Matching body odor may subconsciously spark friendships, a study suggests.
Imagine you are at a party, talking to someone you’ve never met. Underneath the smiles and polite small talk, you are subconsciously sizing-up whether this person is friend material. You might notice that they have a similar accent, facial features and fashion sense. You’ll evenMost animals rely on their sense of smell when interacting with others. And researchers in Israel speculated that it plays a role in human friendships, too.
Researchers hypothesized that sniffing strangers is yet another way to evaluate how much somebody resembles ourselves. “We become friends with people who are similar to us in the way they look or their values,” Sobel says. “But also similar in more surprising ways, such as patterns of brain activity.”The study collected body odor samples from 20 pairs of “click friends,” or people who were immediately drawn to each other.
To confirm if similar smells played a role in initiating friendships, the researchers recruited a group of strangers and asked them to silently interact with each other. Afterwards, they gave them a questionnaire to evaluate how positively they perceived their partners. The eNose correctly predicted which pairs of people would get along best 73 percent of the time.