Steve Quartz: the neuroscientist who studies what's 'cool' and why

“Cool” is a bit of a moving target. Sixty years ago it was James Dean, nonchalantly smoking a cigarette as he sat on a motorbike, glaring down 1950s conformity with brooding disapproval. Five years ago it was Zooey Deschanel holding a cupcake.

In a phone interview with Steve Quartz, the co-author of the recently published Cool: How the Brain’s Hidden Quest for Cool Drives Our Economy and Shapes Our World, we skirted around a working definition. Defining cool turns out to be tricky even for someone who has just written an entire book examining the neurological processes behind it. Quartz’s most succinct definition was that cool is “the sweet spot between being innovative and unconventional, but not weird”.

Quartz is the director of the Social Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology. So when asked to describe what the lab does, he did not deliver a “cool” answer, but rather a precise one: it is, he said, “concerned with all the dimensions of decision making, from simple gambles and risk assessment right up to very complex reasoning and the nature of moral behaviour”.

He wrote the book with his colleague Anette Asp, with whom he has long done research on “neuroeconomics” and “neuromarketing”. Those fields use imaging techniques to look at the ways our brains process the emotions and responses we have to brands and products. The results, as Quartz and Asp posit in the book, reflect primal instincts we have around ideas of status. Their technique gives results that are much more accurate about what the kids are into, these days, than traditional marketing focus groups have ever been able to give us.

Quartz and Asp now believe that we are at the mercy of three biological “pleasure machines” – decision makers that lurk deep inside our neurological makeup. These are evolutionary controls concerned with survival, habits and goals. And they work together to create that pleasing “Wow, so cool!” sensation.

Certain aspects of coolness, Quartz and Asp argue, reside in an identifiable part of the brain. “Specifically, we found that buying a desirable item or even finding a retro t-shirt in a thrift store impacts a part of the brain known as the medial prefrontal cortex,” Quartz said.

Put simply: cool things activate a pleasure center in the brain. “The concept of cool isn’t that complicated,” Quartz said. “But it’s interesting to look at how it gets played out. Cool is a social attribute, and as we dug into it, we saw that the concept has changed over the last forty or fifty years, from opposition and rebellion in the 1950s to today, where it is much more of a pro-social idea.”

There are two defining eras for cool in western society, according to Quartz and Asp. The first is the 1950s, a relatively affluent and stable time when, nonetheless, rebellion started to gain momentum. “In the 1950s, this rebel instinct got integrated into society,” said Quartz. “This requires the perception that some other group is trying to subordinate you, and people have strong aversions to that.”

Quartz argues that when society only offers a limited number of routes to elevated social status (say, professional success in the corporate world), then sub-cultures develop which offer their own pathways to approval: having the newest motorcycle, for instance, or knowing the most about the latest music.

This, according to Quartz, is where cool developed, and when the economy started to take notice. “When you ascribe the value of cool to products, when they are positioned in the market tapping into that instinct, it creates extra value for the product.”

We currently live in a world of what Quartz terms ‘Dot Cool’. “I think a big difference between now and the 1950s is our relationship to work,” he told me. “In the 1950s, going to work meant giving up your individuality, but with the rise of a post-industrial society, work is now something that people regard more as a way to self-actualise, to create their identity.”

Quartz argues that cool in the early 21^st century in the west is a signal of one’s capacity to navigate a knowledge-based economy. “It’s less about rebellion and more about displaying the pro-social attributes that are essential for success today,” he said.

It’s clear after reading the case studies of “cool” products – from SUVs to Levis to cognac (made cool by rap) – that Quartz and Asp present, that capitalism will identify, absorb and sell cool back to society. In some cases, this can have devastating effects – the increasingly mainstream success of the band Nirvana, for instance, being a commonly cited factor in lead singer Kurt Cobain’s suicide.

With a marketing machine this cynical and predatory, is there a future for cool? Quartz was adamant that there is and was impressively optimistic that sociometric status – the degree to which someone is liked or respected among their peers – will become increasingly valued.

“There will always be this tendency to rebel and it can always be triggered,” he said. “Even when society is so fragmented and pluralistic, even when it doesn’t have this traditional hierarchy, it’s easy to trigger that instinct. There’s this change, though, of beginning to see cool in a more socially productive way. The idea of status has historically never had much social benefit, but with this new idea of sociometric status we can make our consumerism more socially beneficial.”

I wondered if this was endowing the consumer with too much agency. Quartz doesn’t think so, but we agreed about the sophistication of modern day capitalism. It can even absorb “normcore” – one of the latest hotly debated trends. “Normcore is a play for anonymity in a capitalist society,” said Quartz, “but the drive for anonymity is itself conspicuous. We get into very meta areas of what meanings you think other people are ascribing to what you buy.”

I couldn’t resist asking Quartz, given all this, how cool he believes himself to be. “Well, I try not to be at all,” he said. “The more someone tries to pursue it in a conscious way, the more they undo the whole thing.” So, sadly, buying a leather jacket or a miniature cupcake isn’t going to make me any cooler. On the upside, I think I’m cool with this.