The smell of fear, and its impact on risk taking

It's often said that you can smell fear, and indeed when people are nervous they release a chemical signal that's detectable on a subconscious level by those close to them.  So far so standard.  Indeed the 'smell of fear' is a part of the popular lexicon.

Here is where it gets interesting though.  Researchers recently took this fear drenched sweat and analysed how it impacts upon our propensity for risk taking.  The researchers first asked participants to undertake a high wire obstacle course to get them nicely spooked up, although it must be said they can't have been as scared as the guys repairing this radio tower (had to get this video into a blog somehow - watch it and come back!).  Guessing those guys must have a whole lot of sweat!  Anyway, back to the blog.

So they put the participants through the obstacle course to induce sweating, then asked them to play a game of poker.  To spice up the game, one group had bags of the scary sweat hung underneath the table, whereas another group had bags of non-scary sweat generated from people on exercise bikes.

The scary sweat table made higher risk bets than the non-scary sweat table.  In other words, the detection of another person's anxiety made them more willing to take risks. Quite why this should be remains unclear.

When both groups were asked to rate the smell of each of the scary and non-scary sweat, they found both to smell pretty bad, but could not distinguish between them, so the different reaction is it seems purely subconscious.

Whilst it isn't entirely clear why this happens, past research has shown that scary sweat and non-scary sweat activate different parts of the brain, and the researchers in this instance suggest a fight or flight type reaction is perhaps the best hypothesis.

Anyway, there you have it, if you want your team to be a bit more adventurous, try sprinkling some scary sweat into the room.

ps, what did you think of the repair man video?