An international team of researchers may have just cracked the code for what makes someone “cool.”
And no matter where you live, the personality traits that make someone “cool” appear to be consistent across countries, according to the study, published this week in the Journal of Experimental Psychology.
The researchers found that, compared with people considered to be “good” or “favorable,” those considered “cool” are perceived to be more extroverted, hedonistic, powerful, adventurous, open and autonomous.
“The most surprising thing was seeing that the same attributes emerge in every country,” said Todd Pezzuti, an associate professor of marketing at Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez in Chile who was a co-lead researcher on the study.
“Regardless of whether it’s China or Korea or Chile or the US, people like people who are pushing boundaries and sparking change,” he said. “So I would say that coolness really represents something more fundamental than the actual label of coolness.”
‘Cool’ isn’t the same as ‘good’
The researchers – from Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez, the University of Arizona and the University of Georgia – conducted experiments from 2018 to 2022 with nearly 6,000 people across a dozen countries: Australia, Chile, China, Germany, India, Mexico, Nigeria, Spain, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey and the United States.
The participants were asked to think of a person in their lives whom they perceive to be “cool,” “uncool,” “good” or “not good.” They were then asked to rate that person’s personality using two scales: the Big Five Personality scale, a widely used scientific model that helps describe personality traits, and the Portrait Values Questionnaire, intended to measure an individual’s basic values.
The study participants consistently associated being calm, conscientious, universalistic, agreeable, warm, secure, traditional and conforming with being a good person, more than with being a cool person. Being capable was considered to be both “cool” and “good” but not distinctly either. But the formula for being “cool” was having the six character traits – more extroverted, hedonistic, powerful, adventurous, open and autonomous – no matter the person’s age, gender or education level.
Pezzuti doesn’t think these “cool” traits are something that can be taught.
“We’re born with those attributes,” he said. “Five of those attributes are personality traits, and personality traits tend to be fairly stable.”
The research showed that cool people and good people aren’t the same, but there may be some overlapping traits, said co-lead researcher Caleb Warren, an associate professor of marketing at the University of Arizona.
“To be seen as cool, someone usually needs to be somewhat likable or admirable, which makes them similar to good people,” Warren said in a news release. “However, cool people often have other traits that aren’t necessarily considered ‘good’ in a moral sense, like being hedonistic and powerful.”
A limitation of the research was that only people who understood what “cool” means were included in the study. Pezzuti said it would be interesting – but difficult – to determine whether the findings would be similar among more traditional cultures or remote groups of people who may be less familiar with the term.
“We don’t know what we would find in supertraditional cultures like hunting-and-gathering tribes or sustenance farming groups,” Pezzuti said.
“One thing we would propose is that in those cultures, ‘cool’ people don’t have as important of a role because innovation, or cultural innovation, isn’t as important in those cultures,” he said. “So I would say that cool people are probably present in those cultures, but their role isn’t as big, and they’re probably not as admired as they are in other cultures.”
‘Cool’ can be controversial
When asked to think of a public figure or celebrity who embodies “coolness” based on his research, Pezzuti immediately said Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk.
“He’s a controversial figure, but someone who comes to my mind is Elon Musk,” Pezzuti said, adding that he checks all the boxes of the six attributes identified in the study.
Musk is “undeniably powerful” and autonomous, he said, and appears to be extroverted due to his presence on social media platforms and in the media.
“I hear that he’s timid, maybe more timid than he seems, but from an outsider, he seems very extroverted. He’s entertaining. He’s on podcasts and always in front of cameras,” Pezzuti explained.
Some of Musk’s behavior also appears to be hedonistic, he said. “He smoked marijuana on the most popular podcast in the world, ‘The Joe Rogan Experience.’”
And Pezzuti added that Musk’s ideas about colonizing Mars show him to be open and adventurous.
The new paper is one of the few empirical studies that examines what exactly makes people “cool,” said Jonah Berger, an associate professor of marketing at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business.
“While people have long wondered (and theorized) about what makes people cool, there hasn’t been a lot of actual empirical research on the topic, so it’s great to see work exploring this space,” Berger, who was not involved in the new paper, wrote in an email.
“While coolness might seem like something you are born with, there are certainly steps people can take to try and move in that direction,” he said. “Given how many people want to be cool, and how much money is spent with that goal in mind, it certainly seems worth studying.”
Future research in this space could evaluate coolness in tandem with goodness and badness rather than in isolation from it, said Jon Freeman, an associate professor of psychology at Columbia University.
“In real life, coolness can be a positive quality but can also have a negative connotation in certain social contexts. It may be valuable for future work to examine the differences between good coolness and bad coolness, and this study’s approach offers a great foundation,” Freeman, who also was not involved in the new study, wrote in an email.
“From a scientific standpoint, cool would seem far more a product of inference and social construction than genetics, although low-level temperament informed by genetics could feed into ongoing personality construction,” he said.
“‘Cool’ is deeply ingrained in our social vocabulary because it serves as a shorthand for complex inferences. It encapsulates signals of status, affiliation, and identity in ways that are instantaneous yet deeply stereotyped. From a scientific perspective, studying coolness is important precisely because it reveals how rapid, schematic trait inferences influence behavior and social dynamics, especially in the age of social media and influencer culture.”