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| Poster #206 Cooking odors, but not food consumption, influence body odors and social judgments |
| Jessica Gaby1, Pete Hatemi2, Helene Hopfer2 1Middle Tennessee State Univeristy, Murfreesboro, TN, United States 2Penn State University, State College, PA, United States |
Olfactory cues facilitate differentiation of ingroup and outgroup members across animal species. Human body odor may be affected by culturally-influenced personal care or dietary choices. Do humans utilize these odor cues to determine group identity? Some cultural stereotypes claim that members of ethnic/racial groups smell like certain foods. Does diet contribute metabolic or environmental group membership cues? We compared the influence of eating curry to added curry cooking odor on hedonic and social judments of body odor. Our “eater” group (n=8) ate 10g of Indian-style curry for 28 days; our “smeller” group (n=6) smelled curry paste but did not eat it. We collected shirts on days 0 and 28; we added a cotton ball infused with curry cooking odor to half of the smellers’ shirts. Shirts were judged by “ingroup” raters (i.e., eaters smelled shirts of other eaters) and by naïve “outgroup” raters (n=17 for eaters, 19 for smellers). Eating curry did not impact hedonic or social ratings of body odors except for perceived intensity by outgroup raters F(1, 247) = 4.5, p = .035. Added cooking odor resulted in lower pleasantness ratings by ingroup (F(1, 71) = 8.65, p = .004) and outgroup raters (F(1, 246) = 12.66, p <.001), and a lower number of body odors categorized as American (ingroup p = .035, outgroup p <.001) and Caucasian (ingroup p = .001, outgroup p = .003). Interestingly, ingroup raters perceived shirts with added cooking odor as more familiar (F(1, 71) = 20.64, p <.001), suggesting that food odors may indeed facilitate identification of ingroup members. The results of this work suggest that food-related stereotypes are likely driven by cooking odors rather than metabolic byproducts of diet, and highlight the potential for exposure to unfamilar foods to decrease outgroup prejudice. |