The conventional wisdom on charisma is that you either have it or you don’t, and if you’re the type of person who rehearses handshakes or conversation starters, you probably don’t.
Research has been picking that apart for years, and a 2024 study published in the British Journal of Social Psychology is the latest to do it. Researchers Martje Buss and colleagues tracked 22 behavioral cues across two group interaction experiments—one in-person, one virtual—where strangers performed tasks together while being filmed, then rated each other on perceived popularity.
What they found is that the people who came out most popular weren’t the funniest or the most attractive. They were the most extraverted, and more specifically, the most assertive and sociable. Those two traits, above all others, predicted how well someone was received by a group of people who had never met them before.
It traces back to dominant behavior, which sounds aggressive but is actually closer to confident. In face-to-face settings, the cues that drove popularity were upright posture and dominant gestures—the physical signals that someone is comfortable taking up space. In virtual settings, all four channels of dominant behavior were important: nonverbal, paraverbal (pace, volume, tone), verbal, and general presence.
Bad News, Introverts
Across both formats, the extraversion effect held. The people who walked in—or logged on— projecting ease and engagement got rated as more likable before anyone knew anything else about them.
This connects to a separate body of research on just how fast those judgments form. Princeton psychologists Willis and Todorov found that people form confident impressions of trustworthiness and attractiveness from a face in as little as 100 milliseconds. Lengthen that to 500 milliseconds and judgments of competence and likeability also lock in. By the time someone has looked at you for a full second, they’ve already filed a complete mental assessment. More time looking doesn’t change how they feel. It just makes people more certain they’re right.
People are being divided into popular and not within moments of entering a room, and the criteria are largely behavioral. Posture, eye contact, how much space someone occupies, how they speak—these aren’t inherent traits. They’re learned, practiced, and adjustable.
The person who walks into a room and immediately commands attention isn’t more interesting than anyone else in it. They’re just broadcasting on a frequency the brain was built to notice first.
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