If you’ve ever engaged in a polemic debate and thought that your opponent’s politics really stink, well it turns out you may have been right all along.
A new study published this month in the American Journal of Political Science, has shown that people tend to end up befriending those with like-minded political beliefs because of an unconscious reaction to what they smell like.
The study – Assortative Mating on Ideology Could Operate Through Olfactory Cues – was completed in UCLA, and asked participants to identify their political beliefs and wear gauze taped under their armpits for a day. 125 other participants then had the enviable task of sniffing the gauze and hazarding a guess to the political ideology of the wearer.
When it came to identifying the politics, the participants proved (understandably) useless. But the study did find that participants proved very adept at picking up on the natural musk of political allies without actually knowing it.
When researchers asked the sniffers to rank how rank the odours were, test subjects deemed the body scent of those with similar political beliefs as much more pleasant than those from the other end of the political spectrum.
So the next time a party canvasser comes to your door during a referendum and you smell a rat, well it’s actually science.
