What’s That Smell? The Psychology of Scent

"Social psychologists don’t typically pay much attention to smells. Indeed, you’d be hard-pressed to find a section on scent in a social psychology textbook, or an introductory psychology text for that matter.

Yet olfaction has a number of important implications for how we think, feel, and behave.

The Nose Knows

It turns out that people appear to be able to detect whether someone is sick based on how they smell and that we tend to avoid individuals whose odors suggest that they are sick.

This suggests that scent may be an important component of the behavioral immune system, an adaptive suite of cognitive, affective, and behavioral responses designed to reduce our odds of acquiring an infectious disease.

Yet other work suggests we can also literally smell others’ fear.

Others’ odors can also be a comfort to us rather than a signal of danger, as Hofer and colleagues note (2020).

In one experiment, researchers found that smelling a romantic partner’s body odor (as opposed to a stranger’s) significantly reduced self-reported stress when waiting to engage in a stressful task, in this case, a mock job interview.

In a similar vein, another study found that electric shocks are rated as less painful when people were exposed to their romantic partner’s scent.

Our partners’ smells also help us to sleep better, as suggested by another experiment by Hofer and Chen (2020) which found that sleeping with a romantic partner’s worn t-shirt on a pillow next to them improved sleep quality for women.

For over 100 years, the scientific community has largely dismissed human olfactory capacities. Yet as the studies we’ve discussed show, our sense of smell is far from vestigial. In fact, it can keep us safe, give us comfort, and help us to find our way."

Read the full article on Psychology Today