A kilowatt smile will make you seem cool, says study

SETTING out to find what makes a person “cool”, researchers looked at clothing, attitude and social standing – but they found that the difference between being seen as trendy or not can be found in something as simple as a smile.

Caleb Warren, the study leader and a professor of marketing at the University of Arizona, said it was generally thought that the way to become cool was by being different or rebellious, like James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause.

The second most common answer in a survey was that people become cool by not showing their emotions.

But Prof Warren said: “Is it actually cool to be inexpressive rather than showing emotion? The most common emotional expression, at least in advertisements and magazines, is to smile. So the narrow question we tested is: is it more cool to smile or to be inexpressive?”

To test the theory, Prof Warren and colleagues created several advertisements featuring James Dean and Michael Jordan, the athlete, as well as other models. The same endorser was depicted twice, once with a smile and then without, and people were asked to rate how cool or uncool they thought the endorser was.

He said: “We found the endorser seemed less cool when they were inexpressive compared to when they smiled. My favourite one was that even James Dean, who people have said became cool by being inexpressive, became less cool when he was inexpressive than when he smiled.”

The findings are published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology.