Scientists discover: how to be cool
If you are the type of person the elusive designation of cool has always evaded, then you are in luck, because a team of researchers has just published a study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology that delves into what exactly makes someone cool. So you can study it, you big dork.
Researchers conducted experiments with 5943 people across six continents — in the US, Germany, Spain, Turkey, Mexico, Chile, India, Hong Kong, China, South Korea, South Africa, Nigeria and, yes, Australia. These experiments were not, shockingly, playing a shonky rendition of Stairway To Heaven on an air guitar in front of people and then saying: 'So whaddya think of that? Pretty cool huh?' But I guess they had their own methodology.
What the study did find is that cool people share six main attributes: extraversion, hedonism, power, adventurousness, openness and autonomy. That would make for a pretty wild remake of Captain Planet.
Surprisingly, the definition of cool remained consistent across all those countries. So if you're a dag in Australia then bad news: you're also going to be a dork in Nigeria. Brutal. James Dean was only considered cool when he was smiling. Credit: Bob Thomas / Popperfoto
Also interesting: the attributes between coolness and goodness largely overlapped. Basically, good people are cool. Not being a good person? Deeply uncool. Your mum was right yet again. How uncool is that?
Participants were also shown photographs of people widely accepted as being 'cool': athletes, models, James Dean. They were shown photos of these people showing no emotion and then photos of these people smiling. And guess what? The pictures of them smiling were deemed cool, whereas the ones where they look, erm, coolly detached, not so cool.
All this time we thought being cool was looking blandly disinterested in everything while wearing dark sunglasses. Turns out it's being smiley, friendly, independent, open to new things and a little bit of a loose unit. Big teacher's pet energy here. Which is to say this multi-nation study has concluded pretty much the same thing Huey Lewis and the News told us in four minutes in 1986: it's hip to be square. How cool is that?
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