Coolness: An Empirical Investigation
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Some people are routinely described as “cool,” but it is unknown whether this descriptor conveys trait-like information beyond mere likability or popularity. This is the first systematic quantitative investigation of coolness from a trait perspective. Three studies of North Americans (N = 918) converged to identify personality markers for coolness. Study 1 participants described coolness largely by referring to socially desirable attributes (e.g., social, popular, talented). Study 2 provided further evidence of the relationship between coolness and social desirability, yet also identified systematic discrepancies between valuations of coolness and social desirability. Factor analyses (Studies 2 and 3) indicated that coolness was primarily conceptualized in terms of active, status-promoting, socially desirable characteristics (“Cachet coolness”), though a second orthogonal factor (“Contrarian coolness”) portrayed cool as rebellious, rough, and emotionally controlled. Study 3, which examined peer valuations of coolness, showed considerable overlap with abstract evaluations of the construct. We conclude that coolness is reducible to two conceptually coherent and distinct personality orientations: one outward focused and attuned to external valuations, the other more independent, rebellious, and countercultural. These results have implications for both basic and applied research and theory in personality and social psychology.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it