It may be that we choose friends because they smell ‘right’. Evidence shows that people are constantly (unconsciously) sniffing themselves and also unconsciously sniffing others and therefore Inbal Ravreby and colleagues (2022) put forward the hypothesis that people may gravitate towards people whose smell is similar to their own. The researchers conducted a number of studies to test their hypothesis.
First, they recruited non-romantic same-sex friend pairs and collected their body odour. An electronic nose (eNose) produced objective ratings of each participant’s smell and showed that the smells of two friends were more similar than the smells of random pairs.
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