Charisma has a reputation as something mystical — an “it factor” you either have or you do not. The research tells a different and more useful story. Over the past few decades, psychologists have pinned charisma down into measurable dimensions, identified the specific behaviours behind it, and shown that those behaviours can be taught. Rizz is the everyday, attraction-flavoured slice of this larger science. This piece lays out what charm actually is, according to the people who study it for a living, and what that means for anyone trying to build more of it.
Charisma Has Two Core Dimensions
When Tskhay and colleagues set out to measure charisma in everyday life, they found it resolves cleanly into two factors: influence and affability. Influence is presence and the ability to guide — the part that commands a room and is taken seriously. Affability is warmth — the part that puts people at ease and makes them feel good. Charismatic people score high on both: impressive and approachable, powerful and warm. Either one alone falls short of charisma.
This two-part structure echoes across the research, and it maps directly onto charm, as we detail in warmth vs competence.
It Is Mostly About How Others Feel
A key insight from the science is that charisma is not a private quality you possess but an effect you have on others. It lives in the response — how seen, energised, and at ease people feel around you. That reframes the whole pursuit: building charisma is less about polishing yourself and more about learning to affect others positively. The charismatic person is not necessarily the most impressive in the room; they are the one who makes the room feel something good.
This is why warmth and attention matter so much, and why self-absorbed brilliance so often reads as charmless.
The Behaviours Behind It
Charisma is not a vague aura; it decomposes into specific behaviours. Antonakis and colleagues catalogued “charismatic leadership tactics” — storytelling, metaphors, expressions of conviction, animated voice and face, purposeful gesture — and showed they drive how charismatic someone is perceived to be. The point is that charm is made of parts, and parts can be examined, practised, and improved. What looks like one seamless magic is really a stack of learnable components.
- Verbal: stories, metaphors, contrasts, conviction.
- Vocal: varied tone, pace, and emphasis.
- Nonverbal: expressive face, gesture, presence.
It Can Be Taught
The most consequential finding is that charisma responds to training. In Antonakis’s intervention studies, people who learned the charismatic tactics were rated as meaningfully more charismatic afterward — the trait is malleable, not fixed at birth. This demolishes the “you either have it or you don’t” myth and grounds the optimistic premise of this whole series: rizz is buildable. We tackle that myth head-on in the charisma myth.
If charm were innate and fixed, training could not move it. It does, repeatedly, in controlled studies.
What This Means for Your Rizz
Put the findings together and the practical message is clear. Charm is a two-part skill — warmth plus presence — that lives in how you make others feel and is built from nameable, trainable behaviours. Your rizz is not a verdict handed down at birth but a current state you can move. The path is to develop both halves: the warmth that makes people comfortable and the presence that makes you compelling, through the concrete habits this series keeps returning to.
Curious about your starting point on the warmth-and-presence blend? The Rizz Test gives you a fast, honest read.