A new study led by researchers through a series of experiments at the Weizmann Institute for Science shows that we tend to befriend people with the same characteristics as body odor.
The researchers found that the volunteers interacted more positively with strangers who shared similar body odor characteristics.
Some recent studies in previous research have found that emotional states in people can be communicated through body odors and chemical cues indicate everything from fear to assumptions, so the new This study is set to investigate whether friendships between people of the same sex are affected. body odor.
The researchers explained that while a friend’s body odor and a person’s body odor stimulate similar patterns of brain activity, exposure to a stranger’s body odor elicits a completely different response. brain than fear, the researchers said.
The researchers ’first experiment was to investigate whether same -sex“ click ”friends share the same body odor. A ‘click’ friendship is defined as a pair of friends that immediately bond once they meet, and these friendships are quickly formed, and the hypothesis is that such ‘chemistry’ can be influenced by factors such as of resemblance to body odor.
To collect body odor, participants were told to avoid all perfumes and odors while sleeping in a T-shirt for two nights using an electronic nose system and a group of human volunteers, and then they tested how similar the scents were to “click” friends. and random pairs of people.
Both the electronic nose and human volunteers saw more similarity in smell between “clicked” friends than between random couples. While this is certainly interesting, researchers have suggested that these similarities in perfume may be the result of long-standing friendships. From similar living conditions to eating the same food, it’s clear that close friends can have similar body odor over time. Therefore, another experiment is needed to better investigate whether people are attracted to strangers with similar scents.
Another group of volunteers who were strangers to each other was recruited, similar to the previous experiment, who collected body odors and then completed a series of pairwise social interaction games involving random matching interaction, then look at each other and exercise. After the Engagement, in which they mirrored each other’s actions for two minutes, they filled out a short questionnaire to assess their satisfaction and how attached they were to their partner.
The researchers then analyzed each person’s body odor profile using the electronic nose technique. Strangers who were most comfortable with pairing were found to have more body odor, and this association became strong enough to predict which. “Click” is a better match based on body odor similarity alone.
Perfume expert Leslie Kay said in an interview with news magazine The Scientist about the new study that this study used a small group and very controlled conditions, so the results were does not entirely imply that people roam around smelling strangers to find them.
Noam Sobel, co-author of the study, agrees with Kay, who mentioned that there are many factors beyond smell that influence human decision making.
“It doesn’t mean we act like goats or shrews. People are more likely to trust each other, which are more dominant cues when making social decisions, ”Sobel said. But the results of our study show that the sense of smell plays a big role in building friendships. ”
Inbal Raffrebi, chief investigator of the new study, explained that humans are quite different from other mammals, especially in terms of verbal communication, so these results may certainly overestimate effect of perfumes on daily human interaction in the real world, but that is emphasized. The results show that chemistry plays a role in building friendships.
source: newatlas
Source: Arabic RT
