Latest / The You Project / #2076 The Psychology of 'Cool' - Prof. Caleb Warren

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#2076 The Psychology of 'Cool' - Prof. Caleb Warren · The You Project

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Speaker 1: I get a team. Welcome to another installment of the
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Speaker 1: You Project. Craig Anthony Harper reporting in for duty for
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Speaker 1: the two thousandth and something time. That's a lot. I
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Speaker 1: should have a break, I might have my first beer.
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Speaker 1: Who knows joining me on the show today is a newbie,
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Speaker 1: brand newb fresh. He's fresh and he looks fresh. I
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Speaker 1: was just saying to him, I saw him seven ye well,
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Speaker 1: I saw him doing it. I didn't see him seven
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Speaker 1: years ago. I saw him very recently doing a Ted
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Speaker 1: talk seven years ago, and I think he looks younger
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Speaker 1: seven years later. So I don't know what that's about.
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Speaker 1: We might find out. But Professor Caleb Warren joins us, Hime, mate,
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Speaker 1: how are you?
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Speaker 2: I'm great, Thanks for having me today.
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Speaker 1: What's the Benjamin Button thing you got going on? What's
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Speaker 1: that about?
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Speaker 2: I don't know. I think it's a faulty zoom filter.
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Speaker 1: He going, all right, Hey, can you give my listeners
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Speaker 1: a snapshot of rather than me read some bio that
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Speaker 1: I ripped off the interwebs, could you tell us a
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Speaker 1: bit about you, you and your research and your background.
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Speaker 2: Sure.
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Speaker 3: So, I am a professor of marketing at the University
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Speaker 3: of Arizona.
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Speaker 2: I was started studying.
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Speaker 3: I studied consumer psychology, which is a sub field of
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Speaker 3: marketing for my PhD. And during that time I was
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Speaker 3: really interested and since that time, I've been interested in
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Speaker 3: this couple questions, including largely what makes things cool and
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Speaker 3: what makes things funny? So these are my two main
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Speaker 3: areas of research. More recently, as I've started mentoring students,
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Speaker 3: I've branched out into a lot of different areas in
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Speaker 3: the marketing and psychology spaces that are questions more driven
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Speaker 3: by them and their interests. So a number of projects
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Speaker 3: on emotions, nostalgia, anxiety, more recently on AI. So yeah,
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Speaker 3: that's that's that's a brief version.
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Speaker 1: I guess that's an emergent area of analysis. Like II,
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Speaker 1: not from the point of technology, but from the point
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Speaker 1: of psychology. How we interface and interact and connect and
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Speaker 1: dare I say, build relationships with and fall in love
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Speaker 1: with fall in love with? Oh my god?
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Speaker 3: If you're interested in that, I'll hook you up with
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Speaker 3: my PhD student who's leading all those projects and he's
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Speaker 3: he's fantastic. Wow, I'd love to be a good he'd
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Speaker 3: be a good conversation.
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Speaker 1: Yeah, So that's it's kind of. It's really interesting. I know,
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Speaker 1: even with my just general chats with chat GPT five
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Speaker 1: point two or whatever it is, at the moment, it
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Speaker 1: talks like me. It it talks Hey, Craig, what's up,
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Speaker 1: says Hey Craig, what's up, and it'll swear like unprompted
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Speaker 1: by me, it'll swear it'll say, oh, that's fucked up.
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Speaker 1: I'm like, dude, I don't know that your program to
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Speaker 1: say this, but.
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Speaker 2: It's like it just, you know, probably programmed to mirror
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Speaker 2: you to some extent.
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Speaker 1: You know, and I yes, if you've got shitty self
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Speaker 1: esteem and you're a bit lonely, or you feel a
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Speaker 1: bit isolated or disconnected, and you know, this thing kind
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Speaker 1: of reinforces what you want or need reinforced, or it
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Speaker 1: speaks in inverted commas in a way that makes you
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Speaker 1: feel something positive even though you obviously know it's it's
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Speaker 1: a it's an AI, it's I guess it's understandable. No
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Speaker 1: exactly exactly. So what's so? I'm obviously every problem everybody
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Speaker 1: probably hits you up about the coolness thing. I'm interested
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Speaker 1: in that, but I feel like you've probably spoken to
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Speaker 1: death about that, right.
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Speaker 3: I'm I think there's still a lot more to talk about.
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Speaker 3: But I'm happy to talk about any any topic that
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Speaker 3: I'm informed on. And if you want to ask about
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Speaker 3: something I don't know much about, I'll say I don't
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Speaker 3: know much about and then bullshit a little.
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Speaker 1: All right, well, perfect, all right. Well we'll start with
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Speaker 1: a thing that you've spoken the most about, because I
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Speaker 1: haven't and my audience hasn't heard it, I guess, or
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Speaker 1: most of them. Man, So is there a definitive kind
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Speaker 1: of explanation for coolness, because, as you kind of were
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Speaker 1: inferring in your ted talk, my cool could be your
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Speaker 1: cringe or vice versa, or the thing that you desire
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Speaker 1: is the thing that I fucking hate, or the thing
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Speaker 1: that's socially acceptable could be socially repellent in another group.
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Speaker 2: Well, that that can happen.
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Speaker 3: But what I found, the more recent research that I
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Speaker 3: did was looking at the personality, traits and characteristics of
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Speaker 3: cool people around the world. We got data from twelve
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Speaker 3: different countries thirteen regions of both Hong Kong and mainland China,
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Speaker 3: and the surprising finding for me was we found the
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Speaker 3: same types of people are cool everywhere. So even though
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Speaker 3: the details might differ like the specific product or a
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Speaker 3: musician or person that change people think is cool might
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Speaker 3: be different than people in Turkey. What we see is
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Speaker 3: if you abstract up a level, like what personality do
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Speaker 3: these people have?
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Speaker 2: These cool people have, it's the same everywhere.
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Speaker 3: And what we found is that and what we're looking
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Speaker 3: at is both cool. How is cool different from not cool?
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Speaker 3: And how is cool different from good? So it's not
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Speaker 3: just purely positive. And we saw the same six characteristics
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Speaker 3: in cool people around the world, being adventurous, open, and autonomous.
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Speaker 2: So these three kind of fit together.
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Speaker 3: People who go their own way, they try new things,
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Speaker 3: they're open to new ideas and experiences. They're not they're
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Speaker 3: not doing things just for rewards. They're doing them out
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Speaker 3: of and sort of this ctrinsic motivation. And then the
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Speaker 3: other three characteristics we found are that they're extroverted, they're hedonistic,
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Speaker 3: so they pursue immediate pleasure rather than long term, long
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Speaker 3: term payouts.
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Speaker 2: And they're powerful.
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Speaker 3: And so there are a lot of other traits that
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Speaker 3: are positive, but they're not they're not distinctly cool. So
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Speaker 3: being agreeable, being conscientious, being warm, being calm, which is
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Speaker 3: sometimes associated with being cool, is actually seen more as
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Speaker 3: a good trait than a cool trait, and being traditional, secure, conforming.
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Speaker 3: These things are are not cool, but they are good.
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Speaker 1: What about attractiveness.
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Speaker 3: We didn't measure that, but I'm guessing so that's a
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Speaker 3: very positive trait. So there's two possibilities. It could be
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Speaker 3: equally cool and good, so capable. One trait we have
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Speaker 3: we found is it's cool, but it's also good and
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Speaker 3: it's both things in equal measure, so it could be
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Speaker 3: that or it could be more cool than good. We
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Speaker 3: could we had to limit what we could measure, and
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Speaker 3: so we basically took We took two established scales. There's
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Speaker 3: the Big five personality traits, which is why you heard
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Speaker 3: about being extroverted. One are the other ones, so extroversion, openness,
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Speaker 3: neuroticism come as the opposite of neuroticism, conscientiousness, and agreeableness.
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Speaker 3: So those are the Big five, and then the other
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Speaker 3: ten are from a scale developed by a scholar named
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Speaker 3: Schwartz that looks at sort of universal values that's been
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Speaker 3: studied across cultures too. So we kind of flip these
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Speaker 3: scales rather than have people measure, rather than measuring these
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Speaker 3: things about themselves, like I'm extroverted versus introverted. We had
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Speaker 3: we had people measure another person, either a person that
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Speaker 3: they thought was cool or a person they thought was
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Speaker 3: not cool, or a person they thought was good or
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Speaker 3: a person they thought was not good. And then we
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Speaker 3: could look at the differences between cool people and the
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Speaker 3: other types of people.
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Speaker 1: And do marketing people, branding people try to consciously operationalize
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Speaker 1: cool for commercial I'm guessing that.
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Speaker 3: I do, yes, and they, I mean they used to
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Speaker 3: pay consultants a lot of money for that.
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Speaker 2: Like these cool hunters.
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Speaker 1: Oh, the cool hunters. What do you do a cool hunter?
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Speaker 1: What does that well sit down? Brian?
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Speaker 2: I'm not sure. They probably go by different names now.
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Speaker 3: Yeah, But one point of this research is a lot
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Speaker 3: of the people in the sort of cool hunting industry,
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Speaker 3: at least when it started, would say, oh, cool is mysterious.
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Speaker 2: You know what, you know what when you see it, but.
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Speaker 3: Only cool people know it, and so you can't even
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Speaker 3: try to you can't even try.
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Speaker 2: You just need to trust cool people.
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Speaker 3: So they're kind of saying like, this is our turf,
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Speaker 3: no one else can understand it. And what I'm trying
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Speaker 3: to do with my research is show like this is
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Speaker 3: something that anybody can understand and study with the right
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Speaker 3: methods or the right tools, And largely the way to
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Speaker 3: do it is just by measuring what people think is cool,
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Speaker 3: because it doesn't matter how the dictionary, it doesn't matter
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Speaker 3: how I or anyone else defines what cool is.
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Speaker 2: What matters is what people, if.
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Speaker 3: You're talking of marketing, the market or consumers perceive to
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Speaker 3: be cool. And if people agree that, you know, I
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Speaker 3: don't know the weekend is cool, then he's cool.
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Speaker 2: People don't think the weekend's cool, then he's not.
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Speaker 3: And where it gets complicated is that if you take
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Speaker 3: a look at different market segments, some of them think
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Speaker 3: the weekend is cool and some don't.
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Speaker 1: And what's hilarious right now is half my audience to like,
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Speaker 1: what do you mean the weekend? Do you mean Saturday
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Speaker 1: and Sunday?
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Speaker 2: That it worked for either.
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Speaker 1: Is a is there a kind of a scale of
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Speaker 1: cool where too much cool becomes off putting? Or like
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Speaker 1: is there a metric around it where we go we
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Speaker 1: want them to be cool, but we don't want them
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Speaker 1: to be intimidating because people will disconnect, not connect, or
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Speaker 1: not really identify.
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Speaker 2: I have it seen.
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Speaker 3: I haven't seen anyone who's suffered or any brand that
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Speaker 3: suffered from being seen as too cool.
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Speaker 2: Now there are.
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Speaker 3: Situations where we don't want cool brands or cool people.
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Speaker 3: I don't want my parents to be cool. I want
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Speaker 3: them to be good people. I want them to be reliable,
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Speaker 3: I want them to care. But I don't think that's
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Speaker 3: an issue of being too cool. I mean, I think
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Speaker 3: that could be an issue of lacking things that are
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Speaker 3: not cool that are valued more.
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Speaker 1: Yes, if you had to give me cool in the
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Speaker 1: context that we're talking about, if you had to give
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Speaker 1: me a synonym for cool, what would it be.
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Speaker 2: That's hard.
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Speaker 3: There's always synonyms that in slang especially, but those go
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Speaker 3: in and out of fashion all the time. So if
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Speaker 3: you go to the look back sick yeah, hip in
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Speaker 3: the fifties, Yes, sick more recently, rad in the eighties,
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Speaker 3: which that one's come back a little.
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Speaker 2: Bit fire and for your time, bro groovy groovy Yeah,
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Speaker 2: that one's probably from the sixties too. Yeah.
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Speaker 3: So there's different synonyms that pop up, and they go
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Speaker 3: in and out of fashion. The reason I think studying
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Speaker 3: cool is important, the reason I think it's not just
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Speaker 3: another word without that doesn't represent a bigger and more
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Speaker 3: important concept is people have been using this word fairly
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Speaker 3: consistently since at least the nineteen fifties. Yes, and now
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Speaker 3: they use this word without translating it all around the world,
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Speaker 3: which is how we did these studies. We would translate
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Speaker 3: all the other words in our surveys and we wouldn't
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Speaker 3: translate the word cool, because whether the participant was in
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Speaker 3: Nigeria or South Korea, or Australia or Germany or Spain,
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Speaker 3: they all knew what cool meant. And also it as
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Speaker 3: the same types of people.
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Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, what do we do we know? And by
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Speaker 1: way I mean you? Of course I don't. Do we
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Speaker 1: know the etymology of the term in this conceptual kind
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Speaker 1: of framework, like where did the when did we first
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Speaker 1: start using it? From? Where did it come?
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Speaker 3: I shouldn't know this better than I do. I've read
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Speaker 3: this multiple times, but I don't.
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Speaker 2: I don't remember. I don't remember about what I wrote.
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Speaker 3: There's a there's a debate about it, and some have
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Speaker 3: argued that this idea of kool came over from West
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Speaker 3: Africa on the slave ships as this sort of underground
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Speaker 3: language and emotional expression that slaves did to sort of
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Speaker 3: hide to speak to one another while hiding meaning from
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Speaker 3: their masters.
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Speaker 2: I think I'm not sure how much evidence there is
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Speaker 2: for this.
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Speaker 3: I think what what is fairly uncontroversial is that people
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Speaker 3: in sort of these jazz subcultures, jazz and bohemian subcultures
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Speaker 3: in the forties and fifties started using the word regularly,
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Speaker 3: and it's and to mean something similar to the way
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Speaker 3: we've used the word since. And it might have come
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Speaker 3: from this idea of emotional restraint, like the opposite of hot.
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Speaker 2: Although all the data I.
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Speaker 3: Have gathered about the way this word is used now
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Speaker 3: is it does not mean that. I have a lot
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Speaker 3: of data showing that people who are emotionally expressive are
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Speaker 3: seen as being more cool than those who are inexpressive.
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Speaker 3: So cool, if it ever meant this no longer does.
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Speaker 1: When I first started, like week one of my PhDa,
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Speaker 1: my pH day is on metaperception, you know, the way
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Speaker 1: that other people perceive and experience us, right, So it's
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Speaker 1: kind of under the umbrella of self awareness, social awareness,
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Speaker 1: situational awareness, so that stuff. And I remember thinking, I
14:02
Speaker 1: wonder when the first kind of the first things were
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Speaker 1: written about self awareness, like what's the early research, right,
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Speaker 1: And I went, it's probably like one hundred years ago,
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Speaker 1: the nineteen twenties or thirties, because psychology as a field
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Speaker 1: is not that old as we have it now, right,
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Speaker 1: even though it's kind of been around.
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Speaker 2: The philosophers who talked about it.
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Speaker 1: Yeah, well be for it. I think Socrates said to
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Speaker 1: know thyself as the beginning of wisdom, right, And I'm like, oh,
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Speaker 1: well that was twenty three hundred years ago or something,
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Speaker 1: And I went, so, I'm not doing anything new. I'm
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Speaker 1: not asking any new questions. Well, a couple of new questions,
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Speaker 1: but yeah, I wonder how long people have been Like
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Speaker 1: when you opened the door on researching this, did you
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Speaker 1: just go into an academic search engine and go research
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Speaker 1: on cool and nothing came up?
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Speaker 3: There wasn't very much, which is so rare as I'm
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Speaker 3: sure you know, when I first started studying this, I
15:03
Speaker 3: could probably say that I had read everything that had
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Speaker 3: been written on the topic, at least by scholars, yes,
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Speaker 3: which you know, in what area can you possibly say?
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Speaker 3: I can't say that anymore because there's been a lot
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Speaker 3: more research the last ten to fifteen years. But you know,
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Speaker 3: to understand this, I wasn't looking mostly at research on coolness.
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Speaker 3: I was looking instead at research on like social status
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Speaker 3: and autonomy, and on social perception and impressions and stat
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Speaker 3: and sort of how social influence or these other these
15:39
Speaker 3: other topics that were related to it, to try to understand,
15:44
Speaker 3: you know, what is this what is this phenomenon that
15:48
Speaker 3: I see that seems to be driving a lot of
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Speaker 3: the behavior out there. There was an Onion article published
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Speaker 3: right around when I was finishing my PhD that said
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Speaker 3: something like consumers spend thirty trillion dollars each year. Report
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Speaker 3: says consumers spend thirty trillion dollars each year trying to
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Speaker 3: be cool. Yeah, yeah, this is a satire newspaper, but
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Speaker 3: it is you know, that's something that taps into a
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Speaker 3: truth that most of us feel. But then the question
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Speaker 3: is like, well, what is this thing that's cool? How
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Speaker 3: do things become cool? And so that's what that's what
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Speaker 3: I've been working on the last it's been twenty years now.
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Speaker 1: Like for almost everything in psychology, there's a style, right,
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Speaker 1: So I developed a style for matter accuracy and behavior
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Speaker 1: emotional cognitive. It's kind of full dominds ten different kind
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Speaker 1: of criteria blah blah blah, and everything seems to be
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Speaker 1: on a scale. Is there a coolness style? Can we
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Speaker 1: measure it?
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Speaker 3: There are there are, no There are many coolness scales,
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Speaker 3: one that I contributed myself. Honestly though, I think one
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Speaker 3: of the best, the probably the most powerful way to
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Speaker 3: measure it is just how cool is this person?
17:02
Speaker 2: Brand?
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Speaker 3: Thingten like from uncool to cool on a single item
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Speaker 3: scale that works pretty well. For there are scales developed
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Speaker 3: specifically to measure cool technologies. There are scales to measure
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Speaker 3: cool fashions. I worked on a scale to measure cool brands. Really,
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Speaker 3: what we're if you just want to measure whether the
17:23
Speaker 3: brand is cool, the one item thing works better. But
17:25
Speaker 3: what we were looking at there is what are the
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Speaker 3: characteristics of cool brands? And so we identified we identified
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Speaker 3: ten different characteristics are I don't want to call them subdimensions,
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Speaker 3: but they're kind of cool. Brands have more of these
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Speaker 3: characteristics than not cool brands, and increasing any of these
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Speaker 3: characteristics tends to make their brand cooler.
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Speaker 2: Do you want to hear what those are? Or is
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Speaker 2: that two in the week?
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Speaker 1: Yeah? No, definitely, definitely. I want I want to know
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Speaker 1: to think, well, yeah, let's start with that. Tell me, so,
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Speaker 1: what are the cool brands?
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Speaker 2: So? For cool the characteristics of cool brands.
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Speaker 3: Now, I will say one thing is that when we
18:01
Speaker 3: were doing this, we weren't specifically distinguishing cool from favorable
18:06
Speaker 3: or good. So a lot of these it's not clear
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Speaker 3: to what extent this makes brands distinctly cool rather than
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Speaker 3: just positive.
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Speaker 2: I'm not sure.
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Speaker 3: With that said, the characteristics we came up with were
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Speaker 3: being extraordinary, which just seems to me just like straight positive,
18:23
Speaker 3: high status, esthetically appealing.
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Speaker 2: So there's the attractiveness you mentioned before.
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Speaker 3: Rebellious, original, authentic, subcultural, end popular. Now this is because
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Speaker 3: cool has a life cycle, and I think this is
18:42
Speaker 3: tapping into two different times in the life cycle. Cool
18:45
Speaker 3: brands start to start off as subcultural and end up
18:48
Speaker 3: becoming popular and finally iconic and energetic. So like high energy, enthusiastic,
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Speaker 3: exciting might fit there. Yes, and so with I'll also
19:03
Speaker 3: say one more thing about rebellion, which is like that
19:06
Speaker 3: can go too far. I've found that in my other
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Speaker 3: research is I don't think you can be too cool,
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Speaker 3: but you can definitely be too rebellious to be cool,
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Speaker 3: especially if people don't think if people don't think they're rebellion.
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Speaker 3: So like to take to take an example, you know.
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Speaker 2: Someone who.
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Speaker 3: Jeffrey Epstein, you know, a child molester, child pornographer, is
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Speaker 3: very rebellious, but they're not going to seem cool. And
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Speaker 3: it can even be more mundane, like someone who just
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Speaker 3: sort of, I don't know, spits on a car on
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Speaker 3: the street probably wouldn't seem cool because the rebellion and
19:40
Speaker 3: really the autonomy, which is sort of the higher level
19:43
Speaker 3: factor I think is driving a lot of coolness needs
19:45
Speaker 3: to seem appropriate, and that it offers sort of a
19:49
Speaker 3: different way that people could behave and might want others
19:53
Speaker 3: to behave.
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Speaker 1: Yes, yes, I remember. I'm going to be a little
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Speaker 1: vague on this, but did you read Blake by Malcolm.
20:01
Speaker 2: Gladwell, yes, but not recently.
20:05
Speaker 1: Yeah, sign with me. But I remember him talking about
20:07
Speaker 1: this story of I think hush puppies were like in
20:13
Speaker 1: the sixties and seventies, you know those shoes He.
20:16
Speaker 2: Talks about that.
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Speaker 3: He talks about that in his New Yorker article The
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Speaker 3: Cool Hunt, which he wrote nineteen ninety seven. That's the
20:22
Speaker 3: first thing I found written about coolness.
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Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, Well, do you want to tell my listeners
20:27
Speaker 1: that story because I'll probably fuck it up? So you
20:29
Speaker 1: feel oh, all right?
20:33
Speaker 2: Well, so in the Cool Hunt.
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Speaker 3: Gladwell was looking at this practice of cool hunting and
20:38
Speaker 3: he found these sort of consultants who were pretty young
20:41
Speaker 3: at the time, twenties maybe young thirties in New York
20:43
Speaker 3: City in the mid nineties, and they were tracking trends
20:48
Speaker 3: and one trend they were tracking was hush puppies were
20:50
Speaker 3: so I think this type of shoe that had gone
20:53
Speaker 3: out of fashion a while ago and had come back
20:55
Speaker 3: into fashion because it was being worn by cool people
21:00
Speaker 3: in New York. So these would probably be like early hipsters,
21:04
Speaker 3: back before hipsters were everywhere, and this is the nineties.
21:07
Speaker 3: And he told the story about how these brands that
21:13
Speaker 3: went from being unfashionable to being one of the hottest
21:16
Speaker 3: trends on the market because cool people were adopting it.
21:21
Speaker 3: And Gladwell's initial theory of coolness is it's just this
21:24
Speaker 3: meaning transfer thing. So brands become cool because cool people
21:28
Speaker 3: use them, and then other people get the brand because
21:30
Speaker 3: they want to be cool themselves, and so the cool
21:32
Speaker 3: transfers from the brand to the people initially, but then
21:36
Speaker 3: the really cool people who started the trend don't want
21:39
Speaker 3: to be associated with all the normies who've tried since
21:43
Speaker 3: adopted a brand like Hushpuppies, and so they move on
21:46
Speaker 3: to the next thing, and the next thing they're wearing
21:48
Speaker 3: like Babe or Supreme or something that becomes that becomes
21:54
Speaker 3: too popular to be cool, and so they move on
21:56
Speaker 3: to something else.
21:57
Speaker 1: I reckonomize the epitome of something that just objectively who's objective, right,
22:04
Speaker 1: but seemingly objectively who was not an objective thing? Exactly right?
22:09
Speaker 1: And obviously everything I say is a subjective interpretation, right,
22:13
Speaker 1: but seemingly to a lot of people, the least cool
22:17
Speaker 1: shoes in the world are or were Crocs, but they're
22:22
Speaker 1: even still like I see the kids out in them now, teenagers,
22:26
Speaker 1: young people or people in their early twenties. I don't
22:29
Speaker 1: know about in the States, but in Australia they still
22:32
Speaker 1: get a good run, like super popular. I'm like, how
22:35
Speaker 1: on earth is that ugly ass looking piece of footwear
22:39
Speaker 1: so popular?
22:41
Speaker 2: Well, I'm not sure how cool it is even if
22:43
Speaker 2: it's popular.
22:44
Speaker 3: I mean it's functional, especially if you're in and out
22:49
Speaker 3: of the water or.
22:54
Speaker 2: That's on temperature. Cool for that too easy to clean.
23:00
Speaker 3: I mean, I think, you know, I think there we
23:03
Speaker 3: don't study this, we don't measure this. Explicitly, but I'm
23:06
Speaker 3: pretty sure there's a I mean, this is true for
23:08
Speaker 3: most status products. There's a negative correlation between how functional
23:12
Speaker 3: it is and how good it is at signaling coolness
23:16
Speaker 3: or other forms of status, because the less functional something is,
23:19
Speaker 3: the harder it is for many people to adopt, and
23:22
Speaker 3: of too many people adopt something, it no longer signals
23:25
Speaker 3: status or coolness.
23:26
Speaker 2: If we're talking about coolness specifically.
23:30
Speaker 1: The video that I saw you on earlier, which was
23:34
Speaker 1: seven years ago, you were talking, you were talking about
23:36
Speaker 1: similar things. I wonder how like, I'm thinking about twenty
23:40
Speaker 1: and eighteen now, and while there was online shopping, it
23:44
Speaker 1: was pretty it was in its infancy compared to where
23:47
Speaker 1: we're at now, and I suspect most people in twenty
23:52
Speaker 1: eighteen went to stores and bought the things that were
23:54
Speaker 1: going to buy most people. That's definitely changing. Has that
23:59
Speaker 1: impacted coolness or perception of coolness, Like the fact that
24:02
Speaker 1: we now do so much stuff online and it's becoming,
24:07
Speaker 1: you know, to the point now where there are retail
24:10
Speaker 1: businesses in Australia that only operate online now that used
24:13
Speaker 1: to have bricks and mortar shop fronts.
24:17
Speaker 3: I don't know, I haven't thought about that. I think
24:20
Speaker 3: the way you're going to need to signal cool is
24:23
Speaker 3: going to change. Obviously it's going to depend less on
24:26
Speaker 3: the in person experience, but it might depend more on
24:32
Speaker 3: the signs on your website. It might depend less on
24:35
Speaker 3: the product itself and more on who's endorsing it. Especially
24:38
Speaker 3: if your main marketing strategy is social media, or if
24:42
Speaker 3: you're trying to get you know, you're using lots of
24:44
Speaker 3: influencer marketing that type of thing, then it's really going
24:47
Speaker 3: to depend more on the coolness of whoever's promoting your
24:51
Speaker 3: stuff rather than the stuff itself or what's in the store.
24:55
Speaker 1: What's the least I mean, again, this is just an opinion,
24:58
Speaker 1: but it's also research, I guess, but the least cool,
25:02
Speaker 1: or the least functional, or the least what's what? Am
25:07
Speaker 1: I saying? The worst product that you've seen that's really cool?
25:11
Speaker 1: Like where you like? That just doesn't from a functional
25:14
Speaker 1: point of view or doing what it's intended point of view,
25:18
Speaker 1: it really doesn't make sense. But nonetheless people love it.
25:21
Speaker 1: It's perceived as cool. Is there anything that springs to mind?
25:26
Speaker 2: Yeah, nothing springs to mind.
25:28
Speaker 3: A lot of times, it helps to have some something
25:32
Speaker 3: of tangible value so that people can attribute. People don't
25:37
Speaker 3: want to seem like they're doing something just because they
25:41
Speaker 3: want to be cool, and so it helps to have
25:44
Speaker 3: something else to attribute why you're buying it, for the
25:47
Speaker 3: reason you're buying it. For instance, look at like expensive
25:52
Speaker 3: designer genes. Most people.
25:56
Speaker 2: I remember my.
25:58
Speaker 3: Sister when she was a teenager, she's some grown out
26:00
Speaker 3: of the stage, would insist on getting like two hundred
26:05
Speaker 3: dollars jeans or one hundred dollars designer genes, and it
26:08
Speaker 3: was clearly a status thing. They were cool in her
26:10
Speaker 3: high school and she wanted that, but it was she
26:13
Speaker 3: would say, it's because they fit better, they've hit better,
26:16
Speaker 3: and then you know they had some like stretching material
26:18
Speaker 3: that so the value came from being cool, but having
26:24
Speaker 3: this extra function let her talk about it and claim
26:29
Speaker 3: that it was that was the reason she was buying
26:32
Speaker 3: this product.
26:33
Speaker 2: Which so there are I'm sure there are.
26:35
Speaker 3: Examples of brands and products that are cool without the function,
26:43
Speaker 3: But I think what's more common is something is cool
26:48
Speaker 3: and there is something something functional or some of something
26:52
Speaker 3: else that's causing value that helps people sort of justify
26:58
Speaker 3: whatever it is they're doing, not in terms of seeking
27:00
Speaker 3: coolness or just seeking status.
27:02
Speaker 1: I feel like nobody that I'm well, most of the
27:07
Speaker 1: people that I work in the fitness industry, a bit
27:10
Speaker 1: corporate space, a lot and a lot of corporate speaking.
27:15
Speaker 1: And I guess no companies and no brands want to
27:17
Speaker 1: be less cool, and no people want to be less cool.
27:21
Speaker 1: Although for some people, of course it's not really a
27:23
Speaker 1: thing and it's not a consideration, but can people I
27:29
Speaker 1: feel like people who want to become like, trying to
27:32
Speaker 1: be cool is the uncoolest thing. Is there a clunky
27:37
Speaker 1: a way that's less clunky or less awkward, or less
27:41
Speaker 1: socially repellent where people can actually become cooler. It's like
27:46
Speaker 1: trying to impress people is wildly unimpressive, because it's pretty obvious.
27:50
Speaker 3: Right, Yeah, Well, to be cool, you need to seem autonomous,
27:56
Speaker 3: meaning like you need to seem like whatever it is
27:58
Speaker 3: you're doing, you're doing that out of an intrinsic interest.
28:02
Speaker 3: And usually it helps to be doing something different than
28:04
Speaker 3: what others are doing.
28:05
Speaker 1: Yea.
28:06
Speaker 2: And so if you are.
28:10
Speaker 3: If people think you're doing something just to be cool,
28:13
Speaker 3: that undermines the coolness of it. I ran some experiments
28:18
Speaker 3: with my brother who's also a marketing professor, Nathan Warren
28:21
Speaker 3: at the Buy Norwegian School of Management. And this here
28:24
Speaker 3: we looked at we were comparing coolness to wealth, a
28:27
Speaker 3: sort of two different status systems. You can have status
28:32
Speaker 3: by becoming wealthy, you can have status by being cool.
28:34
Speaker 3: And we were comparing people who are wealthy because they
28:39
Speaker 3: worked hard and tried versus wealthy without trying, without working
28:43
Speaker 3: hard for it, and people who are cool because they
28:46
Speaker 3: worked hard and tried to be cool. And people are
28:47
Speaker 3: cool without effort effortlessly yes, and so we get this
28:51
Speaker 3: nice crossover. And we're looking at how much people are
28:54
Speaker 3: respected or looked up to, basically how much status they
28:56
Speaker 3: get for it.
28:57
Speaker 2: And with wealth, people get more status.
29:00
Speaker 3: They're more respected when they are wealthy through effort because
29:03
Speaker 3: they try. But with coolness it flips so you're less
29:07
Speaker 3: you're less respected, you're less looked up to, you have
29:10
Speaker 3: less status if you're cool because you're trying to be cool.
29:13
Speaker 3: And part of that is because people don't think you
29:15
Speaker 3: are as cool.
29:16
Speaker 1: It's when when students enroll in your program, what's their
29:23
Speaker 1: motivation is it? Is it because it's part of their
29:27
Speaker 1: marketing degree or their psychology degree, So it's just a
29:32
Speaker 1: component or are they compelled to understand the field or
29:37
Speaker 1: understand that kind of construct.
29:41
Speaker 3: Well, I don't have very many students who are studying coolness.
29:45
Speaker 2: So that's kind of that's my thing.
29:48
Speaker 3: I'd love to take on a PhD student who wants
29:50
Speaker 3: to study this topic, but so far they've been largely
29:54
Speaker 3: focusing on other things. So the students I teach are
29:57
Speaker 3: if they join PhD programs for what variety reasons, and
30:01
Speaker 3: then the other programs I teach, it's probably they're not
30:04
Speaker 3: at all interested in research because these are NBA programs
30:08
Speaker 3: or master's programs or undergraduate programs in marketing.
30:11
Speaker 1: All right, I'll tell you what I'm going to do.
30:13
Speaker 1: I've been chicily doing something and this is purely just
30:16
Speaker 1: an exercise and fun. I'm going to give you ten
30:19
Speaker 1: famous people and you're going to tell me cool or not? Ready?
30:24
Speaker 2: Oh boy? All right?
30:26
Speaker 1: Okay? Donald Trump.
30:29
Speaker 3: Republicans think he's cool, but no one else does. Elon
30:33
Speaker 3: musk Oh, So he's an interesting one because I think he,
30:38
Speaker 3: more than most people, really really wants to be cool.
30:43
Speaker 1: Clues motherfucker.
30:45
Speaker 3: Ever, and he he's and it's become so obvious and
30:50
Speaker 3: that he's basically if you ask me this five years ago, yeah,
30:55
Speaker 3: I think people would have said, yeah, he's he's very cool,
30:58
Speaker 3: because he is.
30:59
Speaker 2: He is kind of rebellious, he doesn't follow the rules.
31:01
Speaker 3: He's been really innovative, you know, bringing Tesla back and
31:05
Speaker 3: starting these companies, But over especially the last couple of years,
31:11
Speaker 3: like he's just sort of like he's sucked up to
31:15
Speaker 3: the president's He basically took over Twitter and kicked everybody
31:20
Speaker 3: he disagreed with off and like became like arguably he's
31:25
Speaker 3: started sympathizing with Nazis. I mean, it's what he's done lately.
31:32
Speaker 3: And then and then he split with Trump. So even
31:34
Speaker 3: the Republicans who maybe thought he was cool while he
31:36
Speaker 3: was running Doge don't anymore either. So I think right
31:39
Speaker 3: now there's a very few people. It's an empirical question
31:41
Speaker 3: we need to ask. My guests would be Elon Musk
31:44
Speaker 3: would probably score one of the lowest of all the
31:47
Speaker 3: people you could get on the coolness scale, after being
31:49
Speaker 3: one of the highest five years ago. I bet he
31:52
Speaker 3: has the biggest change of anyone in the world over
31:54
Speaker 3: the last five years.
31:57
Speaker 1: Number three on my list is Francis good Luck answering that.
32:05
Speaker 3: I mean, if your references other popes, I would say
32:07
Speaker 3: pretty cool.
32:09
Speaker 1: Yea.
32:10
Speaker 3: He broke from a lot of the tradition. He modernized
32:14
Speaker 3: some of the practices. I so it's always like what
32:19
Speaker 3: are you what are you comparing this person to? And
32:22
Speaker 3: if your reference group is other popes, I bet he's
32:24
Speaker 3: going to score about as high as you get if
32:27
Speaker 3: you did a if you did a pool measuring like
32:30
Speaker 3: how cool are all the popes? I guess is Pope
32:34
Speaker 3: Francis would appear towards the top. Yeah, But if you
32:38
Speaker 3: compare them to like rock stars, who knows, like that's yeah,
32:43
Speaker 3: that's not really, that's not really, that's hard hard to do,
32:47
Speaker 3: all right.
32:48
Speaker 1: I don't even know if you're not. I'm sure you do.
32:50
Speaker 3: But Cristiano Ronaldo, Yeah, I think there's a lot of
32:55
Speaker 3: people who think he's cool. He's the highest paid influencer
32:58
Speaker 3: in the world at least a time. Sometimes it goes
33:00
Speaker 3: back and forth between him and like a gener or someone.
33:04
Speaker 3: But there's definitely a lot of people who think he's cool.
33:09
Speaker 3: I'm not one of them, but plenty of people think
33:13
Speaker 3: he's cool.
33:14
Speaker 1: That's interesting. Tyler Swift.
33:18
Speaker 3: Taylor Swift is incredibly popular, and because there's this really
33:26
Speaker 3: close association with positivity and coolness, and so she would
33:30
Speaker 3: probably score if you just ask people straight up how
33:33
Speaker 3: cool is Taylor Swift, she'd score very high.
33:36
Speaker 2: But there's because she's so popular.
33:38
Speaker 3: There's a lot of people who don't think she's cool
33:41
Speaker 3: in part because she's so popular, And even the people
33:43
Speaker 3: who like her, if you force them to sort of
33:46
Speaker 3: distinguish cool from just good or positive, I bet she'd
33:49
Speaker 3: fall more on the positive side.
33:51
Speaker 2: Yeah.
33:52
Speaker 3: A lot of her traits and the reasons that I
33:56
Speaker 3: think she connects so well with her audience and with
33:58
Speaker 3: so many people, are that she has this very sort
34:01
Speaker 3: of good girl image in that she seems very caring
34:05
Speaker 3: and thoughtful and you know, emotion like emotionally present. And
34:11
Speaker 3: so I suspect she's she's very positive on coolness, it's
34:17
Speaker 3: somewhere in the middle, less cool than she has positive,
34:20
Speaker 3: But I mean, she's she's sold a ton of albums,
34:23
Speaker 3: she's changed up her sound a few times, she is
34:27
Speaker 3: she doesn't appear to just be trying.
34:30
Speaker 2: I don't know.
34:30
Speaker 3: Some people think she's probably just trying to make money
34:32
Speaker 3: at all costs.
34:33
Speaker 2: Others don't.
34:33
Speaker 3: I don't know, I think I think probably she'd be
34:36
Speaker 3: more favorable than cool.
34:39
Speaker 1: All right, I'm only going to do one more. Maybe
34:42
Speaker 1: the highest profile female in the world for the last
34:45
Speaker 1: thirty years, who do you reckon? I'm going to say,
34:50
Speaker 1: not the Queen.
34:53
Speaker 2: Not Queen bay Beyonce.
34:55
Speaker 1: I was going to say, I was going to say Oprah.
34:58
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, My guess is Oprah would score pretty low
35:02
Speaker 3: on coolness and very favorable.
35:06
Speaker 1: Very very popular, very loved, but.
35:08
Speaker 3: Normal, even more even more than Taylor Swift. She I
35:11
Speaker 3: think represents the mainstream.
35:13
Speaker 1: Yes, So this is a.
35:16
Speaker 3: Phenomenon about branding, Like brands often want to be cool,
35:19
Speaker 3: and it's helpful for brands that aren't known or are
35:22
Speaker 3: very small and want.
35:23
Speaker 2: To become market leaders.
35:25
Speaker 3: But once a brand's a market leader, it's better off
35:27
Speaker 3: to stop trying to be cool and offering value a
35:29
Speaker 3: different way. And to me, Oprah is that like she
35:33
Speaker 3: she she might have been cool initially, like there weren't
35:36
Speaker 3: too many black women with you know, daytime television shows,
35:41
Speaker 3: for any television show, and so at that time she
35:44
Speaker 3: might have been cool. But now she's become the norm.
35:47
Speaker 3: She's gone from sort of cool, niche cool to mass
35:50
Speaker 3: school to just popular, and she no longer seems cool,
35:54
Speaker 3: but it doesn't matter because people like her and they
35:56
Speaker 3: look up to her and they follow her, and she
35:59
Speaker 3: she is the new norm. Some about being cool is
36:01
Speaker 3: about moving the norm forward or changing or being different
36:05
Speaker 3: than it, and Oprah's not that anymore. But she's kind
36:08
Speaker 3: of the She's kind of the example of what of
36:12
Speaker 3: sort of if you're if you're want to be cool
36:15
Speaker 3: for the market benefits. Oprah is an example of the
36:19
Speaker 3: type of thing that to aspire to where maybe you're
36:23
Speaker 3: cool at first, but you become you become valued for
36:27
Speaker 3: other reasons, and you can remain a market leader because
36:30
Speaker 3: of that. It's hard to remain a market leader only
36:33
Speaker 3: by being cool, because once you become too popular, a
36:36
Speaker 3: lot of the people will not think you're cool anymore.
36:40
Speaker 1: Is there a speaking purely from a product or a
36:43
Speaker 1: brand perspective, is there a relationship between coolness and trustworthiness?
36:51
Speaker 1: Like do I want my product? Do I want to
36:54
Speaker 1: be trusted or do I want to be cool? Or
36:57
Speaker 1: do they coexist? All?
36:59
Speaker 2: Right? So there's going to be both.
37:01
Speaker 3: Are going to be correlated with just general attitude or
37:03
Speaker 3: how positive see people see the brand? Well, there might
37:07
Speaker 3: be if you just were to measure the two, they
37:09
Speaker 3: might be positively correlated.
37:10
Speaker 2: But many I.
37:11
Speaker 3: Think some of the actions you could take as a
37:13
Speaker 3: brand would be more likely to lead to coolness and
37:17
Speaker 3: hurt trustworthiness or vice versa.
37:19
Speaker 2: For example, doing things that.
37:20
Speaker 3: Are edgy or controversial might help a brand be cool
37:26
Speaker 3: but make it less trustworthy.
37:29
Speaker 1: I don't know if I should bring I don't know
37:31
Speaker 1: if I should bring this up. Sorry, prof but it
37:34
Speaker 1: didn't make a big splash here, but but I think
37:38
Speaker 1: it did in the States. Is it Dylan mulvainy? Is
37:44
Speaker 1: it that that? Uh, that influencer who did the bud
37:48
Speaker 1: Light commercials? Was it? And I think they had this
37:56
Speaker 1: whole kind of I don't know, you'll you'll know they
38:01
Speaker 1: did this. They did this whole campaign for bud Light,
38:05
Speaker 1: and it kind of blew up. I think I think
38:08
Speaker 1: they thought it was going to be cool and hit
38:10
Speaker 1: an amazing and well received, and it just wasn't well.
38:14
Speaker 2: I think they misread the room, they misread their audience.
38:18
Speaker 3: So correct me if I'm wrong with Dylan Malvine is
38:22
Speaker 3: a transgender influencer.
38:25
Speaker 1: I think so, yeah, yeah, Okay.
38:27
Speaker 3: So I think what happened was that bud Light hired
38:30
Speaker 3: this transgender influencer, and this is probably during the Biden
38:35
Speaker 3: administration when.
38:37
Speaker 1: It was probably two years ago maybe yeah.
38:40
Speaker 3: Okay, it was before sort of all this anti woke
38:42
Speaker 3: backlash that accompanied President Trump into power for the second time,
38:47
Speaker 3: back when, back when brands were really trying to be
38:51
Speaker 3: inclusive and embraced DEI. So bud Light hires this transgender influencer,
38:58
Speaker 3: and their audience it's doesn't like it, to say the least,
39:04
Speaker 3: and you know, it just doesn't fit their brand, where
39:09
Speaker 3: like their brand is where Budweiser succeeded with their marketing
39:16
Speaker 3: is by taking the opposite approach. So I don't know
39:17
Speaker 3: if you remember that or if these were even in Australia,
39:20
Speaker 3: but they had these dilly dilly ads where this is
39:23
Speaker 3: probably in the late teens. So all these people are
39:27
Speaker 3: going to the King and Queen and bringing bud Light
39:30
Speaker 3: as a tribute and they go dilly dilly, dilly dilly.
39:34
Speaker 3: It's a silly thing, they'll say, but basically everybody's happy
39:36
Speaker 3: to have bud Light. And then this hipsterish guy comes
39:39
Speaker 3: in and brings a honey mead.
39:43
Speaker 2: That he's that he's been really interested in lately.
39:45
Speaker 3: So this is this is like the cool people who
39:48
Speaker 3: you know, the cool people, not bud Light's audience. It's
39:51
Speaker 3: making fun of everybody in like Williamsburg, New York, and
39:54
Speaker 3: Silver Lake, Los Angeles, and sort of who are you
39:59
Speaker 3: know drink drink these micro brews and seek out seek
40:04
Speaker 3: out more interesting varieties. You know, they're not the people
40:06
Speaker 3: who like turn their nose up at a bud light.
40:10
Speaker 2: And so this person.
40:11
Speaker 3: Brings the honeyeat mead and the king sentences them to
40:15
Speaker 3: the pit of misery, and everybody watching it sort of
40:19
Speaker 3: feels like they're part of the party. They're part of
40:21
Speaker 3: this normal group who you know drink bud light and
40:26
Speaker 3: that's you know, that's normal. It's not about it's not
40:29
Speaker 3: about being cool. It's just about fitting with the group,
40:31
Speaker 3: doing what you like, not being snobby about it. And
40:36
Speaker 3: that's the type of marketing that works far better for
40:40
Speaker 3: bud Light because that appeals to their audience.
40:43
Speaker 2: Who you know, are you know?
40:46
Speaker 3: There might be I don't know, And I think especially
40:51
Speaker 3: a couple of years ago there this audience was getting
40:55
Speaker 3: a little bit fed up with all of the I
41:00
Speaker 3: would call it like DEI overreach, you know, I don't
41:04
Speaker 3: know I'm not. I'm not part of this subculture of
41:07
Speaker 3: like I would say the average bud Light drinker, and
41:11
Speaker 3: I don't want to but from what I understand, like
41:15
Speaker 3: most people are not like racist or transphobic, at least
41:20
Speaker 3: not consciously. But they were very tired of they felt
41:26
Speaker 3: like being a man and being white were seen as
41:30
Speaker 3: inherently bad.
41:32
Speaker 1: Uh.
41:32
Speaker 3: And they were tired of brands like Going Bending going
41:37
Speaker 3: out of their way to appease this crowd that was
41:41
Speaker 3: constantly no, we need more representation from minorities, from voices
41:45
Speaker 3: that aren't heard when you know it wasn't it wasn't
41:51
Speaker 3: called for now, I like, this is, there's, there's, there's.
41:56
Speaker 3: This is a difficult issue and it's hard for brands
41:59
Speaker 3: to have gate this. But I think but Light in
42:02
Speaker 3: this situation didn't do what its audience wanted.
42:05
Speaker 1: Yeah. One of the other things that you're interested in
42:08
Speaker 1: and I'm interested in but not particularly good at, is
42:11
Speaker 1: you're interested in humor and what's funny and what makes
42:14
Speaker 1: people laugh. And I guess what gets people's attention in
42:18
Speaker 1: that way? Is there a correlation between coolness and being funny?
42:23
Speaker 3: So the commonality is that both involve doing something different
42:27
Speaker 3: than the norm.
42:29
Speaker 2: Yeah, so.
42:32
Speaker 3: If you're just going to do what's conventional or what's
42:36
Speaker 3: what other people are doing, or what's expected in a situation,
42:39
Speaker 3: it's unlikely to be cool or funny. They differ though,
42:44
Speaker 3: in I think the valance of the divergence from the
42:48
Speaker 3: norm of how it's different with coolness, people's tend to
42:51
Speaker 3: see it as a positive difference.
42:53
Speaker 2: So you know, you're.
42:53
Speaker 3: Wearing this, you're wearing this hat, and nobody's wearing a
42:57
Speaker 3: hat like that, but it looks really good.
42:59
Speaker 2: That's cool.
43:00
Speaker 3: Whereas if you wear i don't know, like a giant
43:03
Speaker 3: duck on your head, that's also unusual. But there people
43:08
Speaker 3: will think that doesn't look good, that's funny. So I
43:13
Speaker 3: started studying humor. Let me get you the short version,
43:17
Speaker 3: and then if you want to get along with it.
43:19
Speaker 3: So the short version is we argue that things are
43:21
Speaker 3: funny when there's a violation. So something that threatens your
43:24
Speaker 3: perception of how the world should be, but at the
43:27
Speaker 3: same time you think it's benign, you're okay with it.
43:30
Speaker 3: So people shouldn't wear a duck for a hat, but
43:33
Speaker 3: you know that's not really causing any harm, and you know,
43:36
Speaker 3: so like there's it's a violation and it's benign.
43:40
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm thinking about in terms of comics that are
43:45
Speaker 1: I think, and this is purely my perspective. Like, someone
43:50
Speaker 1: likes Chappelle, I think is cool and funny. Someone liked
43:54
Speaker 1: Bill Burr. Bill Burr not cool at all and funny. Okay, well,
44:00
Speaker 1: both world renowned comics, and one seems too. And again,
44:05
Speaker 1: probably a lot of people look at Chappelle and think
44:07
Speaker 1: he's not dive Schapelle. I think he's kind of cool.
44:10
Speaker 1: I think he's got this energy about him that's you know, yeah.
44:13
Speaker 3: I think the comics who are seen as cool are
44:15
Speaker 3: more likely to be pushing for meaningful change in society.
44:22
Speaker 3: So Lenny Bruce is a go to here, and he
44:26
Speaker 3: was really pushing against overly restrictive norms, against profanity and
44:29
Speaker 3: against other things back in the early sixties, and so
44:34
Speaker 3: he was able to make jokes about that, but the
44:37
Speaker 3: change he was pushing for seemed like real and valuable,
44:39
Speaker 3: so he seemed cool.
44:40
Speaker 2: And Chappelle was doing the same thing.
44:42
Speaker 3: I think, for especially early on, many of his sketches
44:46
Speaker 3: were I think really a knockout racism and trying to
44:50
Speaker 3: push push against racism, and so I think he worked,
44:57
Speaker 3: So I think he seems cool in part because of that.
45:02
Speaker 1: Tell me a little bit about as we wind up,
45:05
Speaker 1: tell me a little bit about your research into humor,
45:09
Speaker 1: and like how do you do that research, and and
45:14
Speaker 1: like what have you discovered? How do you quantify and measure?
45:18
Speaker 1: And I don't know, analyze humor in that sense.
45:23
Speaker 3: I started around I started a year or two after
45:26
Speaker 3: I started researching coolness, and it was actually a much
45:29
Speaker 3: faster moving research dream because it's in some ways it's
45:32
Speaker 3: easier to measure. You can just ask people is this funny?
45:36
Speaker 3: Are you amused? You can like videotape them and see
45:39
Speaker 3: if they're laughing. So these are the signs that someone
45:43
Speaker 3: thinks something's funny, that they're experiencing humor. And most of
45:47
Speaker 3: our early work was looking at what is it that
45:48
Speaker 3: makes something funny?
45:50
Speaker 2: The more recent work and.
45:51
Speaker 3: Even early on, we were looking at, well, what are
45:53
Speaker 3: the consequences of humor?
45:54
Speaker 2: Because I'm in marketing, I was looking at.
45:56
Speaker 3: Humor and advertising some stuff with humor in like public
45:59
Speaker 3: relations and humor in goal pursuit for customers. But my
46:05
Speaker 3: favorite part of this work is the theory that we
46:08
Speaker 3: built the benign violation theory that have already described, and
46:11
Speaker 3: so what we do is we would we would just
46:13
Speaker 3: try to come up We try to manipulate things like
46:16
Speaker 3: is there a violation, yes or no? Does this seem wrong?
46:19
Speaker 3: And are people likely to see it as okay? When
46:21
Speaker 3: do people see it as okay? And this whole line
46:24
Speaker 3: of work started because I was reading moral psychology literature
46:30
Speaker 3: and my co author and founder of this theory with me,
46:33
Speaker 3: Peter McGraw, he was doing research on taboo trade offs,
46:37
Speaker 3: which is similar when people think like you are using
46:42
Speaker 3: using and when churches with outsourced prayer to India or
46:45
Speaker 3: raffle off ahammer suv to recruit new members. So like
46:49
Speaker 3: some sacred entity is engaging in a profane act marketing activity,
46:54
Speaker 3: and people say, I think that's wrong. But as he's
46:57
Speaker 3: presenting this, his audience members were laughing. And I was
47:00
Speaker 3: reading Jonathan Heights work on moral psychology, and he'd be
47:03
Speaker 3: describing this guy that has buys a chicken at the marketplace,
47:09
Speaker 3: then has sex with the chicken, and then cooks the
47:11
Speaker 3: chicken and eats it, and he asks people is this wrong?
47:14
Speaker 3: And people say yes, and he asks is this disgusting?
47:17
Speaker 3: And they say yes, And he asked, or you know,
47:19
Speaker 3: he asked, why is this wrong? And they don't give
47:20
Speaker 3: a real answer. They say, oh, it's disgusting. They can't
47:23
Speaker 3: come up with So he was looking at this moral
47:26
Speaker 3: happy get the term he used like moral dumbfounding, that
47:28
Speaker 3: was his term. But I was reading these in a
47:32
Speaker 3: psychology journal as like a twenty five year old graduate student,
47:37
Speaker 3: thinking this is hilarious that they would.
47:38
Speaker 2: Print something like this.
47:40
Speaker 3: Yes, so why is it funny even though I think
47:43
Speaker 3: it's wrong? And so then we started to do things
47:46
Speaker 3: like push around whether people would be more likely to
47:49
Speaker 3: see something that seems wrong, like a guy having sex
47:52
Speaker 3: with a chicken as more or less okay. And one
47:56
Speaker 3: thing that makes it seem okay is if it's psychologically
47:59
Speaker 3: dist so if it's not real, if it's somebody else
48:03
Speaker 3: that you don't care about rather than you, if it
48:07
Speaker 3: happened a long time ago. So war stories are often
48:09
Speaker 3: funny years after the fact, but they sucked during the time.
48:13
Speaker 3: All of these forms of distance, so distance reduces threat,
48:18
Speaker 3: and so it can make a violation easier to see
48:21
Speaker 3: as benign. And so we have these We took Jonathan
48:24
Speaker 3: Hights scenarios like this guy having sex with a chicken,
48:27
Speaker 3: these other weird sexual acts. We created other moral violations,
48:31
Speaker 3: like the mother at a wedding swiping all the tips
48:34
Speaker 3: from the tip jar of the servers. We took stuff
48:38
Speaker 3: from Peter's work on taboo trade offs, a church raffling
48:40
Speaker 3: Offahamer suv and we can make all these things seem
48:43
Speaker 3: more or less funny by making by making the violation
48:47
Speaker 3: seem more or less benign. So that's how we started
48:49
Speaker 3: this research, and we've tested We've tested the idea in
48:53
Speaker 3: a few different ways. In one project, we compared it
48:56
Speaker 3: with incongruity theory, which is not very clearly the but
49:00
Speaker 3: we basically we try to look at here are the
49:02
Speaker 3: four different ways people have defined in congruity, and none
49:05
Speaker 3: of them can explain humor as well as this these
49:09
Speaker 3: twin judgments of it's wrong and it's okay.
49:12
Speaker 1: Yeah, I love that, it's so interesting and last one,
49:17
Speaker 1: so what's got your attention now? What are you going
49:19
Speaker 1: to be opening the door on in the next year
49:22
Speaker 1: or two?
49:25
Speaker 3: Well, I mentioned earlier, I have a graduate student who's
49:28
Speaker 3: doing these I think really interesting projects on the psychology
49:31
Speaker 3: of AHI, how consumers and managers interact with it.
49:36
Speaker 2: So that there's some work there.
49:38
Speaker 3: I have another project I'm excited about it on sports
49:41
Speaker 3: gambling or gambling on any entertainment. And the fun finding
49:46
Speaker 3: there is like the people are fans. The people are
49:49
Speaker 3: most interested in the sport, enjoy watching it less when
49:53
Speaker 3: they're betting, which.
49:54
Speaker 1: That's not surprising, I guess it.
49:57
Speaker 2: The non fans. The non fans like it more.
49:58
Speaker 3: Here's why I think it's import is all these leagues
50:02
Speaker 3: and everyone sort of justifying this legalization of gambling, even
50:08
Speaker 3: though it leads to more debt, more addiction. There's a
50:12
Speaker 3: new study that shows that there's more violent crime where
50:15
Speaker 3: supports gambling is legal when there are games. So it's
50:20
Speaker 3: all justified as like, well, people have a right to
50:22
Speaker 3: pursue whatever it is that is that makes them happy,
50:25
Speaker 3: and you know, we shouldn't be a nanny state that
50:27
Speaker 3: tell them what they can do and what they can't do.
50:29
Speaker 2: They're willing to welcome to take their own risks.
50:31
Speaker 3: But what's interesting here is the fans actually, so it's
50:34
Speaker 3: the supposed trade off between enjoyment and long term risks,
50:39
Speaker 3: and so we're showing this for the fans, there's.
50:41
Speaker 2: Not even that trade off.
50:42
Speaker 3: It's a lose lose, so I'm hoping it will offer
50:46
Speaker 3: a little bit of well, and we haven't even submitted
50:49
Speaker 3: this yet, so I probably shouldn't be saying so much
50:53
Speaker 3: about it, but I think that I'm hoping it will
50:57
Speaker 3: help those who see value in maybe slowing the deregulation
51:04
Speaker 3: and proliferation of gambling everywhere. It might maybe maybe give
51:09
Speaker 3: them a rock for the slingshot they have in their
51:15
Speaker 3: David Births Goliath attempt to slow legalize gambling.
51:20
Speaker 1: Gambling, especially on the sports is massive in Australia, huge.
51:24
Speaker 3: Yes, and in the United States it is too, and
51:27
Speaker 3: it's all like in the last five years.
51:30
Speaker 1: It's huge. Hi, Kylo, But I really appreciate you chatting
51:34
Speaker 1: with me. Yeah, it's been so nice to have you
51:37
Speaker 1: on the You Project. We'll say goodbye officially now before
51:40
Speaker 1: we do, where do you want my audience to find you?
51:43
Speaker 1: Or is there any do you want to direct them
51:45
Speaker 1: towards a website or a book or anything, or some
51:48
Speaker 1: social media or.
51:51
Speaker 2: Well.
51:52
Speaker 3: I have a website through the university, hopefully be working
51:56
Speaker 3: on a book over the next year, but nothing out yet,
51:59
Speaker 3: So keep an eye on a book on coolness and
52:01
Speaker 3: maybe a year or two.
52:02
Speaker 1: Yeah, we'll get you back. I will say goodbye here
52:06
Speaker 1: but for now. Thanks so much, Kyler, but appreciate you. Tom.
52:09
Speaker 3: Thanks thanks for having me on. Good luck wrapping up
52:11
Speaker 3: your dissertation.
52:12
Speaker 1: Thanks buddy,