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Two women meeting for the first time can judge within minutes whether they have the potential to be friends — guided as much by smell as any other sense, new Cornell University research on friendship formation finds.
“The Interactive Role of Odor Associations in Friendship Preferences,” published in Scientific Reports, adds to our understanding of the complex picture of what goes on when meeting someone for the first time — and judging the potential for future interactions.
In a study of heterosexual women, the researchers found that personal, idiosyncratic preferences based on a person’s everyday scent, captured on a T-shirt, predicted how much women liked their interaction partners after four-minute “speed-friending” chats. These face-to-face conversations, in turn, influenced how participants later judged the T-shirt scents alone.
“People take a lot in when they’re meeting face to face. But scent — which people are registering at some level, though probably not consciously — forecasts whether you end up liking this person,” said Vivian Zayas, professor of psychology and co-author of the paper.
While social olfactory research often focuses on mate selection, the researchers turned their attention to platonic interactions. And instead of focusing on individuals’ “natural”odor — isolated from products, pets, and other environmental factors — the study leaned into the idea that people actively shape their signature scent through the many choices they make every day, what’s known as their “diplomatic” odor.
Smell-only evaluations paralleled in-person evaluations: If a participant judged someone as having high friend potential based on the smell of a T-shirt, their evaluation of that same person after a four-minute interaction was similarly high.
Moreover, evaluations from the live interaction predicted changes in a second round of diplomatic odor judgments, suggesting that the quality of the in-person interaction influenced how participants perceived the person’s smell.
Zayas said the consistency of judgments across the rating opportunities is remarkable.
“Everybody showed they had a consistent signature of what they liked,” she said. “And the consistency was not that, in the group, one person smelled really bad and one person smelled really good. No, it was idiosyncratic. I might like person A over B over C based on scent, and this pattern predicts who I end up liking in the chat.”
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