test of social skills that will, in some way, be like an IQ test. It will be a social IQ test.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: That’s so interesting. So in some ways, it sounds like basically, evolutionarily speaking, the hardest thing humans have to do is deal with other humans.

BILL VON HIPPEL: That’s exactly right. And if that’s the case, and we believe it is, then what that suggests is that a lot of our mental capacities that go into formal IQ, well, they’re important and they play a big role in our job.

But if you look at the data, they never account for much more than 10% to 20% of your career success. There are some exceptions, some fields that require you to be so smart. But in most jobs, it’s actually not the job itself that’s hard. It’s getting other people to go along with you. So whether you’re in sales or management or even accounting, if you want to get clients to be on your side, if you want them to hire you, they not only have to believe in your technical skills, but they need to want to have you around. They need to find you a compelling individual because in today’s world, usually you have so many choices of who is going to provide whatever services that you’re offering that you not only need to good at providing the service, but you need to be a compelling individual. And you can be compelling in a variety of ways. It doesn’t just mean charismatic. You can be friendly. You can be interesting. You can be lots of things.

But for us, what we’re trying to do is gain an understanding of that other side of the story because I suspect once we’re better at measuring social skills or what you might call social intelligence, we’ll find that that probably predicts half the story of your success in life– your marital satisfaction, your career success, how many friends you have and how close they are to you, et cetera.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: OK, that’s all fair. But say hypothetically I have a friend who wants to be more charismatic.

BILL VON HIPPEL: OK.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: And this friend promises to use their powers for good. What advice would you give them on gaining more charisma. Would you tell them to be quicker about things? Would there be other things you’d tell them to do as well?

BILL VON HIPPEL: Look, that’s a tough call. Charisma is a double-edged sword. And I think we can go back to our example of Donald Trump as a good example of that double-edgedness. If he weren’t so charismatic, he wouldn’t be doing so on the polls. But he also wouldn’t have so many people hating him.

And so to be charismatic, you have to say things and do things that people don’t automatically think of. And that means being a little bit unexpected. But of course, when you do things that are a little bit unexpected, they have just as much risk to be stupid as they do to be clever. They have just as much risk to be offensive as they do to be funny. And so if you’re going to take that risk, if being charismatic is important to you, you have to understand that sometimes things are going to go awry and you’re going to make some major gaffes.

And with that said, one of the things I would recommend is that people try to speed up a little bit, that they try to think of a slightly different way of thinking about a problem, a slightly different way of thinking of a social situation, and they don’t dilly-dally in presenting those ideas. They don’t waffle. They don’t hesitate. People who hesitate and waffle, even if they have a good, fast mind, don’t come across as if they do.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Going back to the evolution thing, back in those caveman days, and you have someone who’s really charismatic, is that automatically attractive? Or do some people see it as being inauthentic, being a blowhard? You’ve mentioned it as a double-edged sword. But is it the kind of thing where some people just don’t like charismatic people? They’d rather be with a humble, more shy person?

BILL VON HIPPEL: Yeah, that’s a good question. We don’t have a lot of research on this. But my sense from the work that we’ve done is that everyone finds charismatic people compelling. Everybody finds them interesting. Everybody wants to be around them to some degree. But that doesn’t mean everybody wants to marry them. That doesn’t mean everybody wants to have them as close friends. That doesn’t mean that everybody wants to spend all their time with them.

And so many of us prefer somebody who’s more stable, reliable, predictable in our close personal relationships. But even those of us who prefer that, what we seem to be finding– because it’s completely independent of things like introversion and other similar aspects of your personality, even openness to experience, for example– completely independent of all those personality traits, everyone seems to find charismatic people compelling.

And that’s why charismatic people play such an important role in leadership because you don’t actually ever have to meet your leader in your entire life, whether it’s the leader of your country or even a large corporation. And if your corporation is small, you may only see your leader in passing. And so in those kinds of circumstances, charismatic leaders tend to be able to push their agenda better. They tend to get us to believe in them and to go along with them. Even if we would in private, say, well, I’m really glad that guy’s not my neighbor, or I would never want to marry that person because that’s not the kind of person I want to spend my time with, we nonetheless find those people compelling and persuasive.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: So they have their uses.

BILL VON HIPPEL: They have many important uses. Yeah, that’s absolutely right.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: It’s interesting, too, to me what you said about how introverts can be charismatic too because I think probably a lot of people do assume it’s extroverts only.

BILL VON HIPPEL: Well, extroverts tend to do a better job of being charismatic in large groups because that’s where they’re most comfortable. But introverts can be very charismatic in one-on-one conversations. The world is full of authors and artists who we find very charismatic and compelling, who we almost never get access to, except in these interview settings where they’re talking to close friends and somebody is filming it or recording it because they don’t like to do that in public. So your willingness to be out there in public, it’s separate from your charisma level.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Well, Bill, that was very persuasive and convincing. And you thought of those answers so quickly. And I’m sure that those can’t be a coincidence. So thank you.

BILL VON HIPPEL: Well, totally my pleasure.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: That was Bill von Hippel from the University of Queensland. For more on this topic, go to hbr.org. And of course, you can also connect with us on Facebook at facebook.com/hbr, on Twitter, at @HarvardBiz, or on iTunes, where you can leave us a review. Thanks.