The pursuit of “the cool,” in our view, fundamentally altered the psychological motivations underlying our consumer choices. In conspicuous consumption, our emulation of higher-ups means we compete directly for status because we want what they have. But rebellious consumption changed the game, by making a product’s worth depend on how it embodied values that rejected a dominant group’s status.

Take the Schott Perfecto leather motorcycle jacket. Worn by James Dean, and by Marlon Brando’s character in the 1953 film “The Wild One,” it symbolized a rejection of traditional respectability. In our time, the business suit remains the standard uniform in corridors of power in Wall Street and Washington. But in the San Francisco Bay Area, it might suggest a back-office support professional (accountant, lawyer, etc.) who serves at the whim of a T-shirt-and-hoodie-wearing tech entrepreneur and his similarly clad software developers.

There’s no longer any one way to keep up with the Joneses. If the Joneses drive a BMW 3 Series, you can compete by buying a BMW 4 Series. But if the Joneses drive a minivan, you can drive a sport utility vehicle to rebel against their staid domesticity. (This is what happened in the 1990s, when suburbanites embraced the S.U.V. as a symbol of fun and adventure.) And if the Joneses drive an S.U.V., you can drive a Prius, or forgo a car altogether — as a sign that you embrace a green lifestyle.

By comparing a PC user to an Orwellian drone while likening a Mac user to a sexy athlete in its iconic “1984” ad, Apple made a fundamental claim about the allure of its products. Today, Apple products are expensive because they’re seen as cool; they’re not cool because they’re expensive (which is still the case for many luxury goods).

A new neuroscience of consumer behavior reinforces our argument. In one experiment, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to understand our brains’ reaction to perceived coolness. We selected students from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Calif., and asked them to rate, from uncool to cool, hundreds of images from the following categories: bottled water, shoes, perfumes, handbags, watches, cars, chairs, personal electronics and sunglasses. We also included images of celebrities (actors and musicians). The cooler objects typically weren’t the more expensive ones: our subjects rated a Kia hatchback above a Buick sedan, for example.

We then asked other students to look at images of these objects and people on a screen above their eyes, while in an fMRI scanner. The most striking finding: Asking people merely to look at products and people they considered “cool” sparked a pattern of brain activation in the medial prefrontal cortex — a part of the brain that is involved in daydreaming, planning and ruminating — similar to what happens when people receive praise. Our brain’s medial prefrontal cortex, in short, tracks our social esteem.

A new generation of ethnographers has discovered an explosion of consumer lifestyles and product diversification in recent decades. From evangelical Christian Harley-Davidson owners, who huddle together around a motorcycle’s radio listening to a service on Sunday mornings, to lifestyles organized around musical tastes, from the solidarity of punk rockers to yoga gatherings, from meditation retreats to book clubs, we use products to create and experience community. These communities often represent a consumer micro-culture, a “brand community,” or tribe, with its own values and norms about status.