Chemical emitted by babies could make men more docile, women more aggressive

Hexadecanal appears to be an approved food additive that you can buy in bulk?

For serious? The top of my kids heads smelled intoxicating for the first 6-9 months. There is still a special scent but not quite the same. And I smell it on other babies, too. It’s like smelling breast milk, but emanating from the Fontainelle

If one do the same experiment as the article describe, called the ultimatum game, and tell participants that further players will know about what decision players makes (reputation), administrating testosterone to players will result in more generosity. However if you tell players that you are giving them testosterone, regardless if it is true or not, it will then make players less generous.

Studying human behavior is difficult. It is possible that only women can smell the pheromone, or it can be culture. Its hard to untangle unless one do blind studies.

Three kids here. I could never smell it either. To me babies mostly smell of poop and whatever medication of the hour you have slapped all over their bottom.

One thing I have noticed is they smell worse as they get older :)

I think that's just the smell of that Johnson's baby soap that everyone uses :P

Total emperors new clothes. They smell of baby powder and very faintly of urine.

> As a recent father, I have had numerous people remark on how wonderful babies smell after smelling my child.

Did you get these remarks from women, and were they aggressive (as the study says)?

My two children smelled very different as babies. They both had smells, yes. They both smelled good. But entirely different smells. So I'm not sure there's a "baby smell", per se, so much as babies are prone to emitting smells. And because we're protective and they're cute we likely interpret those smells as pleasant.

(Damn, now I want to have more babies, but we're almost 10 years past that possibility. And still nowhere close to grandkid babies.)

Slightly related anecdote: one of my kids was born with a full head of hair. The hair was the softest thing I've ever interacted with in my entire life. We also have black cat with silky fur that usually feels soft. When the baby came home, the cat's fur might as well have been sandpaper. It took weeks for us to feel the cat's fur as his normal self.

The thing here is that babies have this ethereal and indescribable effect on the people around them which postmodernist science is now trying understand.

When I lived in my parents' home I couldn't smell anything about it. But whenever I go back there it has this distinctly earthy/wooden smell, and I'm sure it's what visitors smell when they visit it for the first time. Could the same thing (or similar) be happening with your kid, to where you're too used to being around them?

the worst chemical warfare my kid did on me was when they were being breastfed. No matter how much sleep I had, no matter how energetic I felt, as soon as IT started latching and sucking away I just get so sleepy, always had to walk away to get anything done, otherwise I would've just napped right there and then!

Puppies also have puppy smell. After having a puppy, I’m convinced that smell is urine.

Wait till they start solids and you'll definitely smell something that won't make you more docile but run away!

I thought my babies smelled nice, but always assumed it was the baby shampoo or diapers, both of which had a scent. I suppose it's possible the nice smell came from the babies themselves, but it'd be hard to disentangle — especially since much of the supposed scent comes from the head, which also smells of baby shampoo.

Agree.

As an uncle I remember smelling top of baby's soft spot and thinking it was pleasant. Maybe it was the Johnson's product or talcum or some other baby product.

Of course, they can also smell like mother's milk if they puke it up and that shit smells sour.

I've also noticed puppies have a pleasant smell to before they get older and their breath stinks cause the owners don't brush their teeth enough.

Off topic: You can't smell anything from baby's excrement until they start eating meat.

Do they have kids themselves by any chance? My theory is that it “turns on” once you become a parent, because almost every non-family male I knew at the time of my “research” found baby smell from repulsive to disgusting, while their mothers couldn’t get enough of it.

Similar effect in how they look for different people.

This reminds me a bit of the start of the book Perfume by Patrick Suskind.

I have the same experience. The smell dissapears when they stop breastfeeding.

I had developed a minor obsession with home security and we quipped that it must be the pheromones.

My wife can smell it, but I can't.

They definitely have a smell. It wears off after a couple months.

My first kid stopped having the new baby smell before she started smiling, and that period in between was hard. (My second kid started smiling before the smell wore off. She's my favorite.)

I don't know if this is the same chemical that is released by decaying humans, but the few times I was exposed to decaying human bodies (forgotten elderly people in apartment complexes), I felt an overwhelming calming feeling.

The smell is overwhelming, but I specifically remember the feeling it created.

Water is another chemical found in babies, rotten horse meat, and insect cadavers. I wouldn't read too much into it.

Languages are hard enough without that!

I wonder if anyone has ever tried to make a "nightmare" language that is as hard to learn as possible.

Thinking like.. 13 tones, pops, clicks, whistles, every possible grammatical structure from other languages at once... etc

Not to mention, if we all would talk with inward breaths then covid might spread slower.

> I wish more of our language had breathing-in based sounds, it could double our information transfer rate!

It might mean fewer pauses for the purpose of inhaling. But pauses for that purpose are already close to being 0% of speaking time.

The British Comedian Jimmy Carr has a very weird laugh that sounds like a honking seal. He has said that this is because he makes the laughing sound as he breathes in and not out.

Chemically it could be something entirely different that could lead to some really cool new discoveries

I think the distinction is - is enough of it excreted that it can be transfered between people (or babies and people) or it just something that is made internally and just affects yourself,in which case it wouldn't be a pheromone.

A pheromone has a specific purpose of affecting the behavior of other humans.

The scent of various bodily emissions, eg urine, would seem to meet the above criteria, but they are not usually considered pheromones.

"Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?" ― Douglas Adams

I never understood how explaining something makes its "magic" go away. If anything, it usually made me appreciate it more.

The loss of magic is real. Though one thing I've found helpful to understand this phenomenon what is called in some circles "quadrant absolutism." That is, reality can be understood from four perspectives, or quadrants: 1st person singular "I"; 1st person plural "we" or 2nd person "you"; 3rd person singular "it"; and 3rd person singular "its". Quadrant absolutism is taking one or two of these perspectives as more real or true than others. Examples: A religious fundamentalist takes more real or true what his/her community or scripture (1st person plural) believes about reality, leaving out the 3rd person perspectives that would demonstrate, say evolution. Or scientific materialists who only take as ultimately real the "things out there" - chemicals, atoms, quarks, etc, considering 1st person experiences such as love to be somehow less real.

There is no need to emit if they produce it themselves from other stimuli, such as sleep deprivation.

We already have chemical castration worked out.

There are many plausible reasons why women would approach a man with a baby that have nothing to do with how babies smell.

For example, some women just like looking at babies. They may be reminded of their own babies, or thinking of babies that they'd like to have someday. Also, women may be more likely to talk to a man who seems non-threatening (men with babies are probably responsible for very little violent crime!).

While it is possible that babies smell a certain way, and even a whiff of that scent makes women more aggressive, I'd be surprised if this were the most relevant pathway for 'why women are more likely to approach a man with a baby than a man without a baby'. The main variable is the presence of the baby, not how the baby smells.

Now if you tell me that women were more likely to approach you when you had recently been holding a baby...then I think we can draw up articles of incorporation and start a new cologne company.

I would guess they decided to approach you before they smelled the baby. How close do you have to be to smell a baby. If they were close enough to smell I suspect the had already approached you by the strictest definition of approach.

Well, there is also a possible psychological component. Lots of women end up seeing single men as a possible threat. With a baby in your arms, you can signaling that you are much safer to them in a multitude of ways, many of them in a way that both parties are not necessarily aware in a conscious level, but we do have sub conscious processes that alter our thoughts and behaviors.

But the smell is also a factor, that's the thing, humans are the single hardest animals to study, cause we are way, way too complex.

I don't think it's the smell. My puppy works for this too.

Isn't that the opposite of what this article is saying (unless the woman were really aggressive in their cooing)

There's a lot of weird psychology in how humans work. Many men also notice that they are more interesting to other women, only after they enter a relationship with a woman. Apparently it's one of natures way of conserving energi. One woman have already spend the time to assess the man, and judged him to be a good partner, so it might be easier to just go after this pre-vetted man.