All dog owners know this: The four-legged ones sniff each other to find out if the chemistry is present. They smell each other from a long distance. This is a mechanism that is well documented among terrestrial mammals. With the exception of humans. But is this because we don’t use our noses in the same way? No, say researchers. Because in a new study from Israel, research will show that people who have similar body odors more often find the chemistry. – In humans, the sense of smell has not been in focus as much due to various social taboos. This has led to the fact that smell may not have as important a meaning in our social life, write the researchers behind the study. Collected body odors It has long been known that people tend to make friends with people who are similar to themselves. Both in appearance, values and background. The researchers in Israel wanted to see if smell also played a role in this context. What if it’s “love” at first sniff, not just at first sight? They started from the following hypothesis: When people unconsciously smell themselves and others, small comparisons are made. You then gravitate towards those who smell the most like yourself. To find answers, they recruited 20 pairs of friends, all of whom said they had “clicked” at their first meeting. Neither of them is said to have started a romantic relationship. In addition, random people, who did not have a relationship before, were used as a control group. The researchers then collected body odors from all participants in order to carry out their experiments. Had to avoid curry and boyfriends All the participants were asked to wash themselves with an unscented soap. They had to avoid foods like curry and garlic. They also had to sleep in a bed without a partner. Each night they were asked to wear a neutral cotton shirt. They slept on this for at least six hours before the shirt was placed in a closed plastic bag. The garments were frozen and thawed one hour before the actual smell test could start. The smell tests were carried out by ordinary people, as well as an electronic nose. The electronic nose has sensors that objectively assess the chemical signatures in the odor. The group of volunteers were asked to smell the t-shirts of the participants, and then subjectively assess similarities and differences. In both cases, it was found that the friend pairs smelled more alike than the random pairs in the control group. Tested strangers Professor Inbal Ravreby, who has led the study, was not entirely satisfied after this one attempt. She also wanted to rule out the possibility that similarity in body odor was not a consequence of the friendship itself. For example, what if the friends had a similar odor because they ate the same type of food or shared other life experiences that affect body odor? To find out, she started a new experiment. Here she used the electronic nose to smell volunteers who were all strangers to each other. Then these people were put together in pairs where they had to get to know each other without speaking. They had to assess the likelihood that this was a person they could become friends with. The analyzes subsequently showed that people who had positive impressions of each other actually smelled more like each other. The chemistry is right When the results were entered into a database, the researchers were able to predict with 71 percent accuracy which two individuals would have a positive, social interaction. In other words, body odor appears to contain information that can predict the quality of social relationships between strangers. – These results suggest that, as they say, there is chemistry in social chemistry. It does not mean that we behave like goats or mice. People are probably also dependent on other and far more decisive signals in their social decision-making, says Inbal Ravreby. Nevertheless, our results suggest that the nose plays a greater role than previously thought in our choice of friends, she concludes.
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Therefore, the chemistry matches better with some than with others – researchers believe similar body odor may be the reason – news Trøndelag
