But the raters predicted the donor's level of extroversion and neuroticism through smell about as accurately as participants in a different study predicted personality traits based on a video depicting a person's behavior, Sorokowska said. Judgments of dominance were most accurate in the case where an individual rater was assessing the odor of someone who was the opposite sex, suggesting such judgments are especially important when it comes to choosing a mate, the researchers said.
— Another "smell this sweaty t-shirt" study. Read more at Some Personality Traits Affect How You Smell at Live Science. Hat tip to Erin!
Eeeuw!
But seriously, It would have been interesting to include in the lot a few tshirts that had never been worn at all to verify the proportion/possibility of “lucky guesses”.
Like most of these sorts of studies, this one was very small. I would take the results with a grain of salt in any case.
“Let me get this straight…I smell neurotic?” would not be a good thing to hear on a date.
🙂
Lmao!