What smells we like or dislike is primarily determined by the structure of the particular odour molecule. A collaborative study seems to show that people share odour preferences regardless of cultural background.
We wanted to examine if people around the world have the same smell perception and like the same types of odour, or whether this is something that is culturally learned,” says Artin Arshamian, researcher at the Department of Clinical Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet, Sweden, one of the collaborators in the study. “Traditionally it has been seen as cultural, but we can show that culture has very little to do with it.”
The study seemed to show that the structure of the odour molecule determines whether a smell is considered pleasant or not. The researchers found that certain smells were liked more than others regardless of the cultural affiliation of participants.
“Cultures around the world rank different odours in a similar way no matter where they come from, but odour preferences have a personal – although not cultural – component,” said Arshamian.
The study brought together an international network of researchers who collaborated via a unique combination of experimental methods and field studies. It included contributions from Oxford University and ICL in the UK.
Many of the researchers were field workers working with indigenous populations. For this present study, the researchers selected nine communities representing different lifestyles: four hunter-gatherer groups and five groups with different forms of farming and fishing. Some of these groups have very little contact with Western foodstuffs or household articles.
“Since these groups live in such disparate odiferous environments, like rainforest, coast, mountain and city, we capture many different types of ‘odour experiences’,” said Dr Arshamian.
The study included a total of 235 individuals, who were asked to rank smells on a scale of pleasant to unpleasant. The results show variation between individuals within each group, but global correspondence on which odours are pleasant and unpleasant. The researchers claim to show that the variation is largely explained by molecular structure (41%) and by personal preference (54%).
“Personal preference can be due to learning but could also be a result of our genetic makeup,” said Dr Arshamian.
The odours the participants were asked to rank included vanilla, which smelled best followed by ethyl butyrate, which smells like peaches. The smell that most participants considered the least pleasant was isovaleric acid, which can be found in many foods, such as cheese, soy milk and apple juice, but also in foot sweat.
According to Dr Arshamian, a possible reason why people consider some smells more pleasant than others regardless of culture is that such odours increased the chances of survival during human evolution.
“Now we know that there’s universal odour perception that is driven by molecular structure and that explains why we like or dislike a certain smell,” he said. “The next step is to study why this is so by linking this knowledge to what happens in the brain when we smell a particular odour.”
The fieldwork behind the study was financed by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO), the general study by the Swedish Research Council and the USA’s National Institutes of Health (NIH).
