When describing someone’s political views, we often use words associated with smells: “revolutionary spirit”, “stale conservatism”, “smells like dangerous freethinking”. As it turned out, these epithets are true not only in a metaphorical sense: we really react differently to the smell of ideological allies and opponents.
Political scientist Pete Hatemi and his colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania are interested in a long-known fact: spouses usually share each other’s political views. And, if you think about it, this is not as banal as it seems, because at the stage of courtship and first dates, that is, at the moment of choosing a potential partner, people usually do not talk about politics. Of course, later, when ideological incompatibility is discovered, it leads to the rupture of some pairs, and this is how the unions of like-minded people survive, but the researchers nevertheless decided to check their suspicions.
To participate in the experiment*, they recruited 146 volunteers aged 18 to 40. All participants answered questions about their political preferences, and according to their answers they were divided into “conservatives” and “liberals”. Since the word “liberal” in America is used in a sense different from that accepted in Europe and in Russia, in terms more familiar to us, we should rather talk about people of right and left views, respectively.
Then 21 participants were asked to wear gauze pads under their arms for 125 hours, and they were forbidden to bathe, use perfume, or even sleep in the same bed with another person. The other 5 had to sniff the pads and rate on a XNUMX-point scale how pleasant or repulsive they found the smell.
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The result was funny and asymmetrical. “The right likes the smell of the right, and the left smells the right. The right is indifferent to the smell of the left, and the left is indifferent to the smell of other leftists,” Hatemi summed up the results of the experiment. Therefore, it must be assumed that left-wing people do not like anyone’s smells.
At the same time, the participants of the experiment could not determine what beliefs the owner of this or that smell adheres to, that is, their reaction is completely unconscious.
Due to the small scale of the experiment, an article about which was published in the American Journal of Political Science, the results should not yet be taken as the ultimate truth: according to Hatemi himself, the risk that the identified relationship is a coincidence is 10%. It is because of the small sample size that Hatemi and his colleagues were criticized by Columbia University professor Anfrew Gelman in his blog on the Washington Post website.
Nevertheless, earlier studies have already established a connection between political beliefs and neurophysiological characteristics of people. For example, it is known that the right is more squeamish than the left, that the brains of the right and the left process signals related to risk assessment and the emotion of fear differently. On the other hand, the fact that smell affects the choice of a sexual partner, signaling genetic compatibility or incompatibility, is also a well-established fact.
But whatever our biological predisposition may be, it should not be overestimated, Hatemi emphasizes. According to him, it does not necessarily have a decisive effect on people’s behavior: “It just creates a background and maybe affects us a little.”
* R. McDermott et al. «Assortative Mating on Ideology Could Operate Through Olfactory Cues». American Journal of Political Science, September 2014.