People can guess personality types, by smell, say Polish researchers Agnieszka Sorokowska, Piotr Sorokowski and Andrzej Szmajke, of the University of Wroclaw. The team’s research published in the European Journal of Personality found that people could guess personality through odors better than when shown videos of people in action.
The team got 60 people, 50/50 men and women to wear t-shirts while they slept, for three nights. Each was told to avoid perfumes, soap or deodorants and to not smoke or eat or drink things that affect body odor, such as onions or garlic. Each were given personality tests, too.
Two hundred volunteers, again half men and half women, were enlisted to sniff the t-shirts and offer their viewes on personality type.
The sniffers were able to guess whether the person was anxious, outgoing or dominant at least as well as people in a previous study had been able to do by watching videos of people interacting with others. The sniffers were very good at picking up dominate personality types from odors that came from someone of the opposite sex.
The researchers say that there is something going on regarding how much a person sweats and under what conditions as well as a correlation between the components in sweat and personality traits and that other people are able to pick up on those differences.
More information: Does Personality Smell? Accuracy of Personality Assessments Based on Body Odour, Article first published online: 12 OCT 2011. DOI: 10.1002/per.848
Abstract
People are able to assess some personality traits of others based on videotaped behaviour, short interaction or a photograph. In our study, we investigated the relationship between body odour and the Big Five personality dimensions and dominance. Sixty odour samples were assessed by 20 raters each. The main finding of the presented study is that for a few personality traits, the correlation between self-assessed personality of odour donors and judgments based on their body odour was above chance level. The correlations were strongest for extraversion (.36), neuroticism (.34) and dominance (.29). Further analyses showed that self–other agreement in assessments of neuroticism slightly differed between sexes and that the ratings of dominance were particularly accurate for assessments of the opposite sex.
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