When you meet a stranger for the first time, how do you judge your potential to be friends? Is it their personality? Their style? Their smile? According to a new study in Scientific Reports, scent might have something to do with it, as smell preferences can predict whether people see each other as potential friends.

“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, a study author and a professor of psychology at Cornell University, according to a press release.

Read More: People Are Drawn To Others With Similar Body Odor

Finding Friends Through Social Olfaction

Many researchers have studied what happens in our minds — and in our olfactory systems — when we meet strangers. But this work is far from finished, as there’s still a lot that we don’t know about the role of olfaction in shaping our social interactions.

For instance, while many scientists have studied how olfactory cues inform our interpersonal judgements in romantic situations, few have looked at how they influence us in platonic scenarios. Moreover, while the majority of social olfactory studies have concentrated on our “natural odors,” only a few have focused on “diplomatic odors,” or the “signature scents” that are shaped by our daily choices (like our decisions to use certain fragrances and hygiene products).

Hoping to address these gaps in the research, a team of Cornell University scientists set out to determine how diplomatic scents inform platonic interactions between strangers. Enlisting the help of 40 heterosexual participants, all of whom were women aged 18 to 30, the researchers revealed that the participants’ preferences for each other’s diplomatic scents predicted how much they liked each other after a series of short face-to-face interactions.

Ultimately, the results improve our understanding of social olfaction, offering new insights into the impact of smell on our relationships.

Read More: The Sense of Smell in Humans is More Powerful Than We Think

Social Sniff Tests

To arrive at their results, the researchers asked the participants to take part in a series of “speed-friending” interaction sessions, before and after which they evaluated the scents of the other participants by sniffing their previously worn t-shirts. After each of these steps — the first t-shirt smell test, the short face-to-face interaction sessions, and the second t-shirt smell test — the participants were asked to judge their friendship potential with the other participants, either based on the other participants’ scent or conversation.

The team found that the judgements in the pre-interaction smell assessments predicted the judgements in the post-interaction conversation assessments, with participants tending to see the same people as potential friends.

Adding complexity to olfaction’s impact on our friendships, the researchers also revealed that the participants’ perceptions of conversation quality predicted their perceptions of scent after the interaction, as participants’ post-interaction evaluations of each other’s conversation tended to forecast changes in their post-interaction evaluations of each other’s smells.

According to the researchers, the participants’ preferences for particular people’s scents were also relatively individualistic, stable for one participant but unstable from one participant to another.

“Everybody showed they had a consistent signature of what they liked,” Zayas said in the release. “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.”

Future research could add additional complexity to our understanding of social olfaction, as well as its role in our relationships. For now, though, it seems safe to say that finding friends may be more of an olfactory process than traditionally thought.

Read More: You Can’t Stop Touching Your Face Because You’re Subconsciously Sniffing Your Hands

Article Sources

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Sam Walters is a journalist covering archaeology, paleontology, ecology, and evolution for Discover, along with an assortment of other topics. Before joining the Discover team as an assistant editor in 2022, Sam studied journalism at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.