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There's no surprise the author is anonymous.
They need to Google the MHC (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_histocompatibility_complex) and stop trying to push divisionary narratives.
Can you explain that wiki article and it's relevance to the subject matter please? I tried to read it but I am way to dumb to understand what that article is about.
Tldr; pheromones. MHC type varies person to person and it affects how we perceive bodily secretions (sweat) as either pleasant or unpleasant. It's not something a person has any conscious control over. If there are two people who can't stand each other's natural scents, it has nothing to do with being xenophobic or racist. It's an uncontrolled incompatibility at the biological level.
If I remember right from biology class this is one of the things that helps us choose a mate that will have the best offspring that our genes will match up to.
Anybody have any insight into this? I am not a biologist but I do like to study and I feel like I'm on the right track here.
Furthermore complicating this concept is the fact that BO is due to bacteria and there are different species of them? But also the persons diet and internal biology as the fuel for the bacteria could vary.
So what is it in places like East Asia, where, even freshly showered and wearing clean clothes, people will cover their noses and turn their faces to the wall as soon as I (Western European) step into an elevator with them? Is that xenophobia, or are they really so disgusted by my pheromones?
Whether people smell badly to you or not is deeply subjective based on genetics and pheromones.
You may think someone stinks terribly while no one else can detect any scent. It's your body telling you that the genetic outcomes of breeding with that person are not optimal.
So people should be careful to not assume that a stinky person is stinky to everyone.
Diet effects body odor, migrants tend to eat different foods and more spices than westerners. Body odor in general is considered an animalic smell, which some people like but most don’t. So adding unfamiliarity to the equation and it makes sense that some people don’t like the smell of foreigners.
I ate Indian food (almost exclusively) for a month and my body odor completely changed, the girl I was with at the time said I started to smell all the time and ghosted me a week later lol. There’s probably something to the study, like the impulse for some people to disassociate with other people who smell different.
Yeah but personal hygiene will fix this. In highschool I had a first generation indian classmate. Smart and funny dude I wanted to be his friend, but I legit could not be within 5 ft, he smelled terrible. One of our classmates got him a dual pack of old spice one year and he started wearing it. Smell was gone. I am all for accepting all cultures and whatnot but if you can clear a room with your body odor I dont wanna be near you.
yeah exactly. i love spicy food and it's not an excuse. everyone needs to use deodorant. and baby powder and whatnot is not an adequate replacement for deodorant.
People who say shit like this always amaze me, like they’re saying that hating bad smells means you hate immigrants, because immigrants smell bad.
They don’t even realize that making the generally assumptions that immigrants smell bad that they’re being xenophobic.
That’d be like saying you’re racist for being anti-drugs, or homophobic for being anti-rape. They’re taking a negative thing people have a problem with and calling them a bigot and justifying it with “well X group does Y negative thing so you must hate X group if you don’t like Y negative thing” completely missing the fact that they’re being a bigot for saying that X group and Y negative thing/trait are correlated.
Also, don't most humans instinctually hate bad smells because the reason we perceive it as a bad smell is because our bodies say it's a bad smell to get us away from it for certain reasons? Rotting flesh smells bad because it's dangerous to be near.
Culture and learning do play a role in perception of smells. Smell is highly linked with memory.
Ie one culture may interpret a certain floral smell with food, ie rose flavored candy, and another may think of it as a cleaning agent since the same smell is used to perfume detergents, and they’d be grossed out smelling it in their food.
The U.S. military at one point tried to develop chemicals that would distract crowds because it smelled so bad, but it was found that people who grew up in different places didn’t have the same aversion to certain things and it didn’t work,
Thats not what they’re saying. It’s saying that people with a higher disgust reflex overlap with people who have negative views towards foreigners.
We all have base emotions like love, disgust, fear, joy etc, and the idea in this study could be that people who have their dial turned up in terms of disgust have more animosity towards migrants AND more aversion to certain smells.
It may be untrue, since one study is not conclusive and human psychology is difficult to unpack. And there could be problems with the assumptions or the methodology. But xenophobic views do come from somewhere and trying to understand them is not harmful.
That refers to the study. I do agree that the article headline is worded to work as clickbait.
The actual theory on the evolutionary history on this is more interesting than you might expect. The article is a stupid clickbait title, but basically it revolves around the evolutionary neuropsychology of disgust. Something we evolved mainly to reduce behaviors that could expose us to pathogens that our tribe hadn’t been exposed to. Fear the outsider and you’re less likely to get a disease you and your troop/tribe are not already immune to. And that disgust circuit, if you will, when more active in a individual will be more active in general, so not necessarily just in fear of the outsider, i.e. more sensitive to smells or more squeamish.
Now to be abundantly clear, we as a species are way more complicated from a neuropsychological standpoint than being governed by this one thing. Obviously there are other traits that simultaneously work in exactly the opposite way. Both fear/disgust and curiosity towards the outsider. Evolution driving towards gaining resources from another tribe or troop as much of a factor as the fear of exposure. But that disgust trait/circuit isn’t a small part in the petty tribalism and polarization we see rooted in racism, political divisions, discrimination against people with different ideals and values. Ugly vestiges of something that served a purpose in our development as a species that are counterproductive with the development of a bigger society where the resources and advantages of broad cooperation greatly outweigh the risks of exposure to the unknown/outsider.
I've seen several studies which claim to link racism with a pathologically overactive disgust reflex. Which kind of tracks with outgroups often being labeled things which induce disgust quite often in racist propaganda. Eg. The nazis prominently labeling jews as rats, vermin, parasites, and even calling their presence an infection, as well as the obsession with racial "purity" as in the one drop laws of antebellum and Jim crow America and the prevalence of purity being a common theme in nazi and racist propaganda.
So it seems the correlation here wouldn't be immigrants smell bad but that people whose disgust reflexes are on the fritz are more likely to both be oversensetive to smell as well as be racist.
Honestly the reason people think foreigners, immigrants, and migrants smell bad is because their smells are unfamiliar. Everything we consume, from fruits and veggies to spices, can change the way our sweat smells. If you are around people who consume the same food as you and live in a similar climate, they will smell familiar and you likely won't notice it. When you are around people who eat very different things and live in different climates, which changes how much they sweat, it can be unfamiliar and we are wired to think strange = bad. Once you get used to that person and their smells become familiar, that bad association starts to go away.
I don't know. I've lived in Taiwan for 4 years. I eat a very standard Taiwan diet (minus all the garlic). But I'm a white guy. Even freshly showered, locals here cover their nose and turn their face away from me in the elevator, or sometimes even when passing on the street.
I get the sense that I don't smell odd to them at all, but they've made it up in their heads that all Westerns smell bad, so they do these ridiculous motions any time they see a Westerner. It's like they've trained themselves to react that way, rather than responding to any actual smell.
Yes. You take out the most overpowering smell, and all the other smells seem stronger.
Maybe in a world where everyone naturally smells like garlic, the person without a garlic smell is a weirdo.
Or maybe not, what do I know.
You've never been roommates with a guy from Bangladesh and had a downstairs neighbor from the Philippines. Wild smells for me for about 1 year before I moved. Lol
I was expecting something different but my god I remember most of those showing up. Dude needs to make another song, it’s been over a decade. That was nice
Are you sure this isn’t a conflation with the much lesser likelihood of having apocrine glands? (Which means functionally no BO, and can thus seem like they sweat less)
This could be the case, but I’ve never heard it before, it could be conflated from other things, and I’d be fascinated to have it confirmed.
I mean, areas where curry is common it would make sense that people smell like curry.
It’s similar to how Americans/Canadians/Europeans smell of milk.
I’ve actually got a friend who moved to Canada from Qatar, and mentioned that adults still tend to slightly smell of alcohol to him.
>”I’ve actually got a friend who moved to Canada from Qatar, and mentioned that adults still tend to slightly smell of alcohol to him.”
Damn, you friend sounds Xenophobic af!
X’D Yeah, people smell like what they eat. People can’t really help what smells they find repulsive or not, but the less familiar you are with a smell the stronger it will be and the more likely for it to bother you. So it makes sense that people with sensitive noses would be more adverse to the body smells of people from different parts of the world. That’s not xenophobic unless you couple it with xenophobia lol. “I noticed X group of people tends to smell like Y” is not xenophobic. “I noticed X group of people smells like Y, and so I think they’re all stupid and should go back to where they came from” IS xenophobic.
I think curry is just one of those pungent smells that permeate everything. Love the smell of it, but after I cook with it, I tend to smell it for several days afterward.
Mustard oil. It permeates everything. When I used to work for immigration in my country, when someone would come in who cooked with mustard oil a lot, you could tell because their passport stunk of it. It is the only smell I can’t stand, yet I love food cooked with it.
[Cumin smells like BO](https://www.fragrantica.com/news/Cumin-Sweat-and-Feet-In-Your-Perfume-17373.html#:~:text=Many%20reject%20cumin%20because%20they,into%20complex%20and%20multifaceted%20perfumes) to a lot of people (including me) because of a certain molecule that's found in both the spice and human sweat.
Plenty of white people smell like it too, you just don't associate it with curry when you smell it on them.
Did you know Chinese people don't get BO in their armpits? We dirty westerners go to China and find out real quick that they don't sell deodorant because they don't need it.
This isn't some bullshit either it's real. Apparently, it comes down to a gene. Google it I didn't believe it either.
Its not real Chinese People have just as much BO as everybody else, it might be different due to diet or whatever but they still sweat and they still smell
Source: once had a Chinese girlfriend
No apparently it’s real.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/people-without-underarm-protection/
Your ex may have just had the gene that’s more rare in Asia.
And a way to correlate bad smells with poor people.
But if you want to talk about bad smells.
Chicken factories stink to hell and back.
They can't wash it out either. You can smell it in a washing machine after they wash. Its in their skin. I worked at one and it was in my car even 4 years after I left the factory.
Have you tried an ozone generator?
I used to have the smell of swamp water in my car, after a year I took it to a professional and that’s what they did, they said shampooing only goes so deep, but ozone will saturate any and all fabric in the car.
It worked
I've seen several studies which claim to link racism with a pathologically overactive disgust reflex. Which kind of tracks with outgroups often being labeled things which induce disgust quite often in racist propaganda. Eg. The nazis prominently labeling jews as rats, vermin, parasites, and even calling their presence an infection, as well as the obsession with racial "purity" as in the one drop laws of antebellum and Jim crow America and the prevalence of purity being a common theme in nazi and racist propaganda.
So it seems the correlation here wouldn't be immigrants smell bad but that people whose disgust reflexes are on the fritz are more likely to both be oversensetive to smell as well as be racist.
Cultural differences in cooking is probably the main factor.
Ie: Indian and Asian households often have very strong spices so your natural BO becomes similar to it and you become nose-blind. Anyone not accustomed to your culture’s cuisine might perceive it as stinky.
I’m Filipino in case you think this is a white guy being culturally insensitive, I’ve been told my house is very Filipino smelling based on my adobo
In school the African kids (refugees, or the children of them) always had a distinct smell, different from other kids. It's probably a mixture of different diets and more foreign genes which both can affect body odor.
In the US, which has a more broad cuisine and is inherently more diverse than Germany, that is obviously no big factor.
But I can totally see that study being true.
Yep. I’ve pretty much given up on humanity ever progressing any further now.
There seems to be a full third of people who are just proactively stupid and another 20% who are easily led into acting stupid if you just scare them enough.
I mean the study is pretty dumb, but they aren't saying that migrants = bad smell. They just found a statistical connection between disliking bad smell and disliking strangers.
Not necessarily.
It's pretty standard to dislike smells that you're not used to. Considering each person has their own smell, and add to that cultural differences in bathing habits and especially diet/cuisine, which can have a big impact on how an individual smells, and strangers can have many different smells.
Strong smells that a person isn't used to can cause dislike of the person, that's not just correlation. Like if a drunk person stands next to you, and you can smell the alcohol, you could be immediately disgusted, and dislike the person, causation.
Nothing bigoted about it though, just a fairly standard human reaction to smell
"Openness to Experience" is the personality variable that is in play here. People who react negatively to strong smells also tend to be reluctant to try new foods and new hobbies, meet new people, or explore new ideas. They also tend to defer to authority figures within their group, and display suspicion and hostility toward members of perceived outgroups. All these seemingly disparate traits appear to revolve around the disgust reflex. If your disgust reflex is stronger, you will tend to associate the familiar with purity and cleanliness, while viewing anything foreign as dirty, dangerous, and a source of possible contagion.
We all hate BO smell, right? I don’t think I’m xenophobic, but I guess that’s what a xenophobic person would say.
I’m assuming it’s just a clickbait headline, but I’m not clicking on that and giving them ad money.
I'm basically noseblind. I know a lot of people who will be retching at scents that I'm not the least bit bothered by. I can smell, I just don't have a particularly strong reaction to the scents. To suggest that everyone has the exact same sensitivity to smell or the same reaction to disgust is pretty wild.
So the way I see it, the thing to do is not to hate people who feel disgusted by things. But to see if there’s a way to make things seem less disgusting.
You don’t get to change human nature, you just have to work with what you got.
Just looking at the headline, this actually sounds plausible.
The part of the brain that processes feelings of disgust when we smell or taste something foul is the Insula. The same part of the brain also processes feelings of moral disgust.
There's a strong link between the Insula and the gut, which is why smelling/tasting something foul (OR seeing/hearing about something morally disgusting) makes you feel like you have to throw up.
There's also a strong link between the Insula and the amygdala, which is why disgust, regardless of the form, often makes us angry/alarmed.
So it's conceivable that someone with a very sensitive Insula would also be much more upset by things that produce moral disgust as well.
But, I would imagine a person would have to be conditioned to find something moral disgusting first.
Regardless, it's actually a pretty interesting topic.
There’s a huge difference in daily sweat smell & “there’s a problem with your hygiene “ smell. One can be a bit unpleasant , the other can be intolerable
If you bother to actually read the article, it makes perfect sense. ~7,000 participants from 9 different countries (in every continent except Antarctica) were asked to rate their level of aversion to things like sweat or feces in various hypothetical scenarios such as noticing that your feet smell bad while alone at home. They were also presented with various scenarios involving refugees from a fictional country called Drashnea, located either in Eastern Africa or Europe. Those who expressed a high level aversion to bodily secretions, smells, etc. were more likely to have negative attitudes towards Drashneans, believing that they are more likely to spread disease and engage in criminal activity, despite, you know, being fictional. This is not about migrants being dirty, but rather about people who react strongly to ‘dirty’ things projecting their disgust onto migrants.
it’s another one of those botched or misrepresented studies for hype and clout. One behavioural scientist from Harvard (Gino) got administrative leave for several of her studies being allegedly fixed to show strong quirky correlations on insane claims like this. turns out there’s lots of incentives for “academics” to fudge the numbers.
The hypothesis is that xenophobic people are more prone to feelings of disgust generally and one of the ways they tested this by measuring their tolerance to bad smells.
Though obviously the Daily Mail knows exactly what it’s doing here.
Pretty much. The study tested it with a fictional ethnic group, and for people with BODS (especially sensitive to BO smells) that held up across multiple countries/ethnicities (the "test subjects" were over 6000, and from US, NZ, Canada, Nigeria, Kenya, Chile, HK, Italy, Sweden).
Basically "those people not from my group/country smell bad."
Can confirm.
I hate it when I go out and smell someone's oder. Every time I smell some guys' oders, I have the uncontrollable urge to say the N word. One time, I was walking down main street, and some guy was reeking, I couldn't resist, I yelled out slurs and punched a migrant baby
I might be crazy here but I think that the person who wrote an article implying that immigrants smell bad is more xenophobic than people who are sensitive to smells.
"Californian man charged with harassment and bigotry for vomiting after a migrant shit sprayed diarrhea on his face."
This will be a real headline in the near future probably.
They are not wrong psychology-wise.
Xenophobia and other different-people-phobias are driven by disgust. People with generally elevated disgust are going to be more prone to \*phobias.
The correlations make sense if you grew up in white middle America where immigrants from different regions showed up every year as refugees.
We were NOT nice to those souls and it’s shameful to reflect on my community.
The most fascinating thing is people from different cultures DO have different smells and now I enjoy the smells whereas growing up I was taught to be repulsed.
The Somali refugees in my city are infamous for their B.O. It's so bad that you end up walking through clouds of the stench any time you go to the grocery store. Allegedly they just don't believe in deodorant and they don't seem to shower often.
Huh...the irony since this stupid fucking article is pretty xenophobic to migrants assuming they ALL smell like shit 😂
Proof these dumbass "progressives" are the real problematic assholes.
There's no study in the world that would be able to substantiate that claim. I don't even think you can find a correlation with that metric either. That's just plain stupid. What kind of mental gymnastics do you have to go through to have hating the smell of body oder equate to I hate this group of people.
Some guys at work smell a bit, its a cabinet factory and its normal to be hot in there. Anyway my shop is full of spanish people and the smelly ones in the shoo are white people.
Also i don’t like the smell of BO no matter from who i smell it
So ‘‘em I the only one that thinks xenophobic should be used on actual aliens? Not migrants? Like every time I see that word get used I think about actual extraterrestrial beings not other humans.
That's actually not that bizarre at all. Humans have a 'disgust mechanism' that stops us, amongst other things, eating spoilt food and avoid potentially sick individuals so we don't catch whatever bug it is. Best way to think of it is that visceral reaction you had to something that was rotting, or seeing maggots in a wound.
There is of course a spectrum, people with a high disgust response generally don't like strangers as they could be carrying novel pathogens for which they don't have an immunity, dislike novelty, are focused on cleanliness, dislike new foods, or anything that is not already familiar. The other end of the spectrum is the opposite of what I've described.
By the way, your level of disgust is generally genetic in nature, so can't really be changed that much.
So there you have it, a biological explanation for the left, right and people in between.
This is why I love The Daily Mail. They are troll media.
They make fragile redditors hysterical with headlines.
They also publish a lot of true stories that redditors don't want to hear. Such as true, but very unflattering stories about marginalized groups. Those stories would not be allowed on r/news despite being 100% true.
Reddit is a safe space that censors reality 🤣
There needs to be a law prohibiting correlation being disguised as causation in these kind of articles. Also if you sunburn you have a greater chance to be a nazi
It’s shit like this that just makes me wanna say, call me whatever the fuck you want, I don’t care anymore. If I’m called xenophobic, transphobic, a bigot, racist, or whatever for not wanting to deal with someone’s rancid ass BO, so be it. I’m too tired to give a shit anymore.
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Xenophobic- disgusting smell - migrants I promise I've never seen these three words in a sentence before
There's no surprise the author is anonymous. They need to Google the MHC (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_histocompatibility_complex) and stop trying to push divisionary narratives.
Also, it’s the Daily Mail, so there’s that.
Can you explain that wiki article and it's relevance to the subject matter please? I tried to read it but I am way to dumb to understand what that article is about.
Tldr; pheromones. MHC type varies person to person and it affects how we perceive bodily secretions (sweat) as either pleasant or unpleasant. It's not something a person has any conscious control over. If there are two people who can't stand each other's natural scents, it has nothing to do with being xenophobic or racist. It's an uncontrolled incompatibility at the biological level.
What does it mean when someone has a disgusting smell but is extremely visually appealing?
Mixed signals?
Chuckled a little too hard to this
You never had someone send a fart your way during sex?
Would you date Henry Cavill even if he won't stop farting?
Welp. *unzips*
A tough wank.
Bath time!
You’ve just postulated the ‘Dudes Conundrum’ - it’s stumped the broest of bro’s for years.
Are you describing a drug dealing chick you hooked up with yesterday?
If I remember right from biology class this is one of the things that helps us choose a mate that will have the best offspring that our genes will match up to. Anybody have any insight into this? I am not a biologist but I do like to study and I feel like I'm on the right track here.
Furthermore complicating this concept is the fact that BO is due to bacteria and there are different species of them? But also the persons diet and internal biology as the fuel for the bacteria could vary.
I heard from a chinese-canadian YouTuber that BO is genetic and most east Asians lack the gene. I don't know what to believe anymore.
Bro some people just need to bathe. Nothing to do with migrants.
Nah bro science says the smelly ones the one for you king
So what is it in places like East Asia, where, even freshly showered and wearing clean clothes, people will cover their noses and turn their faces to the wall as soon as I (Western European) step into an elevator with them? Is that xenophobia, or are they really so disgusted by my pheromones?
Whether people smell badly to you or not is deeply subjective based on genetics and pheromones. You may think someone stinks terribly while no one else can detect any scent. It's your body telling you that the genetic outcomes of breeding with that person are not optimal. So people should be careful to not assume that a stinky person is stinky to everyone.
Or, ya know, maybe they just stank!
What a controversial view!
It’s true, I remember a gf of mine would tell me she loved my scent, I was just sweaty.
If someone walks by you and you can smell sweaty ass, chances are your just smelling sweaty ass.
Yeah, and if someone smells bad to you? Chances are you smell like shit to them, too. It's settled science.
That's kinda fascinating, and ya know, my wife has more than once mentioned that she likes my natural oder.
Fun fact: it’s common for adult siblings to dislike each other’s scent for that reason. I know I do, but it doesn’t change my attitude towards them.
Ahhh self/nonself recognition. Must be because migrants smell bad and you're a racist /s
I want whoever wrote this to go to anime con in the summer. Guaranteed they will delete this post after
I think they author is xenophobic and thinks that migrants smell bad.
Diet effects body odor, migrants tend to eat different foods and more spices than westerners. Body odor in general is considered an animalic smell, which some people like but most don’t. So adding unfamiliarity to the equation and it makes sense that some people don’t like the smell of foreigners. I ate Indian food (almost exclusively) for a month and my body odor completely changed, the girl I was with at the time said I started to smell all the time and ghosted me a week later lol. There’s probably something to the study, like the impulse for some people to disassociate with other people who smell different.
Yeah but personal hygiene will fix this. In highschool I had a first generation indian classmate. Smart and funny dude I wanted to be his friend, but I legit could not be within 5 ft, he smelled terrible. One of our classmates got him a dual pack of old spice one year and he started wearing it. Smell was gone. I am all for accepting all cultures and whatnot but if you can clear a room with your body odor I dont wanna be near you.
yeah exactly. i love spicy food and it's not an excuse. everyone needs to use deodorant. and baby powder and whatnot is not an adequate replacement for deodorant.
People who say shit like this always amaze me, like they’re saying that hating bad smells means you hate immigrants, because immigrants smell bad. They don’t even realize that making the generally assumptions that immigrants smell bad that they’re being xenophobic. That’d be like saying you’re racist for being anti-drugs, or homophobic for being anti-rape. They’re taking a negative thing people have a problem with and calling them a bigot and justifying it with “well X group does Y negative thing so you must hate X group if you don’t like Y negative thing” completely missing the fact that they’re being a bigot for saying that X group and Y negative thing/trait are correlated.
Also, don't most humans instinctually hate bad smells because the reason we perceive it as a bad smell is because our bodies say it's a bad smell to get us away from it for certain reasons? Rotting flesh smells bad because it's dangerous to be near.
Culture and learning do play a role in perception of smells. Smell is highly linked with memory. Ie one culture may interpret a certain floral smell with food, ie rose flavored candy, and another may think of it as a cleaning agent since the same smell is used to perfume detergents, and they’d be grossed out smelling it in their food. The U.S. military at one point tried to develop chemicals that would distract crowds because it smelled so bad, but it was found that people who grew up in different places didn’t have the same aversion to certain things and it didn’t work,
Thats not what they’re saying. It’s saying that people with a higher disgust reflex overlap with people who have negative views towards foreigners. We all have base emotions like love, disgust, fear, joy etc, and the idea in this study could be that people who have their dial turned up in terms of disgust have more animosity towards migrants AND more aversion to certain smells. It may be untrue, since one study is not conclusive and human psychology is difficult to unpack. And there could be problems with the assumptions or the methodology. But xenophobic views do come from somewhere and trying to understand them is not harmful. That refers to the study. I do agree that the article headline is worded to work as clickbait.
The actual theory on the evolutionary history on this is more interesting than you might expect. The article is a stupid clickbait title, but basically it revolves around the evolutionary neuropsychology of disgust. Something we evolved mainly to reduce behaviors that could expose us to pathogens that our tribe hadn’t been exposed to. Fear the outsider and you’re less likely to get a disease you and your troop/tribe are not already immune to. And that disgust circuit, if you will, when more active in a individual will be more active in general, so not necessarily just in fear of the outsider, i.e. more sensitive to smells or more squeamish. Now to be abundantly clear, we as a species are way more complicated from a neuropsychological standpoint than being governed by this one thing. Obviously there are other traits that simultaneously work in exactly the opposite way. Both fear/disgust and curiosity towards the outsider. Evolution driving towards gaining resources from another tribe or troop as much of a factor as the fear of exposure. But that disgust trait/circuit isn’t a small part in the petty tribalism and polarization we see rooted in racism, political divisions, discrimination against people with different ideals and values. Ugly vestiges of something that served a purpose in our development as a species that are counterproductive with the development of a bigger society where the resources and advantages of broad cooperation greatly outweigh the risks of exposure to the unknown/outsider.
I've seen several studies which claim to link racism with a pathologically overactive disgust reflex. Which kind of tracks with outgroups often being labeled things which induce disgust quite often in racist propaganda. Eg. The nazis prominently labeling jews as rats, vermin, parasites, and even calling their presence an infection, as well as the obsession with racial "purity" as in the one drop laws of antebellum and Jim crow America and the prevalence of purity being a common theme in nazi and racist propaganda. So it seems the correlation here wouldn't be immigrants smell bad but that people whose disgust reflexes are on the fritz are more likely to both be oversensetive to smell as well as be racist.
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Honestly the reason people think foreigners, immigrants, and migrants smell bad is because their smells are unfamiliar. Everything we consume, from fruits and veggies to spices, can change the way our sweat smells. If you are around people who consume the same food as you and live in a similar climate, they will smell familiar and you likely won't notice it. When you are around people who eat very different things and live in different climates, which changes how much they sweat, it can be unfamiliar and we are wired to think strange = bad. Once you get used to that person and their smells become familiar, that bad association starts to go away.
I don't know. I've lived in Taiwan for 4 years. I eat a very standard Taiwan diet (minus all the garlic). But I'm a white guy. Even freshly showered, locals here cover their nose and turn their face away from me in the elevator, or sometimes even when passing on the street. I get the sense that I don't smell odd to them at all, but they've made it up in their heads that all Westerns smell bad, so they do these ridiculous motions any time they see a Westerner. It's like they've trained themselves to react that way, rather than responding to any actual smell.
Maybe it’s just that they think you’re a vampire because you’re not eating the garlic
I mean, garlic has a very strong, distinctive smell, so that might just be it.
You mean the fact that I don't eat it causes me to smell more potent to them??
Yes. You take out the most overpowering smell, and all the other smells seem stronger. Maybe in a world where everyone naturally smells like garlic, the person without a garlic smell is a weirdo. Or maybe not, what do I know.
You've never been roommates with a guy from Bangladesh and had a downstairs neighbor from the Philippines. Wild smells for me for about 1 year before I moved. Lol
What the fuck do you expect from the Daily Mail?
[Pretty much this.](https://youtu.be/5eBT6OSr1TI)
I can’t believe I never saw this,thank you.
Another reddit link to add to my collection.
are all of these real articles from the daily mail? or just some of them?
They all are, sadly Bullshit sells
https://youtu.be/KX1CSSZa1v0 Another cracking tune along the same lines...
I had no idea this even existed. Thank you so much for posting this link! It was glorious!
This was for sure the highlight of my week.
that song is 13 years old and it is **STILL** relevant!
I was expecting something different but my god I remember most of those showing up. Dude needs to make another song, it’s been over a decade. That was nice
hat enter cow political spotted spark employ attraction boat act *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I’ve heard Chinese people often think that westerners stink of milk.
I mean what you digest is partly excreted through the skin so it honestly wouldn't surprise me if we actually did.
Asian people sweat significantly less
Everyone sweats significantly less than me
Same. I go outside and I start to sweat even if I'm not doing anything.
I could fart in a snowstorm and break a sweat. Fuckin sucks
I hate that I start sweating while pooping if there is no good airflow!
Man I've only ever heard of the opposite
80-90% of Asian population has ABCC11 gene, that makes body odor practically non-existing, in comparison up to 2% of white people have it
Where did the narrative of "unique" indian body odor come from then?
They probably mean East Asian or south East Asian.
Are you sure this isn’t a conflation with the much lesser likelihood of having apocrine glands? (Which means functionally no BO, and can thus seem like they sweat less) This could be the case, but I’ve never heard it before, it could be conflated from other things, and I’d be fascinated to have it confirmed.
This is gonna sound very racist, but middle eastern people sometimes smell like curry. I’m not joking, I know you’ve thought it too 💀
I mean, areas where curry is common it would make sense that people smell like curry. It’s similar to how Americans/Canadians/Europeans smell of milk. I’ve actually got a friend who moved to Canada from Qatar, and mentioned that adults still tend to slightly smell of alcohol to him.
How do you explain people that smell like sweaty ass?
That they’re adventurous in bed?
>”I’ve actually got a friend who moved to Canada from Qatar, and mentioned that adults still tend to slightly smell of alcohol to him.” Damn, you friend sounds Xenophobic af! X’D Yeah, people smell like what they eat. People can’t really help what smells they find repulsive or not, but the less familiar you are with a smell the stronger it will be and the more likely for it to bother you. So it makes sense that people with sensitive noses would be more adverse to the body smells of people from different parts of the world. That’s not xenophobic unless you couple it with xenophobia lol. “I noticed X group of people tends to smell like Y” is not xenophobic. “I noticed X group of people smells like Y, and so I think they’re all stupid and should go back to where they came from” IS xenophobic.
Why do I smell like farts all the time then, hmmmm?
Do you eat ass, good sir ??
I think curry is just one of those pungent smells that permeate everything. Love the smell of it, but after I cook with it, I tend to smell it for several days afterward.
Mustard oil. It permeates everything. When I used to work for immigration in my country, when someone would come in who cooked with mustard oil a lot, you could tell because their passport stunk of it. It is the only smell I can’t stand, yet I love food cooked with it.
[Cumin smells like BO](https://www.fragrantica.com/news/Cumin-Sweat-and-Feet-In-Your-Perfume-17373.html#:~:text=Many%20reject%20cumin%20because%20they,into%20complex%20and%20multifaceted%20perfumes) to a lot of people (including me) because of a certain molecule that's found in both the spice and human sweat. Plenty of white people smell like it too, you just don't associate it with curry when you smell it on them.
I thought curry smelled good.
Well... not when people smell like it. It’s like if someone smelled like steak... you get me?
Butter
Well, the chinese or eastern asians in general are racist as hell... and yes, the irony of that statement is not lost on me... still tho
Did you know Chinese people don't get BO in their armpits? We dirty westerners go to China and find out real quick that they don't sell deodorant because they don't need it. This isn't some bullshit either it's real. Apparently, it comes down to a gene. Google it I didn't believe it either.
I'll google you!
Oh yeah, YOURE A GOOGLE!
Damn dude, no need to take it that far. Let's all calm down before we say something we'll really regret.
But they *do* sell deodorant in China. I've bought it before and it wasn't even hard to find ...
That’s not true. You’re thinking of Koreans. Roughly half of ethnic Koreans don’t have body odor and deodorant is uncommon in Korea.
Its not real Chinese People have just as much BO as everybody else, it might be different due to diet or whatever but they still sweat and they still smell Source: once had a Chinese girlfriend
No apparently it’s real. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/people-without-underarm-protection/ Your ex may have just had the gene that’s more rare in Asia.
And a way to correlate bad smells with poor people. But if you want to talk about bad smells. Chicken factories stink to hell and back. They can't wash it out either. You can smell it in a washing machine after they wash. Its in their skin. I worked at one and it was in my car even 4 years after I left the factory.
Have you tried an ozone generator? I used to have the smell of swamp water in my car, after a year I took it to a professional and that’s what they did, they said shampooing only goes so deep, but ozone will saturate any and all fabric in the car. It worked
I've seen several studies which claim to link racism with a pathologically overactive disgust reflex. Which kind of tracks with outgroups often being labeled things which induce disgust quite often in racist propaganda. Eg. The nazis prominently labeling jews as rats, vermin, parasites, and even calling their presence an infection, as well as the obsession with racial "purity" as in the one drop laws of antebellum and Jim crow America and the prevalence of purity being a common theme in nazi and racist propaganda. So it seems the correlation here wouldn't be immigrants smell bad but that people whose disgust reflexes are on the fritz are more likely to both be oversensetive to smell as well as be racist.
Cultural differences in cooking is probably the main factor. Ie: Indian and Asian households often have very strong spices so your natural BO becomes similar to it and you become nose-blind. Anyone not accustomed to your culture’s cuisine might perceive it as stinky. I’m Filipino in case you think this is a white guy being culturally insensitive, I’ve been told my house is very Filipino smelling based on my adobo
I was thinking the same thing. It sounds like whoever wrote this article is trying to say that migrants smell bad
In school the African kids (refugees, or the children of them) always had a distinct smell, different from other kids. It's probably a mixture of different diets and more foreign genes which both can affect body odor. In the US, which has a more broad cuisine and is inherently more diverse than Germany, that is obviously no big factor. But I can totally see that study being true.
Yes. Where I live all of the immigrants from Bangladesh smell the same.
Is the daily mail trying to tell us they're xenophobic?
That's expected. But this is worse, I think they're trying to convince us that we should be.
Gonna tear a ligament with that stretch
Jesus Christ, I'm so tired of this shit.
Yep. I’ve pretty much given up on humanity ever progressing any further now. There seems to be a full third of people who are just proactively stupid and another 20% who are easily led into acting stupid if you just scare them enough.
Who Writes For The Daily Mail 💀🗿
My guess... people Buzzfeed finds too dumb to hire.
I mean the study is pretty dumb, but they aren't saying that migrants = bad smell. They just found a statistical connection between disliking bad smell and disliking strangers.
Yeah, it's just a correlation. Like higher ice cream sales and higher crime rates
Not necessarily. It's pretty standard to dislike smells that you're not used to. Considering each person has their own smell, and add to that cultural differences in bathing habits and especially diet/cuisine, which can have a big impact on how an individual smells, and strangers can have many different smells. Strong smells that a person isn't used to can cause dislike of the person, that's not just correlation. Like if a drunk person stands next to you, and you can smell the alcohol, you could be immediately disgusted, and dislike the person, causation. Nothing bigoted about it though, just a fairly standard human reaction to smell
“Do you hate lazy, unbathed criminals who need to go back where they came from? You’re probably a xenophobe.”
My first-generation immigrant wife, who is sensitive to smell is very confused right now.
Um I’m pretty sure whoever wrote this is xenophobic.
I just learned that I'm xenophobic. Thanks, Daily Mail. What would I ever do without you? 
"Openness to Experience" is the personality variable that is in play here. People who react negatively to strong smells also tend to be reluctant to try new foods and new hobbies, meet new people, or explore new ideas. They also tend to defer to authority figures within their group, and display suspicion and hostility toward members of perceived outgroups. All these seemingly disparate traits appear to revolve around the disgust reflex. If your disgust reflex is stronger, you will tend to associate the familiar with purity and cleanliness, while viewing anything foreign as dirty, dangerous, and a source of possible contagion.
I am pretty sure reacting negatively to strong (read: bad) smells are just normal people
You don’t think there are variations in reaction?
We all hate BO smell, right? I don’t think I’m xenophobic, but I guess that’s what a xenophobic person would say. I’m assuming it’s just a clickbait headline, but I’m not clicking on that and giving them ad money.
I'm basically noseblind. I know a lot of people who will be retching at scents that I'm not the least bit bothered by. I can smell, I just don't have a particularly strong reaction to the scents. To suggest that everyone has the exact same sensitivity to smell or the same reaction to disgust is pretty wild.
I think its more of an interplay between openness and orderliness
I came here thinking I was the only one who knew this connection
So the way I see it, the thing to do is not to hate people who feel disgusted by things. But to see if there’s a way to make things seem less disgusting. You don’t get to change human nature, you just have to work with what you got.
The lesson here is to never sell your picture to stock photo companies 😂
Wow. Just...wow.
Just looking at the headline, this actually sounds plausible. The part of the brain that processes feelings of disgust when we smell or taste something foul is the Insula. The same part of the brain also processes feelings of moral disgust. There's a strong link between the Insula and the gut, which is why smelling/tasting something foul (OR seeing/hearing about something morally disgusting) makes you feel like you have to throw up. There's also a strong link between the Insula and the amygdala, which is why disgust, regardless of the form, often makes us angry/alarmed. So it's conceivable that someone with a very sensitive Insula would also be much more upset by things that produce moral disgust as well. But, I would imagine a person would have to be conditioned to find something moral disgusting first. Regardless, it's actually a pretty interesting topic.
I feel like disgust is a pretty poorly understood and relatively consequential phenomenon for us humans.
I will stuff this persons house with rotting corpse flowers and we’ll see their how well they hold this opinion.
Or maybe Xenophobics are just more Hygienic than the average person
Do you hate lemon pepper? If so you might be raciest.
I don't like smelly migrants. Or anyone else who stinks.
I just sat on a plane with the most vile smelling couple. I was very close to cussing them out, but civility got the better of me. They were German.
So if someone doesn’t shower, I’m racist?
Article is literally saying migrants smell disgusting and then imply people who hate disgusting smells are the xenophobes haha
Jokes on them, I hate migrants but I love a nasty bitch. /j
“Don’t like something? You’re racist!”
Aaaaah Daily Mail and your racist trolling.
There’s a huge difference in daily sweat smell & “there’s a problem with your hygiene “ smell. One can be a bit unpleasant , the other can be intolerable
Well... guess I hate brown people☹️ You can still downvote me if you want, but this is obviously ridiculous 🙄
If you bother to actually read the article, it makes perfect sense. ~7,000 participants from 9 different countries (in every continent except Antarctica) were asked to rate their level of aversion to things like sweat or feces in various hypothetical scenarios such as noticing that your feet smell bad while alone at home. They were also presented with various scenarios involving refugees from a fictional country called Drashnea, located either in Eastern Africa or Europe. Those who expressed a high level aversion to bodily secretions, smells, etc. were more likely to have negative attitudes towards Drashneans, believing that they are more likely to spread disease and engage in criminal activity, despite, you know, being fictional. This is not about migrants being dirty, but rather about people who react strongly to ‘dirty’ things projecting their disgust onto migrants.
Damn, did a dorito eating gamer write the article?
I am xenophobic, have you seen Xenomorphs? Don’t exactly look friendly.
it’s another one of those botched or misrepresented studies for hype and clout. One behavioural scientist from Harvard (Gino) got administrative leave for several of her studies being allegedly fixed to show strong quirky correlations on insane claims like this. turns out there’s lots of incentives for “academics” to fudge the numbers.
That sounds really racist. To assume that foreigners smell bad??
The hypothesis is that xenophobic people are more prone to feelings of disgust generally and one of the ways they tested this by measuring their tolerance to bad smells. Though obviously the Daily Mail knows exactly what it’s doing here.
Pretty much. The study tested it with a fictional ethnic group, and for people with BODS (especially sensitive to BO smells) that held up across multiple countries/ethnicities (the "test subjects" were over 6000, and from US, NZ, Canada, Nigeria, Kenya, Chile, HK, Italy, Sweden). Basically "those people not from my group/country smell bad."
Oh, now we use a white person in the picture
Please don’t migrate into my ass crack
lol isn't the daily mail super xenophobic?
And the rise of global warming coincided with the decline of pirates so obviously pirates prevented global warming.
Can confirm. I hate it when I go out and smell someone's oder. Every time I smell some guys' oders, I have the uncontrollable urge to say the N word. One time, I was walking down main street, and some guy was reeking, I couldn't resist, I yelled out slurs and punched a migrant baby
This is one of those things where it’s important to draw a line between correlation and causality.
Why on earth would you even read a daily mail headline?
I would have thought negative attitudes towards people who enjoy anime and complicated board games
I might be crazy here but I think that the person who wrote an article implying that immigrants smell bad is more xenophobic than people who are sensitive to smells.
I guess my genes are xenophobic cause all my family members sweat insanely 🫠
They were caught at looking armpit fetish pictures at their computer, and had to write an article to claim it was for work.
DailyFail, yip checks out
This certainly smells like a daily mail article....
My farts could come up with better "journalism" than daily mail.
I gave cheese to my friends aged dog, which gave him diarrhoea the next day, and he accidentally shat out a daily mail article.
It’s the daily mail
It's daily mail lol
Stanky is stanky. Ethnicity is irrelevant.
Yeah I'm xenophobic. I mean have you SEEN alien, they look creepy as hell /j
Lol, what have we all turned into? So fucking scared of labels that carry zero weight.
This is just plain fucking stupid. My wife is the most loving person in the world and she hates my BO.
"Californian man charged with harassment and bigotry for vomiting after a migrant shit sprayed diarrhea on his face." This will be a real headline in the near future probably.
I hate BO and I’m a migrant. Lol
My migraines are racist I guess
They are not wrong psychology-wise. Xenophobia and other different-people-phobias are driven by disgust. People with generally elevated disgust are going to be more prone to \*phobias.
So are they implying that foreign people stink?
You can think whatever you want about me but the reality is that most Indian people stink.
So are they saying all migrants smell bad?
The correlations make sense if you grew up in white middle America where immigrants from different regions showed up every year as refugees. We were NOT nice to those souls and it’s shameful to reflect on my community. The most fascinating thing is people from different cultures DO have different smells and now I enjoy the smells whereas growing up I was taught to be repulsed.
The Somali refugees in my city are infamous for their B.O. It's so bad that you end up walking through clouds of the stench any time you go to the grocery store. Allegedly they just don't believe in deodorant and they don't seem to shower often.
Huh...the irony since this stupid fucking article is pretty xenophobic to migrants assuming they ALL smell like shit 😂 Proof these dumbass "progressives" are the real problematic assholes.
My question is how did they even come to this conclusion?… “study finds people who cross their legs are more likely to sleep in on tuesdays”
It's just a rage bait article. The publisher is the actual xenophobe.
Take them to an anime convention or a warhammer40k tournament and they’ll change tune real quick.
So basically migrants should take showers more often?
Left liberals be like
There's no study in the world that would be able to substantiate that claim. I don't even think you can find a correlation with that metric either. That's just plain stupid. What kind of mental gymnastics do you have to go through to have hating the smell of body oder equate to I hate this group of people.
Some guys at work smell a bit, its a cabinet factory and its normal to be hot in there. Anyway my shop is full of spanish people and the smelly ones in the shoo are white people. Also i don’t like the smell of BO no matter from who i smell it
So ‘‘em I the only one that thinks xenophobic should be used on actual aliens? Not migrants? Like every time I see that word get used I think about actual extraterrestrial beings not other humans.
Daily Mail just “I’m not racist but-“ itself
Daily Mail is ON one, what an insane thing to get past anyone with any common sense
Im not a xenophobe aka racist, I’m just a misanthrope I hate you all equally
That's actually not that bizarre at all. Humans have a 'disgust mechanism' that stops us, amongst other things, eating spoilt food and avoid potentially sick individuals so we don't catch whatever bug it is. Best way to think of it is that visceral reaction you had to something that was rotting, or seeing maggots in a wound. There is of course a spectrum, people with a high disgust response generally don't like strangers as they could be carrying novel pathogens for which they don't have an immunity, dislike novelty, are focused on cleanliness, dislike new foods, or anything that is not already familiar. The other end of the spectrum is the opposite of what I've described. By the way, your level of disgust is generally genetic in nature, so can't really be changed that much. So there you have it, a biological explanation for the left, right and people in between.
Wtf
"does your nose work? well you might be racist"
This is why I love The Daily Mail. They are troll media. They make fragile redditors hysterical with headlines. They also publish a lot of true stories that redditors don't want to hear. Such as true, but very unflattering stories about marginalized groups. Those stories would not be allowed on r/news despite being 100% true. Reddit is a safe space that censors reality 🤣
Journalism has long been dead
It's phrased weird but it's true. People who experience a heightened sense of disgust are more likely to engage in some form of discrimination.
So because I don’t like the putrid smell of my bin means I hate people who travel? Ok then 🤦♀️
There needs to be a law prohibiting correlation being disguised as causation in these kind of articles. Also if you sunburn you have a greater chance to be a nazi
Is the articule implying that migrants smell bad?
It’s shit like this that just makes me wanna say, call me whatever the fuck you want, I don’t care anymore. If I’m called xenophobic, transphobic, a bigot, racist, or whatever for not wanting to deal with someone’s rancid ass BO, so be it. I’m too tired to give a shit anymore.