To choose your friends, you can trust your flair: social life would be influenced by body odor.
- Friendships between human beings of the same sex are an essential pillar of mental health.
- Olfaction is a dominant sensory input that underpins social interaction.
“Non-human land mammals sniff each other to find out who their friend or foe is. (…) Since human beings seek out friends who look like them, we hypothesized that they can smell others to unconsciously assess similarity in body odor, which, in turn, may promote friendship”, said researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. To get to the bottom of it, they carried out work published in the journal Science Advances June 24.
Formation of a friendship
As part of this study, the scientists recruited 20 duos who said they fell in love at first sight when they first met. The participants were between 22 and 39 years old. The authors collected samples of their body odors. In order to determine if there was a similarity in the chemical fingerprint of body odors between the duos, they used an electronic nose, namely a device that analyzes odors. According to the results, “the more the body odors of the duos are chemically similar, the more they interact”. Clearly, friends have similar body odors.
electronic nose
Secondly, the authors used the electronic nose to find out if two strangers could get along. Also, they asked people who didn’t know each other to interact. “We observed that people with similar smells had more positive interactions. In other words, we were able to predict social bonding using an electronic nose. and a lot of chemistry in social alchemy”, developed the team.
