What you need to know
- Marketing experts have studied which set of qualities makes someone "cool"
- Their research finds that the concept and use of "cool" is pretty much the same worldwide
- The word "cool" has been around since the 1950s. Now, Generations Z and Alpha are coming up with new terms for similar ideas
- Caleb Warren tells us more about the recent study on the last episode of Science Unscripted. You can listen to it here.
Whenever you travel, keep your "cool" — it will probably be good to go wherever you are.
Caleb Warren, a marketing professor at the University of Arizona, has spoken with the hosts of Science Unscripted about his recent research on coolness.
"We looked at 13 different regions and 12 countries […] trying to explore cultural differences in coolness and what we found is it's the same six attributes that are common in cool people everywhere we looked," he said.
It's one thing to know that if you're cool at home, you would probably be seen as cool abroad as well. But, are you cool to begin with?
How do I know if I'm cool?
In their new study in search of the "cool" factor, Warren and his peers Todd Pezzuti and Jinjie Chen conducted interviews with almost 6,000 people all around the globe.
After four years of gathering opinions about cool people, the authors found out there are six attributes most people consider "cool." In the eyes of the interviewees, cool people are extroverted/extraverted*, powerful, hedonistic, open, adventurous and autonomous.
To get to the bottom of coolness, Warren said they wanted people in their study "to have an image of a cool person they know, a friend of theirs preferably, […] not famous people. And then […] to say, well, is your friend extroverted or introverted? Are they agreeable or disagreeable?"
That way the experts could find out which qualities out of 15 different ones are specifically associated with coolness. They could identify that some of the traits, like being autonomous, are a key ingredient to the coolness recipe — sometimes even more relevant than being powerful.
"One reason politicians aren't cool is because they lack autonomy. They're beholden to voters, and if they don't do what voters want, they get voted out. So that tends to make them less cool," said Warren.
But, is 'cool' still… cool?
For Warren, "what is interesting about 'cool' is that people have used that word since at least the 1950s, and probably earlier with a somewhat similar meaning. Whereas all these other synonyms [hip, rad, fire…] have gone in and out of fashion."
So, other terms have also been used for that concept for decades, but none of them has been able to replace "cool" or perpetuate in our vocabulary the same way. But that may be changing.
The clocks of the social media era are ticking to announce new times and the TikTok is louder than ever. New trends are emerging among Gen Z and Gen Alpha, and with them, new slang tests the dominance of "cool" swipe by swipe.
"Aura", "alpha" or "sigma" are terms younger generations are using to refer to what others may define as "cool." Whether those words can make millennials or boomers lose their cool is not yet clear.
What is clear is that the newbies are facing a tough rival. They are up against a term that managed to establish itself worldwide way before the internet was there to help.
"What is remarkable about the word cool is that it has been used similarly in the United States since at least the '50s, and then, as it traveled across the globe… Today, people in Korea, Spain and Germany say 'cool' without translating it," said Warren.
Why does 'cool' fascinate us?
Nobody knows if "The Simpsons" cartoon already predicted that this study on coolness would be published or what the results would be, but they were already discussing coolness almost 30 years ago.
In the peculiar family feud, the protagonists of the show end up asking themselves "how do you be cool?." It's a question almost everyone has struggled with at some point and one that has no easy answer, even for the experts studying the matter.
According to Warren, their study aims to find out why people are seen as cool, but he doesn't think we can use the results to learn how to be cool, nor should we.
"I would be hesitant to encourage people to try to be 'more cool'. [...] If people think you are trying to be cool, it is not going to work. It will backfire," he said.
And after so many questions on coolness, maybe the most important one yet begs to be asked: Is a Simpsons reference still cool in 2025?
The study, titled Cool People, involved experiments with nearly 6,000 people in Australia, Chile, Mainland China, Hong Kong, Germany, India, Mexico, Nigeria, Spain, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey and the United States during the years of 2018 to 2022.
Edited by: Zulfikar Abbany
*Editor's Note: There is debate in psychology about the correct spelling of extrovert/extravert. Swiss psychotherapist and author Carl Jung said the correct spelling was extravert, with an "a", because it was closer to the word's root in Latin. But the dominant spelling in US English seems to be extrovert, with an "o", and the Merriam-Webster dictionary confirms this, so that is the spelling we have used for this article.