[danbmil99]

> Some people seem to have an almost super-human level of charisma/ability to influence others

I think most people are completely unaware of how true this is. As students and tech geeks, we've all probably met someone whose talents seemed otherworldly -- mastery of Quantum math, able to punch out code like Notch, that sort of natural intellectual athleticism that seems like something they must have just been born with.

Well, in boardrooms and marketing departments, in politics, in places of power and sometimes just in random situations, there exist people for whom the ability to (at least seemingly) 'connect' with other people at a deep psychological level is similarly off the charts, in the vanishing 6-sigma rightward tail of the hump.

Of those few people, some percentage, say 1%, were additionally born without anything like a normal conscience. They are incapable of feeling guilt or the normal sort of empathy that makes one feel the suffering of another soul.

I believe that those are, for the most part, the people in charge of things.

[salemh]

There is an amount of fair criticism on the subject, but it has made sense (in my opinion), to equate these individuals as being very high in emotional intelligence / awareness of self, others, and the perceptions of themselves, by others.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotional_intelligence

[danbmil99]

This may be true, but in my experience most "emotionally intelligent" people are also -- sometimes to a fault -- prone to really feeling other people's pain as their own.

The interesting combination for me is those with such "emotional intelligence" in that they can read people and figure out their motivations and feelings, but they don't have a significant empathic response, and they appear to feel little or no guilt in utilizing these perceptions for personal gain, regardless of the pain they inevitably cause to those who trusted them.