I’m not sure exactly what you’re asking, but in the ancestral environment of tribes of 100 or so people, being able to negotiate alliances, curry the favors of those in power, and attract mates were essential qualities for survival and reproduction.
Something that’s often overlooked in this context is that it’s not these qualities themselves that are adaptive, but the ability to analyze your surroundings and learn how to develop them. In other words, we didn’t evolve charisma as much as the ability to develop it.
The benefits to having charisma are obvious. I’m wondering about the benefits of being under the spell. Having a property (x) that leads people to follow you is way beneficial for survival. But how is it that humans evolved to follow people with characteristic x. Presumably it is some kind of proxy for competence in the ancestral environment. Or a side effect of something else.
You are looking at it backwards. It’s not that humans evolved to follow people with characteristic X, it’s that people evolved to exploit human psychology to get people to follow them. There are not necessarily any benefits to being under the spell. Compare: predators evolved to have hunting skills, but that doesn’t mean there are benefits for the prey to being hunted.
There are sometimes very large benefits to “being under the spell”. It’s most obvious in military contexts, where signaling disloyalty is likely to be fatal.
It might be a kind of Prisoner’s Dilemma. If others are voting to follow the leader, the minority who don’t suffer. If the majority doesn’t follow any leader, a small clique that does follow benefits.
That is a very good question. One guess might be that being under the spell affords one the safety to breed (see the birds above). If they allow the more dominant bird to protect them, then they have more opportunity to breed safely (or gather food and eat, or stay safe themselves and not get eaten, as the dominant more charismatic will draw the attention away from the less obvious)… Just guesses though.
Safety to breed? Kind of.* I think you’re all missing the obvious...
The template of the charismatic person is the idealist thinker who wants something better for mankind. Think Yuri Zhivago. (Lenin.) Hitler. They’re not tricking us: we have the ability to recognize that they really believe in their ideas, and that they are willing to sacrifice all that is necessary to realize those ideas. Our trust in their ability to realize their ideas may be misplaced, and of course our trust in their ideas may be misplaced.
The “spell” though is the ideas they represent. If you want to explain why we follow, you just need to explain our idealistic tendencies; our ability at times to sacrifice our time, money, even our lives and all our other values for an idea. A charismatic person is someone who is able to stir up our innate idealism in the direction of their chosen ideals.
*Idealistically, I can think of the most idealistic leaders as the altruists willing to sacrifice their lives for the cause while the masses are busy raising their families...
I don’t know… My Younger sister (she is a zoologist and mathematician) says that Birds can exhibit traits that might be primitive forms of charismatic behavior. Certainly among male birds there are all manner of display and currying favor behaviors. And, in some flocking birds, the most dominant males will seek out positions that place themselves in danger in order to protect the rest of the flock. These birds often have shorter life spans, yet have more offspring.
I’ll have to ask her more about this, and see if she has an Evo Biologist on staff that might have more info.
I’m not sure exactly what you’re asking, but in the ancestral environment of tribes of 100 or so people, being able to negotiate alliances, curry the favors of those in power, and attract mates were essential qualities for survival and reproduction.
Something that’s often overlooked in this context is that it’s not these qualities themselves that are adaptive, but the ability to analyze your surroundings and learn how to develop them. In other words, we didn’t evolve charisma as much as the ability to develop it.
The benefits to having charisma are obvious. I’m wondering about the benefits of being under the spell. Having a property (x) that leads people to follow you is way beneficial for survival. But how is it that humans evolved to follow people with characteristic x. Presumably it is some kind of proxy for competence in the ancestral environment. Or a side effect of something else.
You are looking at it backwards. It’s not that humans evolved to follow people with characteristic X, it’s that people evolved to exploit human psychology to get people to follow them. There are not necessarily any benefits to being under the spell. Compare: predators evolved to have hunting skills, but that doesn’t mean there are benefits for the prey to being hunted.
There are sometimes very large benefits to “being under the spell”. It’s most obvious in military contexts, where signaling disloyalty is likely to be fatal.
It might be a kind of Prisoner’s Dilemma. If others are voting to follow the leader, the minority who don’t suffer. If the majority doesn’t follow any leader, a small clique that does follow benefits.
That is a very good question. One guess might be that being under the spell affords one the safety to breed (see the birds above). If they allow the more dominant bird to protect them, then they have more opportunity to breed safely (or gather food and eat, or stay safe themselves and not get eaten, as the dominant more charismatic will draw the attention away from the less obvious)… Just guesses though.
Safety to breed? Kind of.* I think you’re all missing the obvious...
The template of the charismatic person is the idealist thinker who wants something better for mankind. Think Yuri Zhivago. (Lenin.) Hitler. They’re not tricking us: we have the ability to recognize that they really believe in their ideas, and that they are willing to sacrifice all that is necessary to realize those ideas. Our trust in their ability to realize their ideas may be misplaced, and of course our trust in their ideas may be misplaced.
The “spell” though is the ideas they represent. If you want to explain why we follow, you just need to explain our idealistic tendencies; our ability at times to sacrifice our time, money, even our lives and all our other values for an idea. A charismatic person is someone who is able to stir up our innate idealism in the direction of their chosen ideals.
*Idealistically, I can think of the most idealistic leaders as the altruists willing to sacrifice their lives for the cause while the masses are busy raising their families...
I don’t know… My Younger sister (she is a zoologist and mathematician) says that Birds can exhibit traits that might be primitive forms of charismatic behavior. Certainly among male birds there are all manner of display and currying favor behaviors. And, in some flocking birds, the most dominant males will seek out positions that place themselves in danger in order to protect the rest of the flock. These birds often have shorter life spans, yet have more offspring.
I’ll have to ask her more about this, and see if she has an Evo Biologist on staff that might have more info.