Sensation_The New Science of Physical Intelligence

by Thalma Lobel

  Another study found that a pleasant ambient smell influenced the amount of money spent—however, only by young shoppers.4 In yet another study, researchers told participants that a group of students was thinking of establishing a store near the campus that would contain all kinds of items.5 Students were asked to enter a simulated store and evaluate it and its products. One group of students visited the simulated store while it was scented with lavender, ginger, spearmint, or orange, whereas other students visited the store when it was not scented. In comparison with students who visited the unscented store, those who visited the scented store liked it and its products more.

  Marketers are well aware of the influence of smell. Numerous stores, restaurants, clubs, and hotels diffuse pleasant scents in their establishments. According to Karen Ravn of the Los Angeles Times, when Verizon introduced its new LG Chocolate phone, it diffused a scent of chocolate in many of its stores.6 Pleasant ambient smells also affect the behavior and judgments of the clientele in establishments other than stores. A study conducted in a Las Vegas casino found that people gambled to a greater extent on days when the slot machine area of a casino was odorized compared with days when no odor was diffused.7 In a field study conducted in a pizzeria in a small town in Brittany, researchers found that customers remained longer and spent more money when a lavender scent was diffused in the restaurant.8 People also danced more in dance clubs and evaluated the evening as more pleasant when a scent of orange, seawater, or peppermint was diffused in the clubs than when there was no added scent.9

  It might surprise you to learn that certain odors influence not only our behavior as consumers but also our cognitive and athletic performance. Several studies have shown that peppermint and cinnamon scents improved cognitive performance, including attention and memory; clerical tasks, such as typing speed and alphabetization; and performance in video games.10 A peppermint scent also has an effect in the athletic sphere. For example, participants in a study were asked to undergo a fifteen-minute treadmill stress test.11 Those who performed the task in a peppermint-scented room perceived the task as less difficult. Another study showed that peppermint affects not only perceived difficulty but also athletic performance.12 Athletes in the peppermint-scented room ran faster, exhibited stronger handgrips, and performed more push-ups than others in a nonscented room.

  Next time you have to study for a test, write a paper or report, or pay bills, make your task more enjoyable—and speedy—with the scent of cinnamon or peppermint. Perhaps you could chew gum or a mint, or just open your spice cabinet for a whiff before you begin! Or get yourself a cinnamon- or peppermint-scented air freshener. What a simple, enjoyable trick to use to get through a not-so-enjoyable task.

  Several studies have shown that pleasant smells influence our interactions with other people. One of the most liked scents is that of a freshly baked croissant with a fresh cup of coffee on the side. You may like this smell, too, but did you know that it can enhance your interactions with others? In one study, people in a shopping mall were approached at different locations, either near pleasant-smelling establishments such as bakeries (e.g., Cinnabon, Mrs. Fields) and roasted-coffee cafés (e.g., Coffee Beanery), or near locations lacking any specific pleasant smell, such as clothing stores (e.g., Nine West and Banana Republic).13 The request was simple: Could the person give change for a dollar bill? A greater number of people changed the dollar bill in the pleasant-smelling locations.

  The smell of fresh-baked pastries influences not only helping behavior but also romantic interactions. In a study conducted in a shopping mall, young men approached young women and asked for their telephone numbers.14 The potential suitors approached the women in two areas of the mall: areas with pleasant ambient scents, such as near pastry shops and bakeries, or areas near stores with no particular scent. More women gave their phone numbers to the men in the areas with the pleasant smells.

  If you’re looking to attract the attentions of a stranger, try to do so in a nicely scented room! If you happen to be in a mall, look for the nearest bakery or fresh-brewed coffee establishment and take action there. Based on these findings, your chances are greater in good-smelling food and beverage stores than elsewhere.

  Good scents can also help people in awkward situations, such as sitting in a room full of strangers while waiting for a doctor’s appointment or an interview, or simply sitting in a hotel lobby while waiting for your room to be ready or for a friend to meet you. Researchers compared the interactions of strangers sitting in a waiting room under two conditions: a scented and an unscented room.15 Those who sat in a room scented with geranium essence oil exhibited more interactions with other people in the room. There were more social interactions—such as conversations, eye contact, and physical contact—and there was a shorter physical distance between people: they sat in chairs closer together rather than taking the seats farther away from others.

  Pleasant smells positively influence our moods and consequently enhance our interactions with others, our willingness to help them, and our tendency to evaluate places such as stores and restaurants as more pleasant. But sometimes a smell activates concepts that are somatically related to that specific smell. For example, a scent of cleaning product activates the mental association with cleaning and consequently a cleaning-related behavior. Researchers showed participants several letter sequences and asked them to indicate as rapidly as possible whether they saw a word (e.g., different) or a nonword (e.g., rinexe).16 Some of the words were cleaning-related, such as hygiene or tidying, while others were not related to cleaning: computer or bicycling, for example. Half of the participants were seated in a room scented with the citrus odor of a cleaning product, while the other half were assigned the task in a room with no scent. Those who sat in the scented room reacted faster to the cleaning-related words than did those who sat in the unscented room. Participants were unaware that the cleaning scents influenced their performance.

  In a second experiment, the researchers asked participants who were sitting either in a room with a clean (citrus) scent or in an unscented room to list five activities they were planning to do that day. Those who sat in the scented room wrote down a greater number of cleaning-related activities than did those who sat in the unscented room.

  A third experiment, however, was the most interesting. Again the researchers had participants sitting in either a clean-scented or an unscented room, but this time they asked the participants to respond to a questionnaire. Yet the questionnaire was actually irrelevant to the study; its only purpose was to seat the participants in either the scented or the unscented room. After filling out the questionnaire, all the participants were moved to another, unscented room and asked to eat a biscuit that produced a lot of crumbs. A hidden camera recorded the participants, enabling the researchers to examine participants’ behavior later. Those participants who had sat in a room with a cleaning-related scent cleaned the crumbs off the table more often than did those who had sat in the unscented room.

  It’s quite amazing. Simply smelling a cleaning-related scent influences our cleaning behavior. Want your child, spouse, or roommate to clean his or her room or the apartment? Just scatter around some cleaning-related substances to scent up the room. These experimental findings suggest that there is a greater chance the person will be motivated to clean up.

  This study demonstrated that a certain smell activates a somatically related concept (clean smell activates clean behavior). By now you can guess that the interesting question for us scientists who study embodiment would be to examine whether smelling a particular odor that is metaphorically linked to a specific behavior would influence our judgments or behavior in a similar direction. We saw in Chapter 9 that, according to metaphors such as clean conscience, rotten apple, and rotten to the core, pleasant and disgusting smells were related to moral judgments, and the same moral dilemmas were judged differently according to the ambient smell

  When Something Smells Fishy: Scent of Suspicion

  Numero
us metaphors, such as something smells fishy and that idea stinks, use smell to describe bad things. I can smell something is up recruits smell in its capacity as a detector. Two researchers conducted a pair of studies in which they tested the common metaphor something smells fishy, which implies that we have a suspicion something is wrong—to see whether an actual fishy smell would trigger people’s suspicions.17 Both studies used games to examine suspicious behavior, though not games like Monopoly or basketball but rather a carefully designed task-oriented setup called the Trust Game that seeks to elicit specific behaviors from subjects in a controlled environment. This game has strict rules and enables researchers to examine various behaviors, such as trust, generosity, and egocentrism. This method is better than directly questioning participants about their various behaviors and is easier than watching them in real-life situations, which contain too many variables to control.

  The researchers asked forty-five students to participate in an investment decision project, which was really an exercise in trust. Each participant went to the laboratory with another “participant,” who was actually part of the experiment. Each of the two received twenty quarters. There were two roles in this game: the sender decided how much money to send to the receiver. The money sent was quadrupled, and the receiver decided how much money to return to the sender. The more the sender trusted the receiver and believed the receiver would be fair and return more money, the more money the sender would send.

  For example, if the sender sent ten quarters out of the twenty, they immediately became forty. If the receiver was fair and sent back half, then the sender would get twenty quarters, double what he or she originally sent. On the other hand, if the receiver returned only five quarters, the sender lost money. Since the purpose of the study was to investigate suspicion and not fairness, the real participants were invariably assigned the role of the sender. They were told that at the end of the game they would take the money home.

  Participants were divided into three groups, and each group’s playing area was sprayed with a different scent. One group smelled fish oil, one smelled fart spray, and the third group’s area was sprayed with odorless tap water. The researchers chose to use the fart spray for one group because they wanted to examine whether any unpleasant smell might influence suspicion or whether the influencing factor is specifically the fishy smell (the one that is metaphorically related to suspicion). The researchers found that indeed, participants who were exposed to the fishy smell sent less money than those who were exposed to no odor or to the fart spray. Not one of the participants was able to guess the purpose of the study.

  The second study also examined suspicion, this time using a game called the Public Goods Game. In this game, each participant received twenty quarters with the option of investing as much as he or she chose into a common pool. Each was told that the money invested would be multiplied and subsequently divided equally among the participants—regardless of the amount of money each invested—and would be theirs to take home. Since the money was multiplied, if all participants invested more money, then everybody should take home more money.

  A suspicious player would tend to believe that others were not putting as much as she was into the common pool; and since the money was equally divided, she would not want to be the sucker putting in more money than others. Consequently a distrustful person would put in less money. A trusting person would not suspect the other participants and would put more into the common pool. In other words, the more suspicious one is of others’ intentions, the less money she would put into the pool. As in the first study, participants were divided into three groups and three odors were sprayed in the areas where the experiment was conducted. Again, those who were exposed to a fishy smell invested less money in the common pool than did those who were exposed to fart spray or the odorless water spray.

  Taken together, these two studies demonstrate that the mere smelling of a fishy odor was enough to make people suspicious. Without being aware of it, the participants were influenced by the metaphorical link between a fishy smell and suspicion. The sensory experience affected the abstract concept and subsequently the psychological judgment and behavior.

  The researchers then wanted to study whether the link between fish odor and suspicion exists in reverse. In other words, would those who are more suspicious be more likely to detect a fishy smell? To examine this hypothesis, the researchers invited eighty students to the laboratory and divided them into two groups, a suspicious group and a nonsuspicious group. Both groups were asked to smell five odors and to identify the smells in writing. One of the smells was of fish oil, and the four others were orange nectar, minced onion, autumn apple fragrance oil, and creamy caramel.

  In the nonsuspicious group, participants were simply asked to sniff each tube and write down the smell. For the other group, the experimenter created a suspicious atmosphere by behaving as if she was hiding something: for instance, she would suddenly take a document that was placed underneath the participants’ response sheets, put it in her bag, and smile strangely.

  Participants in the suspicious environment were more likely to correctly identify the fish oil. Suspicion did not influence the identification of any of the other smells. The researchers replicated this study with other smells and obtained the same results. Taken together, the experiments indicate that the metaphorical link between a fishy smell and suspicion works both ways. We are more suspicious when we smell fish oil, and we are more inclined to detect the smell of fish oil when we are suspicious.

  Once again, we have clear evidence that we think metaphorically. We associate fishy smells and suspicion, and each component of that association activates the other. If you find yourself suddenly wary of a place or a person, or uncomfortable in a situation where more seems to be going on than you can rationally put into words, it may be that your sense of smell is alerting you that something is amiss. Take this information from your ancient olfactory sense seriously and reevaluate whether you should put your trust in someone when something smells “off.”

  Turning on Lights Outside the Box: Embodying Metaphors

  The many revealing studies described in this book have dealt with ways in which our behavior is influenced by physical sensations that are metaphorically linked to abstract concepts. Some studies manipulated physical sensations such as warmth or cleanliness to examine whether they activate abstract concepts such as friendliness or moral behavior. Others used abstract concepts to examine whether they influence physical sensations.

  But there is another way to investigate the association between metaphors and behavior: by actually embodying the meanings of the metaphors. Embodying metaphors means acting them out. For example, to embody the metaphor fishing for information, one would hold a fishing rod while sitting next to a small pond and actually try to fish for something.

  In this chapter, we will see how embodying metaphors influences our emotions and our performance.

  Sealing That Bad Feeling

  Many rituals and superstitions are actually embodiments of our thoughts and wishes. In a tradition called Tashlikh, which is Hebrew for “casting off,” observant Jews symbolically cast off their sins of the previous year into a vast body of water, such as a lake or sea, in preparation for the new year. To do this, they put pieces of bread or other food, symbolizing the sins, in their pockets and then throw the food into the water. As the pieces are carried away by the flowing water, so are the sins.

  Another example is the ancient Middle Eastern ritual of guarding against the evil eye. The performer of the ritual must heat a chunk of lead and throw it into a container of water, where it supposedly takes the shape of the evil eye, and then bury it or throw it into the sea. In another ritual, believers write on a piece of paper the name of a person who is troubling them and then throw it out of the house, saying: “Get out of my life!” This physical throwing out of something that symbolizes what we want to be rid of is the very essence of embodiment.

  Metaphors such as I kept
my emotions inside, hide your emotions, I buried my feelings, and I bottled up my anger treat emotions almost as tangible objects you can control by putting them in a container or using some other physical restraint. A group of researchers wanted to investigate whether embodying these metaphors would actually help keep the emotions inside and allow the individual to feel better.1

  For their first experiment, the researchers divided students into two groups and asked all of them to write about a decision they regretted. Participants in one group were asked to place the note in an envelope and hand it to the experimenter, while those in the other group were simply asked to hand over what they’d written. Participants from both groups were then asked to indicate their feelings about the event they had just written about, choosing from five negative emotions—guilt, sadness, worry, regret, and shame. The students were asked to indicate on a five-point scale to what extent they felt each of these feelings, ranging from not at all to extremely. Those who sealed their recollections of the regrettable events in envelopes felt less negatively about them than did those who simply handed back their answers.

  In a second study to examine whether this effect also applies to other events that arouse negative feelings, the researchers asked students to write about something they strongly desired but did not get. Again, half of the students were asked to put their written stories in envelopes whereas the other half were simply asked to hand over their pages. All were then asked to indicate how they felt about their remembered events, using four emotions: sadness, disappointment, anxiety, and dissatisfaction. As in the first study, those who put their answers in envelopes felt less negatively about their events than did those who did not put their stories in envelopes.