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. It's great to be here.

Thanks for having me. Let's start with the basics. What does Cool even mean in 2025? And why did you

want to study it scientifically? I'll start with the second question.

Why did I want to study it?

I'm 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 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

...