Summary: A new study finds that women can, often without conscious awareness, use scent to assess potential friendship compatibility during first meetings. Researchers discovered that a person’s everyday odor—captured on a worn T-shirt—helped predict how much they were liked after brief, face-to-face conversations. This research highlights scent as a subtle but meaningful cue in social bonding and friendship formation.
The study focuses on what the authors call “diplomatic” odor: the everyday scent that results from a person’s hygiene products, perfumes, diet, environment, and other daily influences. Unlike attempts to isolate a so-called natural body odor, this approach recognizes that people intentionally and unintentionally shape how they smell. These diplomatic scents aligned with impressions formed during four-minute speed-friending conversations, suggesting scent contributes to whether two people feel potential for friendship.
Key findings
- Odor predicts liking: The scent captured on T-shirts alone predicted how women evaluated others after a four-minute interaction.
- Individual preferences matter: Scent preferences were highly personal—there was no universal “good” or “bad” scent; judgments were idiosyncratic.
- Interactions influence scent perception: Positive or negative impressions formed during live conversations subsequently changed how participants judged the same odors.
Source: Cornell University
Findings in context
The research, titled “The Interactive Role of Odor Associations in Friendship Preferences” and published in Scientific Reports, examined how sensory cues—particularly smell—contribute to the early stages of friendship formation. While much past work in social olfaction has emphasized mate choice and romantic attraction, this study deliberately turned to platonic relationships, asking whether scent plays a role when two people first meet as potential friends.
In the study, heterosexual female participants took part in speed-friending sessions consisting of multiple four-minute face-to-face conversations. Before and after these sessions, participants smelled T-shirts worn by other participants and rated friendship potential based on those odors alone. They also made rapid judgments of friendship potential from brief (100 ms) portrait photographs. The ratings made from smelling T-shirts predicted how much participants later liked their conversation partners, even beyond the predictive power of quick photo-based judgments.
Importantly, the direction of influence worked both ways. Live conversational experiences affected later odor judgments: if a participant had a positive interaction with someone, that favorable impression tended to make the same person’s T-shirt scent more appealing in a subsequent smell-only evaluation. This bidirectional relationship suggests that scent both informs and is shaped by social experience.
Vivian Zayas, a professor of psychology and a co-author on the paper, emphasized the subtlety and consistency of these effects. She noted that people appear to have stable, personal patterns of scent preference—an individual “signature” that reliably predicts who they will find appealing as a potential friend. These preferences are not universal rankings of pleasantness; rather, they are idiosyncratic orderings that align with later social evaluations.
About this olfaction and social neuroscience research news
Author: Ellen Leventry
Source: Cornell University
Contact: Ellen Leventry – Cornell University
Image credit: Neuroscience News
Original Research: “The interactive role of odor associations in friendship preferences” by Vivian Zayas et al., published in Scientific Reports (open access).
Abstract
The interactive role of odor associations in friendship preferences
Who we choose to befriend is highly personal and influenced by sensory impressions, including smell. This study asked how a person’s sensory evaluation of others’ everyday body odor—what the authors term diplomatic odor—affects friendship judgments. Female participants rated friendship potential (FP) after four-minute live interactions during a speed-friending event. They also rated FP based solely on worn T-shirt odors presented before and after the live interactions, and they made rapid FP judgments from facial photographs. Odor-based FP ratings predicted later in-person FP ratings even after accounting for photograph-based predictions. Additionally, live interaction judgments altered subsequent odor ratings, suggesting associative learning between social impressions and olfactory perception. Effects were driven more by individual perceiver preferences than by uniform group-level or target-driven influences. Overall, the results underscore the dynamic and ecologically relevant role of social olfactory cues in the early stages of forming friendships.