What Makes Us ‘Cool’?

Who actually qualifies as "cool"? One could claim that it is arbitrary and depends on the observer. Based on things like where you grew up, your present social environment, whether you can play the guitar incredibly quickly, and other things, what you consider to be "cool" could be quite different for someone else. The majority of people would stop there, but two researchers from New York, Ian Hansen and Ilan Dar-Nimrod, decided to continue their investigation.

Students from several colleges came up with phrases they thought described coolness for the study, which required ranking their peers according to those characteristics. None of the findings are particularly shocking; they were reported in a publication titled Coolness: An Empirical Investigation in the appropriately called Journal of Individual Differences. It was discovered that characteristics like attractiveness, sociability, friendliness, and intelligence are strongly linked to how cool we perceive cool people to be.