"Cool feels to me like the stock market or Michelin restaurants: none of my business. I'm not alone. In a recent YouGov survey, a third of respondents said they weren't cool at school, with only 10% reporting that, yep, they actually were. Half claimed they were somewhere in between. But I know I'm missing out. Cool people are desirable and in demand; others want to be them or be with them."
"The trick, of course, is that it rarely does. Cool is fiendish, like a riddle: it cannot be bought, though it's enthusiastically sold, and it can't be claimed without surrendering its benefits. The more you aspire to be cool, the more uncool you are likely to be. It's ineffable but undeniable or so we thought. A much-publicised paper recently published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology found that cool people are seen as possessing six attributes: they are extroverted, open, hedonistic, adventurous, autonomous and powerful."
Coolness is associated with a cluster of personality attributes: extroversion, openness, hedonism, adventurousness, autonomy and power. Many people report not feeling cool in school, with only a small minority claiming they were. Coolness generates social desirability and converts into social and economic capital as others seek to emulate or buy into it. Coolness resists direct purchase or simple imitation and often eludes deliberate attempts to create it. Some aspects of perceived cool can be increased, but innate dispositions and genuine expressions of the traits limit how convincingly cool someone can appear.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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