7. Women Can Smell Fear
Fear not, menfolk. Women's noses may not be as tuned in to your innermost feelings as you think. Or they may. The truth is, it's too soon to tell. The show took this assertion, that women are able to smell men's fear and disgust, from one study done in the Netherlands. You can read
the abstract here, but the rest of the article is behind a paywall. When you try to find out more about this idea, something weird happens: the top hits are magazines (Cosmo), newspapers (The Guardian), or pop science websites, which all reference the above Dutch study. If other studies have been done (which I can only assume has happened), it seems they either haven't been published yet, or haven't been published in major, important science journals. That's not to say that the experiment was a bad one (it wasn't) or that their results are totally bogus (they probably aren't). QI just seems to have jumped on the hype train, both by overstating the results and glossing over the actual experiment. First of all, the experiment itself: after two days of strict "odor control" (no exercising, drinking, aftershaves, etc), a group of men were asked to watch scenes either from MTV's Jackass or from Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. They were equipped with pads in their pits that collected their sweat during their movie-watching experience. Scientists noted which pads belonged to which group, and then gave a group of women a visual test. (Each woman was individually tested.) While performing the test, scientists wafted the smell of a man's armpit pad in the woman's general direction. The Quite Interesting result to this is that, upon smelling, the woman's face seemed to match the mood of the man they were sniffing. If the man had been watching The Shining, for example, the woman opened her eyes wider (like you often do when you're scared); if the man had been watching Jackass, the woman grimaced. For whatever reason, they didn't do the experiment in reverse, with women watching the movies and the men sniffing the sweat, meaning men might be just as able to sniff out moods as women are. It's a far leap from that to say, as Stephen Fry did, the women got it right every time. If you had asked women to sort the sweat pads into "disgusted" and "terrified," they might not have necessarily been able to do so; the criterion of "facial expression" also isn't the best or only indicator of reading moods. And, most importantly, no one's bothered to replicate this effect yet. This is one of those experiments whose Quite Interesting results lead to more questions rather than any solid truths or theories. It isn't total nonsense, really, but it's also not as mind-blowing as Stephen Fry and the elves would lead you to believe.