Intellectual Charisma

1. Introduction

In this article, I aim to contribute to ongoing discussions of the intellectual virtues by presenting an account of one aspect of our intellectual characters that has yet to receive such direct treatment. That aspect is our capacity to influence others in ways that make inquiry go better. In developing my account of this capacity, I will argue that one ought to include it on one’s list of the intellectual virtues because we have reason to think (1) that it is a genuine social-psychological phenomenon, (2) that it plausibly qualifies as an intellectual virtue, and (3) that including it on one’s list of the intellectual virtues is helpful in various ways. Adding this capacity to our picture of intellectually virtuous agency can not only make the picture more apt and complete, but can also lead us to think differently about the rest of the picture. This can allow us to better understand and to take more seriously the ways in which the other intellectual virtues, and our intellectual agency more generally, are socially embedded.

The capacity for virtuous social influence, albeit it in moral rather than epistemic contexts, has an analogue in the history of philosophy in the form of the early Chinese virtue concept ‘de’. ‘De’ is often translated as “virtue”, “power”, or “moral charisma”. It is referenced, for instance, in an oft-cited passage in the Analects of Confucius in which Confucius claims that a virtuous ruler should influence people to be good rather than punish them because a virtuous ruler’s de can move people like the wind moves the grass (Analects, 12:19). Given this, we might call the intellectual virtue I am concerned with “intellectual de”. However, ‘de’ tends to refer both to one’s being virtuous generally and to the charismatic power that the early Confucians believed accrues to a virtuous person. Since I am primarily focused on the capacity for beneficial social influence, and want to remain open about how much this depends on possessing other virtues, I will instead refer to the intellectual virtue that I am concerned with as intellectual charisma.¹

I will begin, in Section 2, by constructing a sketch of intellectual charisma as it can be observed in the world. With that sketch in mind, I will develop, in Section 3, a philosophical account of intellectual charisma that (1) explains some of its distinctive features and (2) shows how it can meet some widely accepted conditions for qualifying as an intellectual virtue. In Section 4, I conclude by explaining some of the key benefits of including intellectual charisma in our picture of intellectually virtuous agency.

2. An Empirical Sketch of Intellectual Charisma

In constructing a sketch of intellectual charisma, I have two primary tasks. First, I aim to show that there is some likelihood that intellectual charisma is a genuine phenomenon. My goal here is simply to assuage enough initial skepticism about the reality of intellectual charisma to warrant further discussion and study (both philosophical and empirical). Second, I aim to see what more specific claims, if any, we are justified in making about intellectual charisma. My goal here is to build a partial picture of intellectual charisma based on the available evidence, so that we can see how this picture might inform my subsequent analysis of intellectual charisma in section 3.

In pursuing these tasks, I take it that support for the general claim that there are inquiry-improving ways that people can influence others might result from finding support for any of a variety of more specific claims regarding which modes of influence have which effects on inquiry. This means that we might see the more general claim as supported while still withholding credence from, and continuing to investigate, most of the specific claims. As I will make clear, this is where I believe we are regarding the currently available support for the more general and more specific claims that we might make about intellectual charisma.

We can perhaps get an initial handle on intellectual charisma by reflecting on our own experiences. Upon reflection, you might remember people who appeared to take you or others “off their game”, intellectually speaking, and you might recall people who appeared to bring out something closer to your or others’ intellectual best selves. Reflection on your own practices as a teacher and colleague may also reveal some capacities for social influence that you have employed to help make inquiries go better, capacities that you may have intentionally worked to strengthen.

We can move from this reflection to observe that there are other professions in which proper training and best practices, which have evolved through success-seeking processes that are likely to be somewhat reality-responsive, include the development and exercise of the kinds of influence under discussion. It is standard, for instance, in psychotherapy and other counseling professions to be intentional in influencing one’s patients, often through the use of one’s demeanor and tone, in ways that make one’s patients more likely to engage in honest, insightful, and productive discussion about their lives. This ability to influence one’s patients in these ways is a part of what has been called “Facilitative Interpersonal Skills” (FIS). Research on therapist effectiveness has shown that there is a significant correlation between successful therapeutic outcomes and therapist FIS (Anderson et al. 2009) and that these FIS can be improved with practice (Anderson et al. 2020).

In discussing the techniques often used by salespeople, advertisers, negotiators, and the like, Robert Cialdini discusses several forms of influence that, while often wielded to a target’s intellectual detriment, might also be applied in ways that make inquiry go better. In discussing how and why such techniques tend to be effective, Cialdini (2021) draws on research in cognitive psychology to show that:

1. People tend to reciprocate favors and other benefits (ch. 2);

2. People tend to acquiesce to the wishes of people they like (ch. 3) and those with authority (ch. 5);

3. People tend to conform to groups and be swayed by social proof (ch. 4);

4. People tend to try to remain consistent with their sense of self and prior commitments (ch. 7).²

If these routes of influence can be used to get people, for instance, to purchase a car or vote for a candidate, then there is little reason to think that they cannot be used to get people, for instance, to persevere longer during a difficult inquiry, exhibit more curiosity, or behave in other ways that make inquiry go better.

Another discussion of professional applications of this kind of influence comes from Chris Voss, former lead international hostage negotiator for the FBI. Voss discusses using his demeanor to influence his negotiation counterparts in epistemically relevant ways. This includes influencing them to slow down and think more clearly and collaboratively by using what he calls his “late night FM DJ voice”, which he also calls “the voice of calm and reason” (Voss 2016, 32). Voss also discusses a technique that he calls mirroring. This involves repeating the last few words a person said in the form of a question, which Voss says is effective in influencing people to “elaborate on what was just said and sustain the process of connecting” (2016, 36). He also advocates a positive tone and demeanor to put others in a positive frame of mind because they will then be “more likely to collaborate and problem-solve” (Voss 2016, 33). In line with this technique, a study by Sigal Barsade (2002) found that a contagious positive affect can decrease conflict and increase cooperation in groups, and a study by Will Felps and colleagues (2006) found that the expression of negative affect is one key way in which dysfunction-causing “rotten apples” can undermine a group’s performance.

Looking more specifically at the relevant literature in empirical psychology, one prominent constellation of results concerns ways in which influencing people’s affect can influence their cognitive performance. These studies do not directly test for intellectual charisma, but rather manipulate affect through a variety of non-social means. Nonetheless, I believe that the results show affect to be a plausible path through which one’s intellectual charisma could operate on others. After all, it should be relatively uncontroversial that people can influence others’ affective states through various intentional actions. There is also reason to think that—as in Voss’ use of a positive demeanor to induce positive affect in others—people can pass on their own affective states to others (see Hatfield et al. 1994).

The first set of results I will attend to has previously been drawn on by Mark Alfano (2012, 2013) in his discussion of the situationist challenge to virtue epistemology. Alfano relies most heavily on “the research of Alice Isen and her colleagues on the influence of positive moods on cognitive motivation and processing” (2012, 234). According to Isen, the upshot of this research is that

in most circumstances, positive affect enhances problem solving and decision making, leading to cognitive processing that is not only flexible, innovative, and creative, but also thorough and efficient. ( 2001 , 75)

One paradigmatic study in this vein found that inducing positive affect improved performance on measures of creativity and cognitive flexibility. One of these measures was the Duncker candle task, which challenges participants to find a creative solution to a moderately vexing practical problem. Another was the remote associates test, which challenges participants to find a word that, for each of 3 given words, helps to complete a well-known phrase (like “cheese” given “cottage/Swiss/cake”) (Isen et al. 1987). Another study found that medical students in whom positive affect was induced were quicker than students in a control group to identify “which of six hypothetical patients … was most likely to have lung cancer” (Isen et al. 1991, 221). Those students also showed more curiosity in discussing potential diagnoses and treatments of the remaining patients. In line with Voss’ view that positive affect facilitates problem-solving in negotiation, two studies by Peter Carnevale and Isen (1983; 1986) found that induced positive affect led negotiators to be more likely than controls to collectively find integrative solutions based on mutually beneficial trade-offs.

Some of these benefits of positive affect might be due to it activating a more open, flexible cognitive style. In line with this explanation, Isen and Daubman (1984) found that, compared to those in a control condition, those in a positive affect condition tended to group more disparate items together in a single category, and were more likely to judge more disparate items to be members of the same category. This suggests a more flexible cognitive style that could help explain the increased creativity and problem solving. A recent study by Wei-lun Lin and colleagues (2014) also showed that positive affect leads to a more flexible cognitive style. They found that those in a positive-affect condition were less affected by task-switching than those in a control condition (as shown by lower reaction times when switching between responding to a stimulus according to one rule versus another). This greater cognitive flexibility also fully mediated the subsequent superior performance of the positive-affect group on an insight problem-solving task.

While such studies paint an intriguing picture, there are reasons to think that the general claim that positive affect improves cognitive performance is not as well justified as it first appears. The recent high profile replication failures in psychology should lead us to be more cautious about which claims we draw from most of the existing studies on affect and its influence on cognition.³ In light of this caution, we should note that although meta-analyses of the affect and creativity literature by Matthijs Baas and colleagues (2008) and Mark Davis (2009) suggest some support for the general claim that positive affect increases creativity, the effect sizes are somewhat small. These meta-analyses also help, though, to identify specific effects that might be more robust depending on the features of the induced positive mood and the kind of creative task being performed. In line with the greater complexity that this suggests, research on affect and cognition has continued to uncover a picture in which various, more specific affective states can have various effects, both good and ill, on certain kinds of cognitive performances.

Part of this more complex picture has come about from researchers sharpening claims like the one discussed above that positive affect leads to a more open cognitive style. Some studies appear to support that basic claim. Gillian Rowe and colleagues (2007) found that induced positive affect broadens the scope of visuo-spatial attention, as measured by a subject’s greater distractibility by outside stimuli in a directed attention task. They also found that it broadens the scope of semantic search, as indicated by greater success on the remote associates test. However, subsequent work by Philip Gable and Eddie Harmon-Jones (2008) adds further nuance to this view of the relationship between affect and cognitive style. It does so by distinguishing between low-approach-motivating positive affect (which increased global attentional focus) and high-approach-motivating positive affect (which actually reduced global attentional focus). Encouragingly, these results were later replicated in a preregistered study by Irena Domachowska and colleagues (2016), which also included a successful conceptual replication of the same idea. A follow up study by Gable and Harmon-Jones found that

approach motivation engages the same neural circuitry that drives local attention in general, and the approach-motivated activation of this circuitry biases local attention even more. (2009, 408)

This increases the plausibility that the affect-attention link Gable and Harmon-Jones describe is a genuine phenomenon.

If different kinds of positive affective states lead to different cognitive styles, then this suggests that negative affective states might function similarly with similar epistemic effects. In line with this posit, Gable and Harmon-Jones (2010) found that negative affective states high in motivational intensity (e.g., anger) narrowed attentional focus, while negative affective states low in motivational intensity (e.g., sadness) broadened attentional focus. This suggests that this attentional effect is less a matter of the valence of the affective state than it is a matter of how activating, intense, or productive of approach motivation it is. Noting these different features of affective states helps us to explain why we sometimes see certain affective states having similar effects despite their different valence. For instance, Joseph Forgas and colleagues (2005) found that induced happiness increased susceptibility to false recall, while induced sadness reduced it. Michael Greenstein and Nancy Franklin (2020) found that increased susceptibility to false recall can also result from induced anger. Rather than valence, these more detailed features are likely operative in similar results obtained by Forgas and Rebekah East (2008), who found that induced sadness increased skepticism when judging the truth of rumors and urban legends. They are also likely operative in results found by Forgas (2007) that induced sadness led people to write more effective persuasive arguments that also contained more concrete information.

An additional layer of this emerging picture is that the relationship between cognitive performance and affect appears to differ depending on a person’s baseline affective traits. Maya Tamir (2005) found that, among people high in trait neuroticism, those in whom worry had been induced performed better on an anagram task than those in whom happiness had been induced (with the opposite being found of those low in trait neuroticism). Angela Leung and colleagues (2014) similarly found that those high in neuroticism exhibited greater creativity when induced with worry compared to happiness (with the opposite being true for those low in neuroticism).

In a similar study, S. Akbari Cherhamini and Bernhard Hommel (2012) worked from the assumption that the effects of induced positive affect on creativity depend on dopamine release. They found that positive effects accrue significantly more to those with low baseline dopamine. Such differential effects might partially explain the small effect sizes in the meta-analyses mentioned earlier, since low effect sizes are what we would expect to find if the effects are robust, but differentially so for some subset of the population. This is especially so if previous studies lumped members of that subset together with the more prevalent group.

This current empirical picture is, unfortunately, insufficient to support confident claims about what specific influences on cognitive performance one might effect by influencing people’s affective states in specific ways. Nonetheless, we can, with some confidence, make the more general claim that influencing people’s affect is a plausible route through which to influence their cognitive performance, and to thereby exercise intellectual charisma. We can add this to the other potential routes of influence discussed in this section. We should also note that some further possibilities exist beyond what I have been able to discuss here.⁴

Given the above, it is plausible that intellectual charisma is a genuine social-psychological phenomenon, even if the available evidence leaves us with an incomplete picture of how a person might exercise the relevant influence. It also seems plausible that some people are more capable of exercising intellectual charisma than others and that people can develop that capability. I believe that this gives us sufficient reason to continue discussing intellectual charisma and the role that it might play in a person’s intellectual character.

3. A Philosophical Account of Intellectual Charisma

In this section, I present a philosophical account of intellectual charisma. This account is intended to allow us to (1) judge whether intellectual charisma should be considered an intellectual virtue and (2) explain some facets of intellectual charisma’s nature as part of a person’s intellectual character. This should further allow me, in section 4, to show some ways in which countenancing intellectual charisma might benefit our ongoing discussions of the intellectual virtues. I aim to offer an account of intellectual charisma that will be useful to as many virtue epistemology projects as possible. I will therefore try, as much as possible, to avoid making commitments about the nature of the intellectual virtues in general. Instead, I will aim to show how well intellectual charisma fares in fulfilling what are often considered important conditions for qualifying as an intellectual virtue.

Before presenting this account, it may be helpful to note that this discussion of intellectual charisma sits within what has been called responsibilist (as opposed to reliabilist) virtue epistemology (Axtell 1997). This is because intellectual charisma involves elements of one’s character and not just perceptual or cognitive faculties. Note also that I am not looking to incorporate the discussion of intellectual charisma into a discussion of how to analyze core epistemic concepts like ‘knowledge’. My account therefore contributes to a branch of virtue epistemology that has variously been called “anti-theory” (as opposed to “theory”) (Battaly 2008), “alternative” (as opposed to “conventional”) (Turri et al. 2018), “autonomous” (as opposed to “conservative”) (Baehr 2011), and “regulative” (as opposed to “analytic”) (Wolterstorff 1996; Roberts and Wood 2007). The aim of such a project is to fill out our picture of intellectually virtuous agency and thereby, as Roberts and Wood put it, to “generate guidance for epistemic practice” (2007, 21). That said, I remain open to the possibility that including intellectual charisma in a picture of the intellectual virtues could somehow benefit the conventional project.

4. Conclusions and the Benefits of Countenancing Intellectual Charisma

In this article, I first outlined intellectual charisma as a social-psychological phenomenon. In light of that outline, I then gave an account of intellectual charisma as an intellectual virtue, the characteristic aim of which is to influence others to act more consonantly with intellectual virtue. In presenting this account, I argued that intellectual charisma can involve a positive orientation toward epistemic goods and exist as a distinct virtuous trait (although we may prefer to think of it as a family of virtuous traits, given its complexity as a disposition). I also suggested that intellectual charisma is best thought of as a social, facilitative meta-virtue that partly develops through developing the other intellectual virtues, and that we might also see it as a capstone virtue. I will conclude by discussing some benefits of bringing intellectual charisma into our picture of the intellectual virtues. I will also suggest some helpful directions that future discussions of intellectual charisma might take.

The most immediate benefit of including intellectual charisma within our picture of the intellectually virtuous person is that, insofar as intellectual charisma is a genuine social-psychological phenomenon, including it gives us a more complete and accurate picture of our intellectual agency. Insofar as we care about the intellectual virtues because we care about being good people who pursue our intellectual lives well, we should care about what kinds of interlocutors we are no less than what kinds of inquirers we are. Countenancing intellectual charisma brings into focus this aspect of our intellectual lives that we might otherwise underappreciate while also improving our understanding of how to pursue it well. This is especially important given how many of the inquiries we perform are ones in which being a good interlocutor constitutes a significant part of what being a good inquirer requires. Pretty much every working group in business, every classroom discussion, every conversation with one’s significant other, and every family meeting present us with inquiries that will go better if we pay more attention to how we influence each other’s intellectual performance, and if we do so with a more developed capacity for having that influence in an epistemically beneficial way.⁸ Assuming that professional philosophers, in particular, take our role to mean that inquiries go better when we are included in them, intellectual charisma is something we might be especially well advised to try to cultivate.

Beyond this primary contribution of yielding a more complete picture of intellectual excellence for social-epistemic creatures like us, adding intellectual charisma to our view of intellectual virtue might also provide some fruitful ways forward in certain ongoing discussions about the intellectual virtues. One such discussion regards situationist concerns about the intellectual virtues. The core of this concern is that the results in situationist social psychology showing that people’s intellectual behavior is influenced by epistemically irrelevant situational factors should lead us to admit that few people, if any, possess the intellectual virtues. This gives us a practical problem because situationist influences present impediments to consistently virtuous conduct.

In response to similar concerns about the ethical virtues, Hagop Sarkissian has proposed that situationist effects “can also be seen as providing important resources for moral progress” (2010, 2). Drawing on the Confucian discussions of de, Sarkissian argues that the existence of situationist effects on people’s behavior opens up the possibility that people can engage in what Sarkissian calls “ethical bootstrapping” (2010, 12). This involves leveraging one’s contribution to situations that are affecting other people’s behavior to make ethical behavior more likely. The ability to have this influence means that situationist effects might actually do more in providing solutions to the perennial challenges of getting people to act more virtuously than they do in providing impediments to virtuous conduct. Acknowledging intellectual charisma allows us to make an analogous argument regarding situationist influences and the practical problems (and solutions) they create within people’s attempts at consistently excellent intellectual conduct.

Situationist results also lead to a theoretical problem, namely that they might lead us to reject theories of the intellectual virtues altogether because they show such theories to be psychologically unrealistic. Incorporating intellectual charisma into our picture of the intellectual virtues might help us to develop a strategy for dissolving this problem. This strategy consists in revising, to some extent, our overall view of intellectual success and the other intellectual virtues. Perhaps taking the situationist results on board means accepting that most people do not have intellectual virtues when intellectual virtues are conceived of as dispositions that are robust in a strongly individualistic way, i.e., robust absent the type of social support that would come from a person with intellectual charisma. Perhaps it also means accepting that people merely have the “local” traits of being creative, flexible, careful, and so on when they have partners in inquiry who can exercise intellectual charisma. But, perhaps we can accept these things and still be left with a satisfying conception of intellectual virtue.

Such a conception would be one on which we expect intellectually virtuous behavior to be socially supported in ways that we can easily countenance when intellectual charisma enters the picture, instead of expecting it to be consistent even when one lacks such support. While we might initially think that this expectation of social support is tantamount to admitting that people largely fail to be intellectually virtuous, we could perhaps see it as simply giving us a view of intellectual excellence and the intellectually virtuous life that is free of individualist pretensions that, being psychologically unrealistic, should not have been adopted in the first place. Most people may only ever be consistently intellectually excellent as members of teams of inquiry, supported by some more intellectually virtuous group members who have intellectual charisma. Yet, we might question whether such supportive situations are deviations from appropriate intellectual self-sufficiency as opposed to being paradigmatic examples of how the intellectual life of creatures like us should be pursued. To put it another way, incorporating intellectual charisma into our view of intellectual virtue might give us reason to remove the “merely” from the statement that most people are merely capable of socially supported intellectual excellence.

Another potential opportunity for bringing intellectual charisma into conversations about the intellectual virtues is presented by conversations about epistemic justice and injustice (Fricker, 2007). This is because attending to the kinds of influence people can have on each other’s intellectual performance might allow us to diagnose ways of being epistemically unjust that we would otherwise miss. This might, in turn, give us some further explanation of what one does wrong in having an intellectually vicious social influence on others. If certain interlocutors systematically act such that they influence certain people in ways that are detrimental to their performance in contributing to inquiry, this might have much the same effect as other forms of testimonial injustice, such as a person’s prejudice-influenced assessments of another’s credibility. This might also be an especially pernicious source of injustice. This is because it may not be remediable by examining one’s judgments for bias, since one might correctly take oneself to be accurately judging people’s intellectual performances, but without realizing how one is negatively influencing those performances. How pervasively dynamics like this tend to be in play is an open question, as is the degree to which countenancing and developing intellectual charisma can help to alleviate such problems, but they are potentially fruitful questions to ask.

Such lines of thought would, of course, require more development than I have given here, and there are likely other ways in which incorporating intellectual charisma into our view of the intellectual virtues can impact discussions in virtue epistemology. Nonetheless, the foregoing examples should help us to see that there are at least some interesting directions that discussions of intellectual charisma might take. In pursuing such lines of thought in the future, philosophers will also be in a better position to understand the implications of adding intellectual charisma to our view of the intellectual virtues the more the empirical picture of it takes shape. Given this, I hope to have generated enough interest in intellectual charisma and its role in our intellectual lives to motivate further investigation into the various ways that people can influence others to make inquiry go better.⁹