How our scent secretly signals social status

Smell gets overlooked all the time. We move through the day watching faces and listening to voices, while scent hangs in the background shaping our reactions without making any noise.

Scent can pull us toward someone or push us back a little, and most of the time we don’t even notice it happening.

Scientists are starting to take this quiet influence more seriously. They want to know how much of a first impression comes from signals we barely register, and why certain scents spark quick ideas about confidence or dominance.

The role of scent in communication

Animals depend on scent more than we do. Some use scent to mark territory. Many species sort out their social groups through chemical cues.

Humans rely more on our eyes and ears, but scent still slips into our judgments.

“Research also reveals that scent plays an important role in human communication – of fear, sickness, safety, attraction, and personality traits such as dominance and neuroticism.” said Marlise Hofer, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Victoria.

Gaining social status

Dominance and prestige are the two main paths humans use to earn status. Dominance pushes others through force or pressure.

Prestige works through talent or knowledge that people respect on their own. These two ideas show up across cultures.

The question behind this new study was simple: do people use scent linked to testosterone to decide if someone seems dominant?

“We examined whether scent cues associated with levels of circulating testosterone impact people’s social status judgments,” said Hofer.

Linking scent to social status

The researchers recruited 76 male students who provided saliva samples to measure testosterone. They also wore shirts that served as scent samples and filled out a questionnaire on social status.

A much larger group, 797 male and female “smellers,” rated the shirt scents. They judged dominance, prestige, and overall odour quality. What stood out was clear.

“We found that both male and female participants in our study perceived men with higher levels of testosterone to be more dominant than men with lower testosterone levels,” Hofer said.

Prestige showed no link, yet dominance did. Participants smelled shirts from men with higher testosterone and repeatedly rated those men as more dominant. This pattern held steady.

“This relationship remained significant, after controlling for potential confounding factors. These include scent positivity, scent intensity, scent donor’s ethnicity, self-ratings of dominance, and smeller’s sex,” said Hofer.

New clues about human communication

The study adds to the idea that smell gives us social information, even when we do not realize it.

“This study contributes to a growing body of work seeking to understand how social communication occurs through scent. Although we often think of sight and sound as our main social senses, smell also appears to carry subtle but meaningful information about others,” said Hofer.

The team still urges caution. The sample included a narrow group of young men, so the results need wider testing. That is common in early research. Still, the findings raise interesting questions about how much our noses influence us.

Life without a sense of smell

The research has pushed the scientists to explore how smell loss affects daily life. COVID-19 made this issue more visible. Many people who lost their sense of smell struggled with mood, appetite, and relationships.

The ongoing work looks at how changes in smell shape emotional well-being and mental health. This includes social ties and everyday experiences that depend more on scent than we realize.

There is also the hope of helping those who live with long-term smell disorders. Hofer aims to build an intervention that can help people reconnect with food, intimacy, and social life through alternative sensory and behavioral strategies.

Even with all the data, the heart of this research comes back to everyday life. Smell is woven into so many parts of being human, from how we judge a stranger to how we feel close to the people we love.

As we learn more about it, the sense that often sits in the background starts to look a lot more important, and it reminds us how much we still have to learn about the signals we miss.

The full study was published in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior.

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