Abstract
Charisma is a trait, widely taken to facilitate the exertion of social influence over others in a plethora of everyday situations, ranging from customer relations over doctor-patient exchanges and leader-follower interactions to instructional encounters. Previously ill-defined, a recent approach conceptualizes charisma from a signaling perspective, focusing on specific, hitherto under-researched behavioral signals that characterize it. We suggest gaze behavior as one such, considering that it represents the most potent signal in daily conversation, with effects in myriad situations revolving around communication. Our study measures gaze, using eye-tracking on participants watching a dynamic social scene, and combines this with a novel conceptualization of everyday charisma. Our findings show that charisma can indeed be mapped onto naturalistic gaze behavior. More specifically, in the bipartite conceptualization of charisma employed in our study, it is charismatic influence which predicts social gazing towards the face, without any effect of charismatic affability. These findings further our understanding of how charisma shapes interpersonal behavior in everyday interactions.