What science says about what makes something cool | The Excerpt
- - What science says about what makes something cool | The Excerpt
Dana Taylor, USA TODAY August 28, 2025 at 10:11 AM
On a special episode (first released on August 27, 2025) of The Excerpt podcast: Is coolness just a vibe—or something deeper? A new global study spanning 12 countries finds surprising common traits that define who we see as cool. University of Arizona professor Caleb Warren joins The Excerpt to break it all down.
Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.
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Dana Taylor:
Hello, I'm Dana Taylor, and this is a special episode of USA TODAY's The Excerpt. What makes someone cool? Is it confidence, the clothes they wear, an effortless ability to stand out without trying too hard? Turns out there's actual science behind the answer. New global study asks thousands of people across more than a dozen countries to define what cool really means, and the results might surprise you. Turns out it's not about rebellion or aloofness. Why do we care so much about it in the first place? And is coolness universal? Here to help us understand these questions is Caleb Warren, Professor in the University of Arizona's Eller College of Management and co-author of the recently published study, Cool People. Caleb, it's good to have you on.
Caleb Warren:
It's great to be here. Thanks for having me.
Dana Taylor:
Let's start with the basics. What does cool even mean in 2025, and why did you want to study it scientifically?
Caleb Warren:
I'll start with the second question. Why did I want to study it? I am trained as a marketing professor in consumer psychology, so we study why people buy things, why they spend their money and how they spend their time. And it struck me that a lot of people that at least that I saw were buying stuff or doing stuff because they thought it was cool. So if you want to understand consumer behavior and really human behavior generally today, I think it's important to understand, well, what is it that makes something cool? Why do people want to be cool? Why do they pursue cool stuff?
Defining coolness is really tricky. A lot of people have tried, in one of my papers, I looked at all the different definitions and found over 70 of them just from scholars. That's not even counting the urban dictionary, but the one thing that most people agree on is that what makes something or someone cool is in the eye of the beholder in that if everybody agrees that like Charlie XCX or Bob Dylan is cool, then these people are cool, and if they think they're not cool, they're not.
So the way I have always defined cool operationally, meaning the way I've studied it is I've asked people for their opinion on is this person or this thing cool or uncool or in this paper, what I did was I asked people to evaluate people that they think are cool or people that they don't think are cool.
Dana Taylor:
You surveyed people in 12 countries. Was there anything people around the world totally agreed on when it came to coolness?
Caleb Warren:
So yes, we ran an experiment in 12 countries, 13 regions. So we had both Hong Kong and mainland China, and we were looking at cultural differences in the types of attributes or characteristics that were in cool people. So the way we did this is we asked everybody to think of either a person that they think is cool, a person that they think is not cool, or because we wanted to see is cool the same thing as just being good or likable. Think of someone you think is a good person, think of someone you think is not a good person.
So everybody thought of one of these four types of people and then evaluated them on 15 different attributes, including the big five personality traits. Are they extroverted? Are they open? Are they calm? And several other values. And then what we could do is we can compare how do the traits and characteristics of cool people differ from people who are not cool and also from people who are good. And what we found is the same six characteristics or attributes were true of cool people, distinguished cool people in every country we looked at, and that's being extroverted, hedonistic, powerful, adventurous, open, and autonomous.
Dana Taylor:
Why do you think traits like adventurousness and autonomy signal coolness to people across the globe?
Caleb Warren:
It's a good question and one that I need to speculate on a little bit because I don't know how these findings emerge. What I do know is people around the world see the same types of people as being cool. Now you picked up on a couple of traits. So the last three traits that we found in our data being adventurous, open and autonomous, all are kind of related. They're about people who seek new experiences, who are creative, they like new ideas, they're not set in their ways, and also they can tend to stray from, or at least sometimes even push against what is conventional or normal.
So this is a core part of what makes people cool. And I think the reason why this has become a valued trait throughout the globe is because we need... It's helpful to have people who are changing culture in a way that seems positive and the traits that are associated with cool people. So being autonomous, adventurous, open, but then also powerful and extroverted. So these people aren't just doing different things, they're then communicating them to others, the extroversion, and they have the ability, the power to change things as a result. I see coolness as a sort of a social reward that different cultures and societies give to people who they see as advancing, as moving things forward or as changing things in a good way.
Dana Taylor:
You touched on this briefly, but you found that cool doesn't necessarily mean good. Can you explain that moral ambiguity?
Caleb Warren:
So one thing in the data is there is an overlap between them. Most of the traits that are cool are also good, being autonomous and open, for instance. Most of the traits that are good, like being conscientious and agreeable are also cool, but in different capacities. So people who are good are far more likely to seem agreeable and conscientious, whereas people who are cool are far more likely to seem adventurous and extroverted and powerful. And so what emerges is this difference between them? And I think a lot of it is and how much people sort of play by the rules versus trying to make their own and also how much they care and show care for others. Cool tends to be more independent and it tends to be less likely to follow the rules, but also less likely really to care directly about others, whereas traits that are being traditional, conforming, being warm, these types of traits that are generally good and especially good for holding families together and communities together are not what distinguish cool people.
Dana Taylor:
How does social media, especially influencer culture, shape or distort our perception of what's cool?
Caleb Warren:
It's a good question. I haven't studied this directly. My hunch is that it does more to accelerate rather than change things too much. I suspect you're seeing similar types of people who are cool now as before, but probably the number of people who could seem cool, it's almost like it's probably both more random and more democratic. It's no longer coming from record industries picking out which artists they want to give a contract to, who are then put in front of enough people to seem cool. Now it's more likely to come from some random person who did something unusual or noteworthy on social media, and then that gets picked up by others.
But it's in both cases, it's probably the artist. If we're talking about music, it's probably the artist who seems adventurous and seems autonomous. That is the one that ends up coming across cool. So in the past it was like Bob Dylan getting picked up by Columbia Records and then his music getting sent out, whereas now it's more likely to be someone like Billie Eilish who's recording in her bedroom with her brother, and then more organically becomes cool. I'm not sure if organics the right word, but I think it's less likely to be a top-down thing now than it used to be.
Dana Taylor:
Was there anything people generally think of as cool that actually scored low in the data?
Caleb Warren:
So I'll speak to the second one first because the data can directly address that. A trait like being extroverted is one that in our data was associated with cool people. Cool people were seen as far more extroverted than not cool people, but was not true of good people. Good people were actually rated as being more introverted than not good people. This is also true of being hedonistic and powerful, although good people were equally powerful or hedonistic than not good people. But in all those cases, these are traits that describe cool people but not good people. So those are some of the differences there. The other question I think was what do people think is cool but maybe is not? And probably the trait that that's most true of is being calm. And this also I found in my other research that looked especially at being emotionally inexpressive or sort of nonchalant, there's this idea that people become cool by not showing emotion, and that is not at all borne out by the data.
Both in this study and in some of my other research, what we found is that in this study we see that people who are calm are rated more as being a good person rather than a cool person. In my previous work, what I found with Todd Pezzuti, he's also a co-author on this paper, is that when we manipulated and advertisements and pictures whether people were showing emotion by smiling or showing no emotion, sort of having a straight face, people thought the endorser or the spokesperson or whoever was photoed seemed more cool when they were smiling than when they were inexpressive. So I think there's this false belief that the way to become cool is by not showing emotion.
Dana Taylor:
How do gender, race, or power dynamics intersect with how we perceive who is or isn't cool?
Caleb Warren:
Far less than we expected. Again, we're looking at these broad characteristics of people, whether they're powerful or autonomous or conscientious rather than who these specific people are. So I'm confident that old people are thinking of different cool people than young people are, but they have the same or similar traits and what we saw in the data, we could not find any systematic differences between men and women, older and younger people, educated and non-educated. We didn't measure race in most of our studies, but we do have these 13 different countries from all over the world, including Africa, Europe, South America, Asia, where people are of different races, and we also don't see any systematic differences there. So everywhere we looked and for all types of people, they see cool people as having these six traits, being extroverted, hedonistic, powerful, adventurous, open and autonomous.
Dana Taylor:
Caleb, what do you think the rise of coolness as a status symbol says about modern values and what might replace it in the future?
Caleb Warren:
Really good questions. The first one I at least have a shot at answering, which is the reason cool has become so desired and desirable is because we're moving to a culture where information and ideas and innovation have become more important. So if you look at sort of the, I don't want to call it a progression, but changes in society and culture over the last couple thousand years, we went from these tribes where hunting and gathering are really important to societies where you're always worried about threat of invasion to industrial economies where it's all about the production of goods to now it's more about who has the best ideas and the value created by humanity is far more likely to be intangible. And I think all of these different ways of structuring society have had their own status systems and coolness appears to align with a modern economies and societies that are more driven by ideas and innovation and creativity.
What comes next? No idea. My guess is it will be influenced by artificial intelligence, but in some ways I think that that might lead to even more emphasis being placed on the ability to be original and creative because so much of what AI is at least doing in the current iteration is reproducing stuff that's already been done. At least my experience with AI, and I'm not an expert here, is if you ask it to create something, to write something, it'll do a great job creating derivative work that seems very similar to what others have done, but it doesn't have its a unique voice as you might expect if you go to an actual journalist to write an article rather than asking AI to do it. So I don't know what's next. It might be even more importance placed on being cool rather than on someone who's able to follow the rules.
Dana Taylor:
What's next for you? Is there another aspect of cool people you want to explore?
Caleb Warren:
What I would like to look at in more detail, and this is sort of part of my idea about how coolness has become this alternative status symbol, if that idea is right, then what we should see is coolness being valued more and used more and a stronger part of the culture in these places where innovation and information has become more valued. So what I'd like to look at is not differences in the meaning of coolness across cultures, but rather the difference in the importance of coolness across cultures. Because I would expect differences there, even though we didn't see them in the data on what cool means or what types of people are cool.
Dana Taylor:
Caleb, it was cool to have you on The Excerpt. Thanks for joining us.
Caleb Warren:
Oh, thanks so much for having me. It's great to be here.
Dana Taylor:
Thanks to our senior producers, Shannon Rae Green and Kaely Monahan for their production assistance. Our executive producer is Laura Beatty. Let us know what you think of this episode by sending a note to [email protected]. Thanks for listening. I'm Dana Taylor. Taylor Wilson, we'll be back tomorrow morning with another episode of USA TODAY's The Excerpt.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: What science says about what makes something cool | The Excerpt
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