In this episode we look at a paper by Groyecka Et al 2017 on how attractiveness is somewhat determined by non-physical cues of voice and smell among other factors such as personality, status and wealth. One of the key findings is just how important smell is, from being able to differentiate between men and women to being able to smell actual personality dominance from different scents. It’s not surprise then that many masculine perfumes try to mimic this smell of dominance while feminine ones try to emulate pheromones of subservience and the reasoning behind it is a lot more nuanced than you may think!
Corpse Husband is a great example of how visual perceptions of a person are formed before ever meeting them from voice (and somewhat smell) alone.
Groyecka, Agata; Pisanski, Katarzyna; Sorokowska, Agnieszka; Havlíček, Jan; Karwowski, Maciej; Puts, David; Roberts, S. Craig; Sorokowski, Piotr (2017). Attractiveness Is Multimodal: Beauty Is Also in the Nose and Ear of the Beholder. Frontiers in Psychology, 8(), 778–. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00778
Little, A. C., Feinberg, D. R., DeBruine, L. M., and Jones, B. C. (2013). Adaptation to faces and voices: unimodal, cross-modal, and sex-specific effects. Psychol. Sci. 24, 2297–2305. doi: 10.1177/0956797613493293
