You Stink so Sexily: Sweaty T-shirts in Emporia

Abstract

his study is a replication with a modification of the original work done by Claus Wedekind in 1995 who used participants' Major Histocompatibility Complex (MHC) type as a predictor of their mate selection patterns and found a significant negative relationship between MHC similarity and pleasantness of smell (p = .03). Females taking oral contraception did not show this pattern (p = 0.34). The present study looks at the dissimilarity of blood type, male physical fitness, and female perceptions of pleasantness and sexiness of male olfactory cues. I matched university athletes males with males who did not exercise on a regular basis (less than once a week). Female participants rated the attractiveness of one control shirt and ten experimental shirts I randomly selected from the twenty-two possible shirts the male participants wore. The results suggested athletes smelled stronger than non-athletes (p < .001 ), but that overall there were no preferential differences between blood types (p > .05). Possible explanations and confounds for these results, such as the activities completed while wearing the shirt are examined to understand the value of this data in the greater context of mating research.