– the researchers here say that previous experimental approaches have failed to adequately study a diverse cultural spectrum.
Ultimately, we might expect people's ranking of odor pleasantness to reflect a mixture of their cultural tradition, personal sensibility, and universal preferences , but the extent of each of these influences has so far been unclear.Arshamian's team found the influence of cultural traditions plays only a small role in people's odor preference, with odor valence rankings correlating strongly and positively across all the cultures measured.
When people ranked individual scents differently to one another in terms of perceived pleasantness, the researchers say participants' culture only explained about 6 percent of the variance, whereas 54 percent was due to people's individual preference, and the scent chemical's molecular profile explained around 40 percent of the variance.
In other words, while people can and do rank different smells differently, most of the variation observed seems to be a matter of personal preference, not a reflection of culture; at the same time, there is a lot of crossover between cultures in terms of what people like and don't like.."Taken together, this shows that human olfactory perception is strongly constrained by universal principles.
As for why the perception of odors appears to be at least somewhat universal across cultures – and is predicated upon the physicochemical properties of the odorants themselves – it's plausible that a preference for certain chemical scents may have served an evolutionary purpose in our history, somehow increasing our survival chances in times long forgotten.
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