#3 Scripts Kill Your Charisma

Nonverbal communication isn’t just about body language, its also about vocal cues. We had our evaluators rate the TED speakers on vocal variety, or the amount of fluctuation in their voice tone, volume and pitch. Again, the relationship was clear. The more vocal variety a speaker had, the more views they had. Specifically, vocal variety increased the speakers’ charisma and credibility ratings. In other words, speakers who told stories, ad libbed and even yelled at the audience likeJamie Oliver in his TED Talk, captivated the audience’s imagination and attention.

Researchers who have studied teacher ratings have also found that vocal variety is important for improving student evaluations (See Rocca, K.A.). When you are practicing giving your elevator pitch or your next presentation, try saying your words at least 5 different ways. Practice putting emphasis on different words, slowing and speeding up your pace and varying your volume on important points.

• Bottom Line: Memorized lines and scripts kill your memorability.

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#4 Smiling Makes You Look Smarter

This finding is the only pattern that goes against the current research. Studies on smiling have found that leaders typically smile less. Nonverbal scientists believe that smiling is actually a low power behavior. However, in our research we found that the longer a TED speaker smiled, the higher their perceived intelligence ratings were. Those who smiled at least 14 seconds were rated as higher in intelligence than those who smiled for less. Doesn’t this seem counter-intuitive? When we think of an intelligent person, we usually think of someone very serious. But even when TED Talkers were speaking about a serious topic, like Sheryl Sandberg’s Talk on women leaders, smiling still helped her intelligence ratings.

• Bottom Line: No matter how serious your topic, find something to smile about.

#5 You Have 7 Seconds

We can’t emphasize enough the power of the first 7 seconds of any interaction you have. According to our ratings, people had already made their first impression and decision about the entire Talk in the first 7 seconds of the video. Researcher, Nalini Ambady calls this ‘thin-slicing.’ She says that for efficiency purposes, the brain makes very quick judgments of people within the first few seconds of meeting them. Typically, this happens before any words are exchanged. So yes, think about your opening line, but also think about how you take the stage, how you acknowledge the audience and how you deliver your first line.

• Bottom Line: Make a grand entrance.

I hope this research has shed some light on what makes someone charismatic and how you can improve your own stage presence. Whether you are going to deliver the next top TED Talk or you just want to make an impact in your daily life, take these 5 easy cues and make them your own.

More About the Experiment:

Participants were asked to rate TED Talks on a scale of 1 to 5 (1 being low, 5 being high). They were asked to rate the speaker’s charisma, credibility and intelligence. We did this in 3 parts:

Part I: First Impressions

Previous research by Nalini Ambady suggested that we decide if we like someone in less than 7 seconds. We wanted to know if there was a difference for people who watched an entire 18 minute Talk versus people who watched just the first 7 seconds. Here is an example of the 7 second trial where participants watched a video like this and filled out a rating chart for charisma, credibility and intelligence as they watched:

Part II: Verbal or Nonverbal

Once we saw these surprising results’ role in (see #1 above) we wondered if the verbal content or nonverbal presentation of the content had anything to do with the success of the TED Talk. This time we had one group watch and rate the first 7 seconds of a TED Talk and a second group watch and rate the first 7 seconds of a TED Talk on MUTE! It was like this:

Here’s what fascinated us at this point: All of the ratings matched the number of views. In other words, the Talks that got the most views were also the Talks that got highest ratings in credibility, charisma and intelligence whether or not people only watched 7 seconds or on mute. As we explain in our 5 patterns:

Our research suggests that we decide if we like the TED Talk in the first 7 seconds–and it has very little, if nothing to do with the words.

Part III: Patterns

Finally, we started to look for nonverbal patterns between the videos that ranked high in charisma, credibility and intelligence. We felt since the results of Part I and II pointed us in the direction of nonverbal, that’s where we would focus. Additionally, most of the previous research has been done on the verbal side of TED Talks, but very little on the nonverbal side.

More Fun Patterns:

We also found that some nonverbal gestures were more important than others:

• Credibility: Speakers who rated high in credibility had higher vocal variety and longer smiling.
• Charisma: The most important thing for charisma was hand gestures and vocal variety.
• Intelligence: Smiling was the most important factor for intelligence ratings (More than 14 seconds of smiling seemed to be the tipping point for higher ratings in intelligence).

Small, But Interesting:

We only examined 50 TED Talks for these patterns, but it proved interesting nonetheless:

• People in casual clothing typically rated lower than people in business or business casual.
• Women who wore business clothing got higher ratings compared to men in business clothing (not casual or business casual).
• Speakers in darker colors got higher ratings than those in lighter colors.

More Fun Numbers:

• Charisma was the name of the game. The most popular TED Talks rated 43% higher in charisma compared to less popular TED Talks.
• The most popular TED Talkers had 30.5% higher vocal variety than less popular TED Talkers.
• For the charisma ratings, high TED Talkers used at least 240 hand gestures. In general, TED Talkers who used less than 240 hand gestures scored lower on charisma.

Conclusion:

There is a lot more research that could be done in this area. We could look at differences between men and women, across races and locations. It would be wonderful to compare these results to different years and see if that changes results. However, this preliminary research is helpful, inspiring and fascinating. What we perceive to be important about public speaking, charisma and presence and what is actually important might differ more than we think.

Researchers:

Vanessa Van Edwards is a behavioral investigator and published author. She figures out the science of what makes people tick at her human behavior research lab, the Science of People. As a geeky, modern-day Dale Carnegie, her innovative work has been featured on NPR, Business Week and CNN.

Brandon Vaughn is our Chief Data Scientist at the Science of People. While moonlighting with us, he spends his days working with data at Apple and running his podcast, First Things. He is a whiz with numbers and loves finding patterns in big data.

Thank You!

Thank you to all of the amazing Science of People friends who voted, watched and rated these videos. We could not have done this amazing experiment without you.

Thank you to TED for bringing together the people with the best ideas and sharing the knowledge with all of us.

Thank you to all of the TED speakers for speaking out, sharing your voice and letting us learn from you.

Citations:

• Nalini Ambady & Robert Rosenthal, Thin Slices of Expressive Behavior as Predictors of Interpersonal Consequences: A Meta-Analysis, Psychol. Bull. 111, 256–274 (1992).
• Moore, J. T. Masterson, D. M. Christophel, and K. A. Shea, College teacher immediacy and student ratings of instruction. Communication Education, 45, 29-39 (1996)
•  Deborah J. Merritt, Bias, the brain, and student evaluations of teaching, St. John’s Law Rev. 82, 235-287 (2008)
•  M. Williams and S. J. Ceci, How’m I doing?, Change, 29, 12-23 (1997).
• Nalini Ambady & Robert Rosenthal, Half a Minute: Predicting Teacher Evaluations from Thin Slices of Nonverbal Behavior and Physical Attractiveness, J. Personality & Soc. Psychol. 64, 431-441 (1993).
• Andersen, J.F. (1979). Teacher immediacy as a predictor of teaching effectiveness. In D. Nimmo (Ed.), Communication Yearbook, 3 (pp.543-559). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books.
• Christophel, D.M. (1990). The relationships among teacher immediacy behaviors, student motivation, and learning. Communication Education, 39, 323-340.
• Frymier, A.B. (1994). A model of immediacy in the classroom. Communication Quarterly, 42, 133-144.
• Gorham, J. (1988). The relationship between verbal teaching immediacy behaviors and student learning. Communication Education, 17, 40-53.
• Mehrabian, A. (1971). Silent messages. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Company.
• Pogue, L. and AhYun, K. (2006). The effect of teacher nonverbal immediacy and credibility on student motivation and affective learning. Communication Education, 55, 331-344.
• Rocca, K.A. (2004). College student attendance: Impact of instructor immediacy and verbal aggression. Communication Education, 53, 185-195.
• Rocca, K.A. and McCroskey, J. C. (1999). The interrelationship of student ratings of instructors’ immediacy, verbal aggressiveness, homophily, and interpersonal attraction. Communication Education, 48, 308-316.
• Thweatt, K.S. (1999). The impact of teacher immediacy, teacher affinity-seeking, and teacher misbehaviors on student-perceived teacher credibility. Paper presented at the National Communication Association, Chicago, IL.

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