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Public Affairs coverage from our award-winning staff |
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Clean Smell Encourages Good Behavior
Produced by Adriene Hill on Tuesday, November 03, 2009
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Does virtue have a smell? According to new research by a professor at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Business, it might be the smell of clean.
Want people to act more trust-worthy, more altruistic? Try squirting a little citrus scented cleaner in the air.
GALINSKY: Half the rooms were sprayed with a clean scent and half the rooms were not sprayed with anything so they were a normal scent.
That's Northwestern professor Adam Galinsky. He says those little squirts, and the scent they left behind, made a big difference in how people in his study behaved. Researchers chose citrus scented cleaner instead of more antiseptic smelling cleanser that might conjure up medical or institutional environments.
GALINSKY: What we did is have people in each of the different rooms and they were taking part in a trust game. They were told that in every trust game there is a sender and a receiver. The sender could keep that $4 and walk away or they could any amount of that $4 up to the receiver and the money would be tripled up to $12.
In Galinsky’s study—all the participants were told they were the receiver and they were told the sender had trusted them and sent all $4. The receivers now had a big choice—they could pocket the $12 and walk away or they could send some amount of that money back.
And how did the smell left behind by a few squirts of cleaner change things?
GALINSKY: What we found in our research is that those who were in the clean scented rooms sent about half the money and those in the normal scented rooms ended up taking about two-thirds of the money for themselves. So it increased by about 50 perent the actually giving rate.
Galinksy and his research partners, Katie Liljenquist from Brigham Young University and Chen-Bo Zhong from the University of Toronto also found that participants in clean scented rooms were more interested in volunteering and donating money to a charitable cause than those in non-scented rooms. Glainksy thinks the clean smell works in a couple of ways.
One:
GALINSKY: It sort of activates that natural association between cleanliness and morality.
And two, social norms kick in:
GALINSKY: You smell a clean scent and you’ve probably acted in a more virtuous way in clean scented areas in the past, so you act in a more virtuous way in this one.
At the broadest level, says Galinksy, the study demonstrates the way that teeny tiny changes to the environment can impact behavior…changes as small as the smell of clean.
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Mike Sloothaak, West Lafayette, Indiana // Tuesday, November 03, 2009 @ 3:36 PM
I'm a bit concerned with the journalist's and even the researcher's blurring the lines between 'good' 'virtuous' 'trust-worthy' and 'altruistic' behavior. Trusting someone else isn't always good behavior. The scent itself may not be the direct cause of changing the behavior. It may be that the scent indicated for the test subjects that their hosts are being especially nice (by cleaning their environment) and therefore the subjects (recognizing their hosts to also be the other party in the trust game being played) feel they owe their hosts for providing the improved environment. The entire experiment can be explained by a series of subtle yet significant non-verbal social ques and expectations, and actually not a direct relation to the environment.
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Merrie Haskell, Saline, MI // Tuesday, November 03, 2009 @ 4:17 PM
Too right, Mike. There are all kinds of possible explanations, and frankly, the cleanliness/virtue notion is very modern, very Western. Medieval monks and nuns were super dirty because bathing too much was considered hedonistic. Why not speculate that the citrus scent makes us think food is available (and plentiful) which triggers a monkey food-sharing response deep in the brain? Seems just about as likely. The correlation might be real, but I sincerely doubt the reasoning.
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MURAT ERGUN, HUMBOLDPARK/CHICAGO // Tuesday, November 03, 2009 @ 8:36 PM
I see a representation issue here. Who are the selected groups? Do they have common? How do they represent whole? And as Merrie Haskell states there are numerous explanations for human behaviors. But I'd appreciate these people's study regardless.
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Mike Sloothaak, West Lafayette, Indiana // Wednesday, November 04, 2009 @ 8:03 AM
I actually don't "appreciate these people's study". My concern is that they are hoping to give a scientific validity to moral questions. And I suspect they do not even realize they are doing this, and that they have a shallow understanding of the difference.
That being said, my concern is restrained by my long experience with how journalists can screw-up when they report on the sciences. In this particular case I'm confused as to whether the scientists involved have a more nuanced understanding than the journalist is giving them credit for or if the journalist is subtly poking fun at some bad science. Or if both parties sincerely believe morality can/should have a scientific explaination. Ah well....
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