“The Smell of Virtue”: Drive-by Research Trivializes Both Science and Morality

A smell study made a big splash this week. It was an item on Instapundit, the British press ran with it, as did Time, and ScienceDaily obligingly published an edited version of a university press release.

What generated such boffo attention? A research paper slated for Psychological Science. Among its chief attractions for the media are a confident, catchy title (“The Smell of Virtue: Clean Scents Promote Reciprocity and Charity”), brevity (at 1,500 words it’s the length of a large-ish blog post), and breezy quotability (“there is some truth to the claim that cleanliness is next to godliness”). If there’s such a thing as science by sound bite, this is it.

The authors are a trio of B-school academics: Katie Liljenquist is an assistant professor of Organizational Relationships and Strategy at BYU, Chen-Bo Zhong teaches Organizational Behaviour and Human Resources at the University of Toronto, and Adam Galinsky is a professor of Ethics and Decision Management at Northwestern’s Kellogg School. Liljenquist and Zhong are his recent doctoral students.

The first of their two experiments is in the contrived style of the “prisoner’s dilemma” genre. The test subject is led into a room and told that a stranger in another room was given $4 and promised that any portion he chose to send the test subject would be tripled. The stranger supposedly sent the full $4 and it is now up to the test subject to decided how much, if any, of the money to return to the sender. While the economically rational thing to do is to keep the entire $12, most people return a portion of the money. This delights economists and game theorists who take it as evidence of human irrationality, while social scientists see it as evidence of a deeply ingrained social impulse to altruism and reciprocity.

The experiment was conducted in two rooms identical but for a spritz of citrus-scented Windex. The Windex scent pushed the amount of money returned to $5.33 from $2.81. Put another way, the Windex sniffers pocketed an average of $6.67. These guys are unlikely to be taking a monastic vow of poverty anytime soon.

In the second experiment, test subjects were put in the Windex-scented or the non-scented room and “asked to work on a packet of unrelated tasks.” (Yes, that’s the entire methods description provided by Liljenquist et al. Sort of the scientific equivalent of yadda-yadda-yadda.) The packet contained a flier soliciting volunteers for Habitat for Humanity. The test subjects were asked to rate their willingness to volunteer. The Windex treatment increased interest in volunteering by nine-tenths of a point on a seven-point rating scale, just enough to tip the needle over the 4.0 point of indifference.

(How many interest-in-volunteering points does it take to actually get a Habitat for Humanity house built? Silly question. Lab-based social science is a form of Kabuki: you can marvel at its stylized beauty but you’d never mistake it for real life.)

What do the authors conclude from their data?

The current findings suggest there is some truth to the claim that cleanliness is next to godliness; clean scents summon virtue, helping reciprocity prevail over greed, and charity over apathy.

Gag. The editors at Psychological Science (to which I subscribe and in which I’ve published) should be ashamed of themselves for letting this sentence stand: it is sophomorically overwritten press bait. (Yet it worked!) Note too the inaccurate use of “clean scents” in the plural: only one scent was tested.

The use of only a single scent ought to have been a red flag to the paper’s reviewers: it severely limits the conclusions that can be drawn. Years ago Robert Baron found that people in a mall were more likely to help a stranger (e.g., pick up a dropped pen) when the scent from the Cinnabon store was in the air. Suppose the Liljenquist team had spritzed cinnamon bun aroma and it boosted the amount of volunteerism and returned money. Would they conclude that sweetness is next to godliness? (Awkward!) They’d be reduced to “nice smells promote nice behavior.”

The authors invoke the “broken windows” theory of criminal behavior which holds that “damage and disrepair in the environment promote lawless behavior.” So why not run an unpleasant scent condition? Volunteerism and returned money should decrease in a stale-smelling room. Working the cleanliness/reciprocity link in both directions would be a far more compelling result. But then it wouldn’t be nearly as nifty a sound bite.

The authors’ disconnection from matters olfactory is matched by their odd view of virtue, morality, and moral behavior. In setting the stage for moral implications they name check various deep thinkers: Aristotle, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Marcel Proust, and . . . George Lakoff. (Which of these names doesn’t belong with the others?)

Then they float their big idea: due to the symbolic association between physical and moral purity,

clean smells might not only regulate physical cleanliness, but may also motivate virtuous behavior.

So how does a clean smell “motivate” virtuous behavior? What’s the thought process? I think it might be something like this:

“Hmmm . . . smells clean in here. A decent sort of place. And I’m a decent sort of person. How much money to return? Here, take $10.”

A less moral person might think:

“Hmmm . . . smells like someone just cleaned this room. This place is a bit fussy—best not to annoy them. Habitat for Humanity? Sure, I’d volunteer.”

So how do Liljenquist et al. explain the motivation? They don’t!

The link from cleanliness to virtuous behavior appears to be a nonconscious one: in neither experiment did participants recognize an influence of scent on their behavior.

[Another yadda-yadda moment: we’re never told when or how the participants were debriefed about smell. As phrased, they could have told the researchers they noticed a scent but denied that it influenced them. Who on earth reviewed this paper?]

Team Liljenquist thinks Windex smell produced a more “virtuous” result without the conscious awareness of the participants. But can a person be said to behave virtuously when he is unaware of doing so? Am I virtuous when the wind pulls a $5 bill from my pocket while I’m distracted and floats it into the hands of a hungry orphan? Hardly. Yet by Liljenquist logic I’m a saint.

Moral reasoning holds no interest for the authors. Here’s how they see things:

These findings carry important implications for environmental regulation of behavior. . . . the current research identifies an unobtrusive way—a clean scent—to curb exploitation and promote altruism.

Despite the hype, this study isn’t about virtue or godliness, nor does it engage morality at a conceptual level. This paper is about a smug idea for controlling the behavior of others for their own good without their awareness. It’s about encouraging charity at the point of a trigger spray.

Scent From Beyond: The Spirit Smells of W.B. Yeats

Our Spectral Tour of olfactory ghost stories is turning out to be shorter than expected. I thought smells would be the perfect, uh, medium for unsettled spirits to make themselves known to the world of the living. Apart from a beautifully sentimental 19th century poem, and a more recent novel, the pickings have been slim. Not so much as a farting poltergeist.

In What the Nose Knows I described how some artists, like William Faulkner, weave themes of smell into their work, while others use scent to kick-start their creative engines (Richard Wagner and Emily Dickinson for example). Among the latter I would now include the fine Irish poet William Butler Yeats, who thus becomes the last stop on our tour. (Even if you don’t care for poetry The Second Coming will grab you attention: it’s an apocalypse in two short verses.)

Yeats apparently went through at least one extended period of preoccupation with spiritualism and the occult. He and his wife experimented with “automatic writing” and sleep talking. His book A Vision was an attempt to organize these spirit-inspired cogitations into coherent prose. He relates the various ways the “communicators” made contact:

Sweet smells were the most constant phenomena, now that of incense, now that of violets or roses or some other flower, and as perceptible to some half-dozen of our friends as to ourselves, though upon one occasion when my wife smelt hyacinth a friend smelt eau-de-cologne.

. . . Such smells came most often to my wife and myself when we passed through a door or were in some small enclosed place, but sometimes would form themselves in my pocket or even in the palms of my hands.

. . . I seldom knew why such smells came, nor why one sort rather than another, but sometimes they approved something said.

. . . Sometimes if I had been ill some astringent smell like that of resinous wood filled the room, and sometimes, though rarely, a bad smell. These were often warnings: a smell of cat’s excrement announced some being that had to be expelled, the smell of an extinguished candle that the communicators were ‘starved’.

. . . I can discover no apparent difference between a natural smell and a supernatural smell, except that the natural smell comes and goes gradually while the other is suddenly there and then as suddenly gone. But there were other phenomena. Sometimes they commented on my thoughts by the ringing of a little bell heard by my wife alone . . .

Yeats categorized his various spirit guides into instructors, communicators, frustrators, etc. The substance of A Vision—the wisdom Yeats distilled from the smells and bells—consists of stuff like this:

At the opening of Book V is a diagram where every date was fixed by my instructors. They have adopted a system of cones not used elsewhere in this exposition. If one ignores the black numbers it is simple enough. It shows the gyre of religion expanding as that of secular life contracts, until at the eleventh century the movements are reversed. Mask and Body of Fate are religion, Will and Creative Mind secular life. My instructors have inserted the black numbers because it enables them to bring into a straight line four periods corresponding to the Four Faculties that are in Flinders Petrie’s sense of the word ‘contemporaneous.’ . . . If we keep the straight line passing through the Four Faculties of the same length as the bases of the triangles we can mark upon it the twenty-eight phases, putting Phase 1 at the left hand, and the line will show what the position of the Faculties would be upon an ordinary double cone which completed its movement in the two thousand years of the era.

Riiiiight.

I have to say that this sort of stuff fails to move me. It’s not so much that it’s unscientific; rather it’s that the aesthetics of it—the numerology, the spirit hierarchies, the obsession with parallelisms—bore me to tears.

The falcon cannot hear the falconer, but the poet can smell the Beyond. Perhaps it doesn’t matter that the spirit messages were blarney; delusions can be the means to great art.

The Odor of Sanctity

First this. Now this, from Gawker: “The deification of Michael Jackson has entered the crucial olfactory stage.”

Tiny Bubbles

Brittany Ghiroli at MLB.com conjured a Bronx smellscape last night:

NEW YORK—The scent of champagne floated down the long corridor leading to the Yankees’ clubhouse, wafting through the double doors and straight into a frenzied mosh pit of players, each so soaked that their shirts clung to their back like a second skin. 

“We knew what we had in store for us at home,” Joba Chamberlain said, spewing drips of champagne with every punctuation as he took in the emotions following the Yankees’ 5-2 American League Championship Series-clinching victory over the Angels on Sunday.

Champagne is the celebratory drink par excellence—and the bubbles make it so. A Yankee’s locker room reeking of Riesling wouldn’t be half the fun.

Turns out that bubbles are a key physical factor in delivering the sensory impact of champagne: they literally bring out its characteristic aroma. Or so says a Franco-German research team in a paper published last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The team was made up of super-intense chemists and oenologists, the kind of nerds who write things like this:

Champagne and sparkling wines are multicomponent hydro-alcoholic solutions supersaturated with CO2-dissolved gas molecules (formed together with ethanol during the fermentation process).

OK, so maybe they’re not the life of the party. But stay out of their way in the lab. Seriously. These guys are the first to apply Fourier Transform Ion Cyclotron Resonance Mass Spectrometry to the fizz of champagne.

Here’s the deal: lots of the aroma molecules in champagne are amphiphilic surfactants, which means that one part of the molecule is hydrophilic and another is hydrophobic. At a fluid-air interface, the hydrophilic end of the molecule dives into the fluid and the hydrophobic part orients to the air. The surface of the champagne in your glass is a fluid-air interface, but so are each of the tiny bubbles rising to the surface. The amphiphilic aroma molecules arrange themselves around the skin of every bubble and ride it to the surface. Once there, the bubble pops and creates a burst of aroma-enriched aerosol (the fizz!). 

At least that was the theory proposed a few years back which the team, lead by a fellow with the outstanding name of Gérard Liger-Belair, has now confirmed. They used ultrahigh-resolution mass spectrometry to compare the organic molecules deep in the wine glass with those in the aerosol fizz just under the drinker’s nose. (Can you imagine how Docteur Gérard Liger-Belair would react to Derek Jeter hosing down Mariano Rivera with a shaken bottle of vintage Veuve Cliquot? He’d probably cry.) 

The research team found 163 molecules (well, technically “exact mass signals”) that were more common in the fizz than in the wine. Among these were molecules traceable to the original grapes and to the yeast cells that transformed them into wine. Also more common in the fizz were molecules known to contribute various toasty, herbaceous, and fruity notes characteristic of champagne. So it seems that bubbles do bring out the flavor.

The chemical analysis was extremely precise, but that doesn’t mean the sensory effects are small. The authors estimate that about 5 liters of CO2 escape from every 750 ml bottle of champagne. Since the average bubble is half a millimeter in diameter we’re talking about 10,000,000 bubbles with a total surface area of 80 square meters. That a lot of aroma-concentrating power per bottle.

Doesn’t that make you thirsty? Here at FirstNerve headquarters we like to sip bubbly while listening to tunes on one of our state-of-the-art 8-track stereo cartridges. À votre santé, Dr. Liger-Belair!

Paranormal Olfactory: The smells of The Haunted Hotel

In keeping with the darkening mood of October and the approach of Halloween I recently embarked on a survey of smelly phantasms in literature. 

My reasoning was simple:

Smells are haunting in more ways than one: they are invisible, they sneak up on you, and they can disappear quickly. Smells go hand in glove with faded memories, lost love, fear, anxiety, and unfulfillable yearnings.

Because smells seem ready-made for ghost stories I anticipated an extended ride on the spectral tour bus, with stops at all kinds of overlooked and long-forgotten fictional destinations. Indeed, thing began well. There was the sweet fragrance of mignonette, a ghostly reminder of unfulfilled love from Bret Harte’s A Newport Romance. Then there was the telltale Parfum Mimosa which announced one of a pair of dueling ghosts in Dorothy Macardle’s The Uninvited. I was on a roll.

Accordingly, I opened The Haunted Hotel with anticipation, having seen this Victorian-era novel by Wilkie Collins cited as a fine example of a smelly ghost story. Alas! (as the Victorians were fond of saying) I was disappointed. It’s a rather stiff story, full of Lord So-and-So and Lady Such-and-Such, and who’s where in line for this or that hereditary title. There’s a love story of sorts, conducted mostly with shy feminine glances and repeated declarations of manly devotion, in the manner of Dudley Do-Right. The starchy characters are matched by a labored writing style. Adding to the tedium, some chapters begin shortly before the last one left off. This artifact of the novel’s original publication in serialized form is the 19th century version of “Last week on 24 . . .”

The Haunted Hotel is really a whodunnit. The cadaverous-looking, overly-dramatic and barely coherent Countess Narona marries a British peer who soon falls ill and dies while staying at an old palazzo in Venice. The circumstances are fishy: Lord Montbarry had taken out a life insurance policy that would pay off big time for his new bride. She herself is an exotic Eastern European with a questionable resume. Her brother, the Baron Rivar, is a notorious gambler and amateur chemist. 

What give the story it’s feeble claim on the supernatural are the bad dreams had by Montbarry’s kin when they sleep in the room where he died—the palazzo having since been made over into a hotel. Then there’s the smell:

He became conscious of a mysteriously offensive odour in the room, entirely new in his experience of revolting smells. It was composed (if such a thing could be) of two mingling exhalations, which were separately-discoverable exhalations nevertheless. This strange blending of odors consisted of something faintly and unpleasantly aromatic, mixed with another underlying smell, so unutterably sickening that he threw open the window, and put his head out into the fresh air, unable to endure the horribly infected atmosphere for a moment longer.

It turns out this double-barreled smell [yes here’s the obligatory spoiler alert, although no one without a lot of time on his hands and a high boredom threshold will seek out this particular volume] was that of a chemically preserved corpse stashed in a hidden crawl space in the hotel. In other words, the smell is a foreshadowing clue in a whodunnit and not an other-worldly message at all.

Boo. What a bummer.

So much for this stop on the olfactory ghost tour. Time to climb back on the bus and hope for better luck next time. Anybody have any gum?