What makes a person cool? Is it sunglasses indoors, impeccable music taste, or smoking behind the bike sheds?
Well, the sad reality is, if you have to ask, it’s a sure sign that you’re not.
A new study has unveiled the six defining personality traits that make you cool, but let’s be honest, there’s one mistake that cancels them all out — and that’s caring about being cool.
You’d never catch Clint Eastwood, Bob Dylan or Kate Moss reading this article. After all, genuinely cool people would find the very idea of ‘cool traits’ a bit, well, cringeworthy.
That being said, you’re here now, so if you’re interested in what psychologists believe constitutes a cool person, you’ll need to tick off the following personality characteristics: extroverted, hedonistic, powerful, adventurous, open and autonomous.
Cool is clearly an eternal conversation. Earlier this year, The Rest Is Entertainment hosts Marina Hyde and Richard Osman discussed whether celebrities are increasingly losing their cool. Journalist Marina suggested that having an air of mystique or a ‘portion of unknowability’ is a ‘big part’ of the entry requirements.
‘The main threat to cool has been a cultural threat, which is that everyone is a sort of homogenised mass of approved opinions and behaviours, and I think you need to be quite free-spirited and almost dangerous in some ways,’ Marina said.
The new research, published in the American Psychological Association, argues that people are on a ‘quest to be cool’ – and that shapes who they ‘admire, how they talk, where they shop, and what they do for fun.’
‘Cool people are admired and perceived to be friendly, competent and attractive,’ the authors write.
‘The word “cool” first emerged in African American and bohemian subcultures, blossomed with the rise of the 1960s counterculture, and has since spread around the globe.’
Likewise, they note that there have been various synonyms for ‘cool’ over the years, like ‘hip,’ ‘swell’ and ‘rad’ – and while many of these have gone out of fashion, ‘cool’ never has.
Plus, it’s still universally understood – and also desired.
As well as demonstrating traits like being open and autonomous, being cool has historically been synonymous with not expressing emotion.
Why else do you think the lead singers of the world’s biggest rock bands never smile in photos? Because it makes them look better.
As part of one experiment referenced in the study, participants rated both celebrities and everyday people based on how cool they thought they looked.
Surprisingly, photographs where the subject was seen to be smiling were rated as considerably less.
That even stretched to one of James Dean, who was so famously cool – and arguably the textbook definition of it – that he was referenced as ‘fresh’ by Lana Del Rey in her 2012 track Blue Jeans, 57 years after he died.
The study’s findings even suppose that coolness isn’t just a trait – it’s actually something that can encourage ‘cultural change in economies that have become increasingly dependent on creativity.’
And so, cool people around the world aren’t just unknowingly channelling a certain aesthetic or an element of je ne sais quoi, but they’re potentially ‘more likely to question convention, innovate, and persuade others to change.’ Who’d have thought it?
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