Members in the Media
From: The Washington Post

I asked psychologists to analyze Trump supporters. This is what I learned.

The Washington Post:

ALL him whatever names you like. A clown. A Know Nothing. A political greenhorn who can barely complete a sentence. A nativist, a racist and — worse — a New York liberal with a comb-over

You can call him a blowhard if you want, but — to the consternation of the conservative elite and to the surprise of just about everybody else inside the Beltway — Donald Trump won’t blow off.

Still, he is an effective speaker, psychologists say. In fact, decades of research show that charisma has more to do with a person’s demeanor than what he or she is saying, says Stanford University’s Jeffrey Pfeffer.

In one series of well-known experiments conducted by the psychologists Nalini Ambady and Robert Rosenthal, subjects were able to predict how students in a college classroom would evaluate their teachers at the end of the term, based on 30 seconds or less of soundless footage of the instructor. The subjects in the study couldn’t hear the words coming out of the instructor’s mouth, but what mattered for the students was gesture and affect, not substance.   

Read the whole story: The Washington Post

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