(Web Desk) - Smell gets overlooked all the time. We move through the day watching faces and listening to voices, while scent hangs in the background shaping our reactions without making any noise.
Scent can pull us toward someone or push us back a little, and most of the time we don’t even notice it happening.
Scientists are starting to take this quiet influence more seriously. They want to know how much of a first impression comes from signals we barely register, and why certain scents spark quick ideas about confidence or dominance.
Animals depend on scent more than we do. Some use scent to mark territory. Many species sort out their social groups through chemical cues.
Humans rely more on our eyes and ears, but scent still slips into our judgments.
“Research also reveals that scent plays an important role in human communication – of fear, sickness, safety, attraction, and personality traits such as dominance and neuroticism.” said Marlise Hofer, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Victoria.
Dominance and prestige are the two main paths humans use to earn status. Dominance pushes others through force or pressure.
Prestige works through talent or knowledge that people respect on their own. These two ideas show up across cultures.
The question behind this new study was simple: do people use scent linked to testosterone to decide if someone seems dominant?
“We examined whether scent cues associated with levels of circulating testosterone impact people’s social status judgments,” said Hofer.
The researchers recruited 76 male students who provided saliva samples to measure testosterone. They also wore shirts that served as scent samples and filled out a questionnaire on social status.
A much larger group, 797 male and female “smellers,” rated the shirt scents. They judged dominance, prestige, and overall odour quality. What stood out was clear. “We found that both male and female participants in our study perceived men with higher levels of testosterone to be more dominant than men with lower testosterone levels,” Hofer said.
Prestige showed no link, yet dominance did. Participants smelled shirts from men with higher testosterone and repeatedly rated those men as more dominant. This pattern held steady.
“This relationship remained significant, after controlling for potential confounding factors. These include scent positivity, scent intensity, scent donor’s ethnicity, self-ratings of dominance, and smeller’s sex,” said Hofer.
The study adds to the idea that smell gives us social information, even when we do not realize it.
“This study contributes to a growing body of work seeking to understand how social communication occurs through scent. Although we often think of sight and sound as our main social senses, smell also appears to carry subtle but meaningful information about others,” said Hofer.
The team still urges caution. The sample included a narrow group of young men, so the results need wider testing. That is common in early research. Still, the findings raise interesting questions about how much our noses influence us.