You Smell Like Liberty: Will You Marry Me?

In the current issue of the American Journal
of Political Science, an article, “Assortative
Mating on Ideology Could Operate Through Olfactory Clues,” by
researchers from Brown, Harvard, and Pennsylvania State
Universities suggests that ideological tendencies have distinct
scents. Moreover, people possibly follow their noses when choosing
politically compatible mates. From the abstract:

Mates appear to assort on political attitudes more than any
other social, behavioral, or physical trait, besides religion. Yet
the process by which ideologically similar mates end up together
remains ambiguous. Mates do not appear to consciously select one
another based on ideology, nor does similarity result from
convergence. Recently, several lines of inquiry have converged on
the finding that olfactory processes have an important role in both
political ideology and mate selection. Here we integrate extant
studies of attraction, ideology, and olfaction and explore the
possibility that assortation on political attitudes may result, in
part, from greater attraction to the scent of those with shared
ideology. We conduct a study in which individuals evaluated the
body odor of unknown others, observing that individuals are more
attracted to their ideological concomitants.

Science Daily adds:

A new study reveals that people find the smell of others with
similar political opinions to be attractive, suggesting that one of
the reasons why so many spouses share similar political views is
because they were initially and subconsciously attracted to each
other’s body odor.

During the study, 146 participants rated the attractiveness of
the body odor of unknown strong liberals and strong conservatives,
without ever seeing the individuals whose smells they were
evaluating.

“People could not predict the political ideology of others by
smell if you asked them, but they differentially found the smell of
those who aligned with them more attractive. So I believe smell
conveys important information about long-term affinity in political
ideology that becomes incorporated into a key component of
subconscious attraction,” said Dr. Rose McDermott, lead author of
the American Journal of Political Science study.

Avoid the sour aroma of conservatism and the cloying stink of
progressivism: liberty smells sweetest.