The room is crowded and noisy. There are conversations all around, and the residual smell of popcorn and beer hangs in the air. Yet 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, according to new Cornell psychology research.
“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 in the College of Arts and Sciences (A&S). “It’s amazing, our attunement to other people, even without being consciously aware of how in tune we are.”
In a study of heterosexual women, Zayas and first author Jessica Gaby, Ph.D., found that personal, idiosyncratic preferences based on a person’s everyday scent, captured on a T-shirt, predicted how much women liked their interaction partner following four-minute chats across a table in a crowded room. These face-to-face conversations, in turn, influenced how participants later judged the T-shirt scent alone.
