According to a study published this month in the American Journal of Political Science, research has shown that people tend to wind up with mates who share their political beliefs, but they’ve been unable to figure out how. Strangely, it doesn’t appear as though it’s caused by deliberately seeking out like-minded individuals, but it may have to do with an unconscious reaction to how they smell.
The study had participants identify their political beliefs and then wear gauze taped under their armpits for 24 hours. Then, 125 other lucky participants were asked to smell the pit-gauze and guess the political ideology of the wearer. In terms of deliberately identifying political affiliations based on scent, people weren’t very good at it…
But what they found was that people were great at picking up on the political alignment of scents without actually knowing it. When asked to rank how pleasing the odors were—truly a great undertaking when sticking your nose in someone’s sweat-soaked pit lint—test subjects mostly ranked the smell of those with similar political beliefs as preferable to that of people on the opposite side of the spectrum.
via The Mary Sue
Image: Edward Simpson
