A few months ago, I was queuing for free tacos at my coworking space in London. And because nothing unites people like free food, half the building had shown up. This gave me the opportunity to shamelessly eavesdrop on the group of guys in front of me. Three of them stood out. The first talked about himself a lot, jumping in on other people’s stories to tell his own slightly better version of whatever had just been said. His colleagues let him, but their faces had gone politely blank, the look people wear when they’re waiting for something to end. The second was his opposite: warm and pleasant whenever someone spoke to him, but only when someone spoke to him. He gave brief answers, handed the floor straight back, and initiated nothing. It was the third who intrigued me the most, because he was the one the whole group kept reorienting toward. What stood out was the way he moved attention around the group, asking questions and handing the floor to different people, while being just as comfortable taking it himself, telling his own stories without waiting to be asked. When he spoke, the same faces that had gone blank for the first guy came back to life. People leaned in. And even when someone else had asked the question, they would answer while looking at him. He came across as the “leader” of the group, even though he seemed to be on a similar professional rank with his colleagues. One monopolized attention, one avoided it, and one knew exactly when to step forward and when to step back. I found the dynamic fascinating, but not unfamiliar. I had played nearly every role in it myself. What I was actually looking at, I realized, was three different social strategies: one monopolized attention, one avoided it, and one knew exactly when to step forward and when to step back. What I didn’t expect, when I was later doing research for my book on social magnetism, was how precisely that live demonstration maps onto what the research literature actually finds. The two dimensions of magnetism A 2023 study by Michael Dufner and Sascha Krause captures what I watched play out in that queue. The pair filmed strangers meeting for the first time and had trained observers rate each person on two dimensions. The first was communal behavior: how warm, friendly, and well-intentioned someone appeared. The second was agentic behavior: how confident, assertive, and willing to take the lead they seemed. They found that communal behaviour reliably made people liked. But becoming popular within the whole group — being the person everyone gravitated toward — took a mixture of the two. This lines up with how modern research measures charisma. In a 2017 study, Konstantin Tskhay and colleagues built a scale for everyday charisma that split into affability (the capacity to put someone at ease) and influence (the capacity to hold their attention and pull it toward you). The first man had agency in abundance. He was confident taking the floor, quick with a strong opinion, and easy in his own storytelling. We’ve all met him, at work or at a social gathering. They’re often engaging at first. But confidence without genuine interest in others only goes so far in terms of charisma. When you notice that attention never comes back to anyone else in the group, it starts to feel tiring and unbalanced. It makes you wonder whether this person actually cares about you, or just about being listened to. The second man had the other half. And this is the one I recognize most, in other people and often in myself. He was warm, pleasant, and careful. No strong opinion offered, no space taken that hadn’t been handed to him first, nothing that might unsettle the room. While this attitude might seem polite and considerate at first, in reality, it is often a protection strategy. Every opinion you offer is something someone else can disagree with. Every story you tell is something someone else can find dull. Staying agreeable means nothing you do can be held against you. It’s risk management. It makes people likeable in a way that asks nothing of anyone, which is why nobody is leaning in toward them. Then there was the third, the magnetic one. He had the first man’s ease taking up space and the second man’s genuine warmth. He gave the floor away, then took it back. That mix, the courage to initiate paired with real warmth underneath it, was what made him the center of the group. It would be tempting to file these away as personality types, believing that the third guy was simply born extroverted or charismatic. But that’s not what the evidence says. Research has shown that charisma can be deliberately practiced and improved. Social magnetism isn’t a fixed trait reserved for a lucky few. It’s a specific set of behaviors. The half that gets you liked Warmth has to come first. Of the two dimensions, it matters most. It earns more points toward being liked by the group, and one-on-one, it’s the only one that counts at all. The explanation is evolutionary — knowing whether the stranger in front of you meant well used to matter more for survival than anything else. That circuitry hasn’t gone anywhere. But how do you actually show it? Last year, while researching for my book, How to Be Magnetic, I interviewed one of the most charismatic people I’d ever met. He had more friends than I thought was possible for one person. He lit up every room he walked into. I wanted to know why, so I sat him down and asked what his secret was. “I just love people,” he said with a big smile. He wanted to know their stories and found them fascinating. And I believed him, because I’d felt it myself while talking to him. He made you feel special through nothing more than the quality of his attention. "I just love people," he said with a big smile. There’s a name for what he was doing. It’s called the reciprocity of liking effect: When you like someone, they tend to like you back. Your liking reads as goodwill. Goodwill reads as trust. And trust is what makes people want to be near you. In a previous article I wrote for Big Think, I argued that warmth was the most important factor in being liked. And that’s true: A genuine interest in the person in front of you goes a long way. But being liked and being magnetic are different. One makes people comfortable around you. The other makes you unforgettable. The half that gets you remembered Most of us think we need something interesting to say before we’re allowed to speak. So we stay quiet and let other people do the talking. I used to hold back on my own stories, thinking, “I don’t want to bore them” or “why would they care?” But we’ve all had the experience where someone else talks, with zero regard for how interesting it actually is, and says something far less compelling than we would have. Or worse, they say the exact thing we were thinking, and the whole room lights up for them. Research shows that this belief works against us. People who are simply willing to take up space in a conversation, even when what they say isn’t particularly interesting, are still the ones everyone else ends up looking to. This is called the “babble hypothesis” of leadership. Neil MacLaren and colleagues placed students into small groups and asked them to complete a collaborative task. Afterward, each group voted on who they thought had emerged as the leader. The researchers found that people who spoke more were more likely to be seen as leaders, regardless of their intelligence or personality. In fact, just 39 additional seconds of speaking earned someone one extra leadership vote. The person who talked the most got treated as the one in charge. One explanation for why this happens comes from research by Antonin Carrier and colleagues, who found that when we judge someone’s social status, we rely more on signs of agency, such as confidence and assertiveness, than on competence itself. Most people have no way of knowing how intelligent, interesting, or capable you really are. So they rely on behavioral shortcuts instead. By taking up conversational space, you send a subtle signal: I deserve to take up your time. But agency without communion just makes you the first guy in that queue. People might respect you, look up to you, even vote you the leader. They’re not going to like you for it. That’s why having both is essential. The balance Watching that queue, I recognized myself in the second man. I’ve spent most of my life being the one who listens well and says little. But I understood that I didn’t need to say anything extraordinary or witty to deserve being listened to. The third guy in that queue wasn’t the funniest or the loudest person in the group. He simply mastered the balance. He spoke with confidence, made everyone feel seen while he had the floor, and then turned the conversation back toward someone else. Social magnetism isn’t about having an extraordinary life story or an untouchable persona. It’s about making other people feel seen while allowing yourself to be seen too. This article The 2 behaviors that make you socially magnetic is featured on Big Think.