“But charm is more valuable than beauty. You can resist beauty, but you can’t resist charm.” – Irene (Hors De Prix)
Very powerful is ‘charm’ that it tends to bias people against rational decisions. Throughout history men who were charming got more public recognition and rewards than men who really performed. And charm is not beauty, only charm can make popular a person as weird as Einstein. Though Niels Bohr had more results to his credit, he is no way near Einstein in popularity. Successes of many such people including Rajinikanth (Tamil Actor) cannot be attributed to anything but charm.
This irrational bias can be attributed to the Theory of Thin Slices as explained by Malcolm Gladwell in his book ‘Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking’. In his book he claims most of the decisions taken by humans are in the time period of ‘Blink of an Eye’ without applying conscious judgment. This sort of decisions he claims tend to be more successful than conscious decisions except for cases where people fall to ‘charm’.
Though every human claims that at the conscious level they treat all equally, there exists an implicit bias that tend to provide unconscious favor to people who are more charming.
‘Charm’ provides an advantage in cases where decisions are to be made in short span of time. That is why the leaders who are selected to represent political parties for President or Prime Minister are the not the ones who are really capable political administrators. They are the ones who the people find ‘Charming’ enough to vote.
How many times we have heard of, seen to ourselves, people getting selected in interviews may not be as good as their competitors. I feel the ‘Charm’ effect provides this advantage. However the beneficiary has to be beware, while ‘Charm’ can help getting through and interview only performance in the long term will help sustainability.
‘Charm’ is definitely powerful.
Note: The Book ‘Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell’ does not make any references to ‘Charm’ and is not a reference to view points mentioned in this blog. The ideas mentioned in this blog are purely my views and inferences made from other sources such as this book. No proper research has been done by the author and no claim has been made for the correctness of views mentioned above.
Leave a Reply