Politics stinks. Yes, literally, it seems. According to a study published recently in the American Journal of Political Science, it seems that people can literally sniff out ideology. Researchers led by Brown University political scientist Rose McDermott found that, to a small but apparently significant degree, people prefer the body odor of those who vote (or at least think) like they do.
While previous studies have shown that long-term mates are more similar when it comes to politics than anything else besides religion, these researchers wanted to see if biological factors play a role.
The Experiment
To “sniff out” this potential link between smell and party affiliation, researchers rounded up 146 people aged 18 to 40 from “a large city in the northeast United States.” They then used a seven-point scale to determine where they fell on the political spectrum.
They sent 21 of them — 10 liberals and 11 conservatives — home with fragrance-free soap and shampoo and a gauze pad taped to one armpit. The subjects were told not to smoke, drink, use deodorant or perfume, have s.ex, eat fragrant foods, sleep with people or pets or linger near strong odors.
Okay – this is the part you might want to skip over.
They returned their used gauze pads a day later — at which point 125 participants sniffed the used pads. (They did take a break in between, “cleansing” their olfactory palates with the aroma of peppermint oil.) Then they rated the attractiveness of each armpit sample on a 1 to 5 scale.
Sure enough, the researchers claimed that the subjects found the smell of those more ideologically similar to themselves more attractive than those with opposing views. “It appears nature stacks the deck to make politically similar partners more attractive to each other in unconscious ways,” the researchers wrote in their obscurely titled report, “Assortative Mating on Ideology Could Operate Through Olfactory Cues.”
The researchers did, of course, point out that smell isn’t everything when it comes to attraction, though it may well provide a subtle influence by affecting hormones and emotional changes.
They say that politics makes for strange bedfellows — and apparently also strange research projects.
