Want people to be nicer to you? STOP wearing deodorant: Bad body odour makes others more generous and supportive

                           

Sharing a desk or spending time with someone who smells is usually best avoided, yet it could make you more compassionate. 

Research has found that bad body odour is commonly associated with vulnerability, which triggers feelings of concern in others. 

This means people tend to increase their level of co-operation when dealing with someone who smells bad because they feel sorry for them

Psychologists from Belgium found that bad body odour is commonly associated with vulnerability, which triggers feelings of concern. This, in turn, leads other people to pity the person with the odour and treat them more favourably than others

'Even though it has been argued that bad scents invoke negative judgments, we argued and demonstrated that a bad body odour elicits feelings of pity in others and increases prosocial behaviour.'

This can include underarm sweat, smelly feet, bad breath or other foul-smelling odours. 

The research, published online in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology, involved several experiments.

In the first experiment, 36 participants were randomly placed into two groups.

Half were asked to sniff a bad smelling T-shirt that had been dowsed in human sweat, beer and sprayed with foul smells. The other half smelt a more neutral-smelling T-shirt.

All the T-shirts were of the same shape and colour and all participants were told to imagine the item belonged to someone they worked with.