“Land mammals constantly smell each other and thus decide who their friends and who are their enemies,” writes the team of researchers led by Inban Ravrebi of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel.
It is often said that there is “chemistry” between people who immediately feel close to each other. There may be a big truth behind this expression, according to a study published today in the journal Science Advances, which concludes that people with a similar smell are more likely to become friends.
“Land mammals constantly smell each other and thus decide who their friends and who are their enemies,” writes the team of researchers led by Inban Ravrebi of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel.
As people look for friends who “look like” them, the team began their research by assuming that they use their sense of smell to judge if they are “compatible” with someone else. To verify this, they collected samples of friends (of the same sex) who did not have an affair with each other and stated that they developed a friendship “from one moment to the next”. They examined a total of 20 pairs of friends – half made up of women and the rest of men, aged 22 to 39 years.
In order not to “confuse” the smells, the participants had to avoid certain foods and not sleep with their companions or their animals. They were even given to wear a specific mako t-shirt, the smell of which was then analyzed by an “electronic nose”, a machine that detects the chemical composition of sweat.
The researchers found that the smells of each pair of friends matched each other better than those of the others.
To see if the results of the machine corresponded to human perception, the scientists recruited their noses. They smelled the smells of two friends and a third, irrelevant face – and managed to distinguish the “couples”.
Another hypothesis, however, could explain this similarity of smell: friends spend a lot of time together and have common interests that affect their smell, such as where they live or the food they eat. The researchers then wanted to see if the smell could “predict” the compatibility of two people who do not know each other. They recruited 17 strangers and observed that due to the similarity of the odors they could predict that two people could develop a good relationship with each other in 77% of cases… but also that in 68% there was no chemistry…
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