Charisma 2.0: Simulating Digital Influence on Social Media

• In Event: Methods and Methodologies in the History of Sociology and Social Thought

Abstract

Studies of charisma have struggled to capture its formative moments because of its explosive and short-lived nature. This inaccessibility of charisma’s ‘spark’ has been ameliorated, however, as charisma has moved online: career trajectories of online influence are instantiated by way of fine-grained data that are both traceable and amenable to modelling. Using agent-based social simulation techniques, we generate 40 million observations to model online charisma. With such data, we address several controversies that have beset the literature in the history of charisma. These relate to charisma’s, 1) dual nature, wherein it appears alternately as a personal quality or as relationally emergent; 2) its revolutionary capacity, wherein mere individuals are credited as somehow driving macro-societal change; 3) the degree to which it is preconditioned, as something that is thought to be both unpredictable and an artefact of presumably causative structural arrangements; and, 4) its manifestation through tipping points—wherein, when charismatic effects happen, it is with a rush-like onset. These four puzzles and putative contradictions are resolved when dynamics of charismatic topic-shifting are modelled as originating both endogenously (i.e. from the leader) and exogenously (i.e. from world events) within a social network. Our contribution is thus twofold, resolving traditional controversies while also charting charisma’s extension online.

Authors

• Yulin Lu, Lund University

• Paul Joosse, University of Hong Kong