Body odor disgust is a primitive regulator of social processes. We thus expect a role of such disgust in the activation of implicit attitudes towards outgroups. The Implicit Association Test is a reaction-time based instrument that measures the strength of automatic associations between pairs of concepts, such as social groups (e.g., Roma and Swedes) and emotional valence attributes (good or bad). In the IAT participants are asked to perform a categorization task by sorting positive/negative words and pictures of faces (or names) of people belonging to different groups (e.g., Roma and Swedes).
Considering the unique potential of olfaction in eliciting strong disgust emotions and in preventing the contact with pathogen threats , in the present study we will use olfactory cues (sweat-like vs. soap-like odors),and, beside the classical IAT, we will use an IAT in which participants will have to categorize words related to illness (e.g. “virus”) vs. health (e.g. “fit”).
We hypothesize that exposure to sweat-like odorants vs. pleasant odors should increase implicit bias towards outgroups (Roma). Since we posit that body-odors are more salient pathogen-cues, we expect this effect to be even stronger when using an illness-related IAT. Furthermore, we predict this effect to be moderated by the Body odor disgust scale BODS), a new measure of sensitivity toward body odors. We expect the effect to be stronger in participants with higher BODS.