Last week, a group of scientists from Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, published an article on Science Advances, unveiling the potential relationship between body odor and friendship. The group has found intriguing evidence suggesting that people with a similar smell have a higher chance to form instant personal connections.
Terrestrial mammals rely heavily on olfaction (sense of smell) to identify friends or foes. The researchers thus hypothesized that us humans, like those mammals, may also draw on our sense of smell to help us make social decisions. Inbal Ravreby, the first author of this article, decided to study the role of body odor in “click” friendships, which are relationships that form before extensive exchange of personal information. She reasoned that because of the rapid nature of such friendship, physiological traits such as smell would have more impact on the pair’s decision.
Ravreby first recruited 20 pairs of so-called “click” friends and put them in a body odor experiment. To control the smell, participants showered before putting on a clean lab-provided shirt. After sleeping for a night, the shirts were collected and tested under the electric nose, a device that detects the chemical makeup of body odor. Ravreby’s team found that the molecular fingerprints of body odor were much similar between friends than the strangers.
However, there were still confounding variables that could explain why the friend’s odors were similar to each other. For instance, a similar lifestyle or diet might directly lead to the secretion of similar chemicals. To further solidify her hypothesis, Ravreby and her colleagues recruited 132 strangers to play a mirroring game, where pairs of participants try to mimic each other’s action. After the activity, the pair filled out a questionnaire rating their connection while their clothes were sent to be scrutinized by the electric nose. Out of those who reported pleasant, positive connections, 71 percent of those shared similar body odor. These results provided solid evidence for the causal relationship between body odor and social interaction, clearly demonstrating the importance of smell in our social interactions.
The team are now looking into modifying people’s body odor to see if they can manipulate interactions between participants. If this were to be successful, this study would open up the door to a new field of novel olfaction-based treatment for social impairment.
Terrestrial mammals rely heavily on olfaction (sense of smell) to identify friends or foes. The researchers thus hypothesized that us humans, like those mammals, may also draw on our sense of smell to help us make social decisions. Inbal Ravreby, the first author of this article, decided to study the role of body odor in “click” friendships, which are relationships that form before extensive exchange of personal information. She reasoned that because of the rapid nature of such friendship, physiological traits such as smell would have more impact on the pair’s decision.
Ravreby first recruited 20 pairs of so-called “click” friends and put them in a body odor experiment. To control the smell, participants showered before putting on a clean lab-provided shirt. After sleeping for a night, the shirts were collected and tested under the electric nose, a device that detects the chemical makeup of body odor. Ravreby’s team found that the molecular fingerprints of body odor were much similar between friends than the strangers.
However, there were still confounding variables that could explain why the friend’s odors were similar to each other. For instance, a similar lifestyle or diet might directly lead to the secretion of similar chemicals. To further solidify her hypothesis, Ravreby and her colleagues recruited 132 strangers to play a mirroring game, where pairs of participants try to mimic each other’s action. After the activity, the pair filled out a questionnaire rating their connection while their clothes were sent to be scrutinized by the electric nose. Out of those who reported pleasant, positive connections, 71 percent of those shared similar body odor. These results provided solid evidence for the causal relationship between body odor and social interaction, clearly demonstrating the importance of smell in our social interactions.
The team are now looking into modifying people’s body odor to see if they can manipulate interactions between participants. If this were to be successful, this study would open up the door to a new field of novel olfaction-based treatment for social impairment.
