Do People Who Smell Alike Become Friends?

Noam Sobel says people who smell more alike are more likely to become friends, and the similarity is there before the friendship is.

A study in his lab looked at click friendships, pairs who feel close as soon as they meet. The question was whether that click is only shared looks or a shared sports team, or whether body odor is part of it. The lab recruited same-sex, non-romantic friend pairs across Israel whose friendship had started as a click, then sampled body odor after they used odorless soap and slept alone in a t-shirt for two nights. An electronic nose, a set of sensors for airborne molecules, found those friends more similar than chance pairings. People who smelled the samples judged the click friends as more alike as well.

Shared restaurants or a neighborhood could have caused that, so the lab also brought in strangers. They smelled each person with the electronic nose, then had them play a nonverbal mirror game, moving their hands close enough to smell one another. How similar two people smelled predicted who would later call the other a likely friend, and nicer. Following each other in the game was not predicted. Sobel treats the smell match as part of how friendship starts, not as a side effect of already being friends.