Psychologists from Belgium found that bad body odour is commonly associated with vulnerability, which triggers feelings of concern. This, in turn, leads other people to pity the person with the odour and treat them more favourably than others.
Sharing a desk or spending time with someone who smells is usually best avoided, yet it could make you more compassionate.
This means people tend to increase their level of co-operation when dealing with someone who smells bad because they feel sorry for them.
Lead author Jeroen Camps and colleagues, from the university KU Leuven in Belgium, said:
'Scents are omnipresent in our daily world and they are of great importance as represented by the use of perfumes or fragrances in the work environment.'
'Even though it has been argued that bad scents invoke negative judgments, we argued and demonstrated that a bad body odour elicits feelings of pity in others and increases prosocial behaviour.' This can include underarm sweat, smelly feet, bad breath or other foul-smelling odours.
The research, published online in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology, involved several experiments. In the first experiment, 36 participants were randomly placed into two groups. Half were asked to sniff a bad smelling T-shirt that had been dowsed in human sweat, beer and sprayed with foul smells.
The other half smelt a more neutral-smelling T-shirt. All the T-shirts were of the same shape and colour and all participants were told to imagine the item belonged to someone they worked with.
Researchers then measured how participants felt about the other person, using ratings from one - totally disagree, to five - totally agree.
Pity was measured through two statements: 'I feel sorry for the other person' and 'I find the other pathetic' and the participants in the odour condition felt significantly more pity than those in the neutral condition.
A second experiment involved 62 participants. They were first asked to complete a maze alone before being seated next to someone wearing either a neutral or bad smelling T-shirt and asked to complete another maze.
Finally, participants moved to a third room and were asked to divide 11 credits giving a chance to win film tickets between themselves and the other person. People who had sat next to an unpleasant smelling person donated more credits to him or her on average than people who sat next to someone without bad body odour.
The authors said this 'showed that there are situations in which a person's unpleasant body odour increases others' helping behaviours toward this person'.
A third experiment involving 42 people showed participants were more generous to people with bad body odour if they were not held responsible for smelling bad than if their BO was seen as their fault. However, the earlier findings also indicate that if such information is not available 'people seem to give the bad smelling person the benefit of the doubt'.
Hmm, this is a silly experiment, now we know why most of them smell...
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