Pleasantness rankings of odours are remarkably consistent regardless of where people came from
Save time by listening to our audio articles as you multitaskNew research, however, suggests that might not be the case. Artin Arshamian, a neuroscientist at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, and Asifa Majid, a psychologist at the University of Oxford, began with the expectation that culture would play an important role in determining pleasant smells. This was not just because of examples like that of fermented herring.
To study how scent and culture relate, Dr Arshamian and Dr Majid presented nine different groups of people with ten odours. These varied from pleasant-smellingextract to isovaleric acid, the chemical responsible for the revolting scent of stinky socks. More intermediate odours, which the team thought might split opinions, included octanoic acid with its moderately rancid smell; the sweet-smelling eugenol, which comes from cloves; and octenol, a musty and earthy scent found in many mushrooms.
The cultures doing the smelling varied widely too. They included hunter-gatherer communities along the coast of Mexico, subsistence farmers living in the highlands of Ecuador, shoreline foragers, swidden horticulturalists living in the tropical rainforests of Malaysia, and city folk from Thailand and Mexico City. All 235 participants were asked to rank odours according to pleasantness. The team compared their results to earlier work on New Yorkers who had been exposed to the same scents.
Even so, while culture did not shape perceptions of odours in the way that it is known to shape perceptions of faces, the researchers did find an “eye of the beholder” effect. Randomness, which Dr Arshamian and Dr Majid suggest has to be coming from personal preferences learned from outside individual culture, accounted for 54% of the variance in which smells people liked. “Olfactory bulb of the beholder” does not slip off the tongue so easily but it too appears to be a real phenomenon.
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