Anyone who follows education and psychology – and yes, if you read this blog regularly, I do mean you – knows that some research questions sound almost playful but end up revealing something quite fundamental. The British Psychological Society recently highlighted one of those cases in their Digest, pointing to a new and rather ambitious study by Todd Pezzuti and colleagues. This coolness versus goodness research asked nearly 6,000 people across 13 countries to nominate someone they consider cool or not cool, and someone they consider good or not good. A simple task, yet the pattern that emerges is surprisingly robust.

So what do we learn? Cool and good do overlap, but not in the way we often assume. Being cool has remarkably little to do with being kind or caring – perhaps a remnant of our collective pandemic sensibilities. Across all regions studied, coolness clustered reliably around six traits: extraversion, hedonism, power, adventurousness, autonomy, and openness. Hardly the list you would expect in a citizenship curriculum. What struck me most was the consistency: whether you look at Australia, India, Turkey, Spain, Nigeria, the United States or China, the same configuration keeps reappearing. Cultural differences seem like the obvious explanation, but coolness, oddly enough, appears remarkably stable across continents.

The flip side is just as intriguing. Traits we usually associate with “good” people, such as warmth, calmness, conscientiousness, care for others, safety, tradition, conformity, consistently scored lower among those judged to be cool. Competence was the only characteristic shared by both the cool and the good, though even that does little to dissolve the contrast. A cool person is seldom the virtuous one. Instead, it is someone willing to take risks, push boundaries and steer their own course. As the Digest piece noted, coolness is not a synonym for general positivity; it behaves more like a separate social label.

The strength of this study lies in how the authors distinguish what people like from what they find cool. That distinction turns out to matter. Not every good person is cool, and not every cool person is good. It sounds obvious, but empirically, this is hard to pin down. The design helps: large cross-national samples, preregistration, careful translation and back-translation, and a combination of personality and value measures. The team even ran several replications and control experiments, even when participants had to think of someone “cooler than most people” or “less good than most people”, the same structure held up.

But why these traits, and why everywhere? The authors propose that coolness may function as a parallel status logic. Not status built on care or reliability, but on risk-taking, autonomy and innovation. In information-based societies, where originality often pays off more than well-behaved conformity, that is not an unreasonable idea. Coolness becomes a social signal: not only are you different, but you have the space to be different.

Anyone who has spent time in a secondary school or scrolled through social media will recognise the pattern. The quiet, gentle student is respected, but rarely cool. The bold, outgoing one often is. And for once, this is not a purely Western trope; people across the globe recognise roughly the same thing.

Of course, we should be careful. These findings are about perception, not objective traits. Coolness is also deeply contextual: a punk, an influencer and a jazz musician might each have their own internal grammar of what counts as cool. Still, the global stability of the pattern is striking. It suggests that coolness is not a passing trend but a social construct with its own internal logic.

Whether this helps you become cool tomorrow is another matter. What the study primarily teaches us is that coolness rewards something quite different from goodness. And the tension between those two may be exactly what makes this topic so fascinating.