Is Being Cool the Same Everywhere?

Being cool is hard. And understanding what it means to be cool is also hard. A fair amount of psychological research in the last decades has been devoted to analyzing what it means to be cool. A very large-scale study published days ago is the most impressive of these.

The research involved more than 6000 subjects in 13 countries and took almost five years to complete. And there are three important lessons. The first is that six personality traits are positively associated with being cool. These are extraverted, hedonistic, powerful, adventurous, open, autonomous. If you have these traits, congratulations, you're high on the coolness scale.

The second piece of finding is that the traits associated with being cool are very different from the ones that are associated with being good. You can be cool and you can be good, but you can't be both. One possible take is that being cool is an aesthetic virtue, and aesthetic virtues are different from moral virtues. Either way, being cool is different from being good.

But maybe the most interesting aspect of these findings is that the researchers did pay attention to possible cross-cultural variations in the concept of being cool. And they have found a remarkable degree of universality. It seems that in the 13 countries examined (Australia, Chile, China (Mainland and Hong Kong), Germany, India, Mexico, Nigeria, Spain, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey, and the United States), respondents converged in their views about what constitutes coolness.

Finding such a cultural universal, especially when it comes to a slippery concept like being cool is a big deal. Alas, things are a bit more complicated. First of all, despite what may seem like a very culturally diverse 13 countries, they are all, in fact, highly Westernized societies, heavily influenced by Western (mainly Hollywood) media. This is also indicated by what is arguably a questionable methodological choice by the researchers, namely, to use the English word 'cool' in all these experiments. Their justification is that all the non-English languages involved (Chinese, Turkish, Korean, Spanish, German) use the English term 'cool'. But this in itself is an indication of a lack of real cultural diversity in the sample, which makes it less surprising that the responses are not so different from each other.

Further, being cool is not a uniform concept. In earlier empirical studies of being cool, a distinction was made between two very different (almost diametrically opposed) senses of cool, 'cachet cool' and 'contrarian cool', a distinction the present study completely ignored. But, more generally, before we get into cross-cultural comparisons, even within one culture, what counts as cool depends heavily on the subculture and context. What is cool in the context of thrash metal is not at all cool in the context of cosplay at a gaming convention, and vice versa.

I started by saying that being cool is hard. And it is hard. Knowing what character traits are associated with being cool will not help you become cool. Part of the reason for this is that while being cool is hard, trying to be cool is possibly self-defeating. It is by definition not cool to try to be cool. This aspect of being cool doesn't even show up on the radar of the current study. A lot more needs to be done if we want to understand the anatomy of being cool.