Is it hip to be square? Huey Lewis and the News said so in 1986. I still have the LP in fact, so does that make me hip, or just square? Or maybe you can be cool only if you’re a “long cool woman in a black dress”, as The Hollies sang. There are more contemporary song titles about being cool, but I’m not sure I’ve heard them, and listing them will just signal how un-cool I am.
We all have a sense of what it means to be “cool”. We know it when we see it, even though it might be tricky to define. It’s also a global term – pretty much any place there are human beings, people spend a lot of time and money trying to be cool, and people know cool when they see it.
But what actually determines it? A joint Chilean-US study led by Todd Pezzuti, Caleb Warren and Jinjie Chen has the answer. The word “cool”, they write, first emerged in African American and bohemian subcultures, and blossomed with the rise of the 1960s counterculture. They note “cool” has never gone out of fashion, even though we’ve seen synonyms come and go. That means you can expect “it’s fire” to disappear into the dustbin of history at some point. Don’t get me started on “slay”.
In their paper “Cool People”, Pezzuti and colleagues describe a cross-cultural study involving 6000 participants in 13 nations. Most continents are represented by at least one nation. New Zealand is not included, but I suppose Australia is the next best thing, even if it’s questionable whether Aussies can be cool (joke).
Take a moment to imagine you’re a participant in this study. First, think of a person you know (not a celebrity) who you think is cool. How would you describe their personality? What values do you think they hold? Pezzuti and colleagues asked a quarter of their participants to rate their cool exemplar’s personality and values on validated scales, and asked another quarter to do the same for a person who isn’t cool. A third quarter were to think of someone they considered a “good” person and a final quarter described characteristics of a “not good” person.
Why mix in goodness? Because some research says cool people are often considered good people, but that doesn’t help us identify the essence of cool. That’s to say, in many cases, what distinguishes someone who is good from not-good is the same as what distinguishes cool from not-cool.
However, Pezzuti and his cool kids found people who are cool are more likely to be perceived as extroverted and outgoing – to seek out opportunities to enjoy themselves. They’re also seen as more hedonistic, powerful, adventurous, open and in control of their own lives. These attributes were more strongly associated with coolness than goodness overall. (Good people were perceived as more conforming, secure, warm, agreeable, conscientious and calm.) In all cases, the difference between cool and not-cool was larger than for good and not-good.
Intriguingly, the same six attributes defined coolness in all 13 nations – cool is a universal language. This is surprising given that the 13 nations were quite diverse in terms of values and traditions, beliefs and languages. Coolness, the researchers theorise, might serve an adaptive function; perhaps to encourage “cultural innovation”. Jazz was cool because it represented a step change in music.
There is a theory that postgraduate students have about the things their supervisors study – that they reflect what we worry about, or aren’t good at. So, a person who studies ageing is worried about getting old; a person who studies power feels powerless.
According to this logic, you shouldn’t accept a lift from someone who studies driving behaviour. And in the case of Pezzuti, Warren and Chen? I guess it is hip to be square.
