A chemical signal in human female tears lowers aggression in males | Hacker News Reader

A chemical signal in human female tears lowers aggression in males

newatlas.com

Sniffing women's tears reduces aggressive behavior in men - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38725595 - Dec 2023 (14 comments)

A chemical signal in human female tears lowers aggression in males - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38735409 - Dec 2023 (8 comments)

So the inverse of the final scene in Patrick Süskind's "Das Parfum" is plausible?

1) collect women's tears from donations (kickstarter.com)

2) spread them as a fine mist at G20

3) world peace

Edit: maybe this is what Hugh Laurie was singing about here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8chs2ncYIw

Could create an unstable equilibrium where too much peace leads to a world wide lady tear shortage.

But then we can't have woman leaders. Only men and a steady supply of women tears and my guess is they'll create an OPEC for that miracle liquid ( which was never used to manipulate anyone, 100% )

> But then we can't have woman leaders

How did you reach this conclusion?

The whole exercise is facetious but in that world a woman leader would be all powerful. Immune to aggression-suppression by tear mist. She'd conquer all. Unless stopped by other women. The war would be total.

Wouldn't it mean that there will only be female leaders? If man could be suppressed by tears, they are not strong enough to compete with someone who can't be suppressed.

The headline is technically accurate but miscommunicates the conclusions we should draw. The subjects sniffed women’s “emotional” tears but the control was an odourless liquid. Therefore what they actually validated was whether smelling something before engaging in a game designed to illicit anger reduced anger. What if they smelled perfume? The tears of a man? Non-emotional tears? Freshly cut grass? There’s zero evidence that women’s “emotional” tears were important.

The first mention of this indeed does not specify that both are odorless but the second sentence does:

> Before playing the game, the participants sniffed either female tears or a saline solution – both are odorless – but were not told what they were sniffing.

If both are actually odorless then what's the mechanism? Magic?

Obviously if there is any effect then the tears aren't actually odorless.

Carbon Monoxide is odorless, but it’s effects are still real and well-understood.

If they think it's being absorbed through the lungs then they should plug the subjects noses and have them inhale instead of sniffing it. But that's a far fetched assumption. Assuming the effect is real at all, it's almost certainly chemical detection through the nose. That's odor. That's why they had the subjects sniff it, because they obviously suspect that it's based on odor.

Let’s be real here. You were wrong and now trying to double down on the idea that odor isn’t detectable unless moving ingress into nostrils.

Just wait until they find out that you can smell and taste with things other than your nose and mouth.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20130710-how-our-organs-s...

If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to smell it, does it make an odor?

Well, the chemicals are there, but nobody's there to interpret them as an odor... so sort of yes?

If tears are being detected by the brain, it's through chemicals from the tears traveling through the air and landing on sensors in your nose (or mouth); that is odor. If there is some mechanism other than odor by which humans might distinguish tears them from saline solution after sniffing them, please tell me.

Odors also being detected with your tongue is irrelevant trivia which doesn't alter my conclusion. Sound can be heard through your chest but that's irrelevant trivia when somebody says "if there's no air to transmit pressure waves to your ears then there's no sound." Sound is transmitted through pressure waves in the air, and odors are transmitted through chemicals in the air. If you're hearing them with your ears or chest or smelling them with your nose or mouth makes no difference, the fact that any detection is evidently taking place shows that there is sound or odor involved. Furthermore, the researchers obviously suspect that the mechanism of detection is odor because they asked their subjects to sniff it. You don't ask subjects to sniff a thing unless you suspect odor of being involved. If researchers were studying the perception of magnetic fields, they wouldn't ask people to sniff the fields.

Again, if there is any other plausible mechanism for detection, then tell me. Otherwise, stop wasting my time.

>Assuming the effect is real at all, it's almost certainly chemical detection through the nose. That's odor.

No, odor is a perceived smell. UV and IR both interact with the eye without being visible, so there's no good reason to insist that it's impossible for chemicals with no smell to interact with the nose.

When chemicals float through the air into your nose or mouth and get detected by your brain, that's odor. Conscious perception or unconscious emotional reaction makes no difference, both are odor. If there are no chemicals being emitted or they have no reaction to your nose and your nose doesn't change the signals it's sending to your brain, then you can fairly say it has no odor.

To say that odors aren't odors unless they are consciously perceived is like saying UV isn't light because you don't consciously perceive it. Except it's the same physical phenomena, electromagnetic radiation or chemicals floating through the air, your sensory organs are detecting it (mostly being destroyed by it in the case of UV, but probably not in the case of tear odor...) and your brain is reacting to it even though you don't consciously realize it.

>To say that odors aren't odors unless they are consciously perceived is like saying UV isn't light because you don't consciously perceive it

No, I'm saying that EM doesn't produce colors unless it's visible light. What you're saying is that not only are cold, pressure, and pain flavors, so are any additional effects on satiety or insulin response or whatever triggered by any interaction with receptors on the tongue.

That's a different definition of odor than commonly accepted. If you can't consciously perceive it, it's not an odor. Just like you can't see the TV remote shine a bright infrared light. We don't call TV remotes flashlights, because we can't perceive infrared. If we can't consciously perceive a smell, it's described as odorless.

> That's odor

That’s not odor. Odor is perceivable.

If, let’s say for sake of argument, this study’s hypothesis is that the effect is caused by pheromones, then by definition it’s odorless.

In fact, one of the inherent challenges of trying to study this effect between humans is that the participants need to be clean and odorless, to ensure you’re actually measuring the effects of pheromones and not, say, odor. This review talks about this challenge[0].

0: https://www.ejog.org/article/S0301-2115(04)00474-9/fulltext

You nose detects it and your brain reacts to it; it's odor. Just because you don't consciously perceive it doesn't mean it isn't odor. If it isn't odor then there isn't any other good word for it.

My first thought was whether:

1. women react the same way 2. men's tears have the same effect

Maybe but men don’t cry so your hypothesis is hard to validate.

Babies produce a chemical in their heads that reduces aggressive behavior in males but does the opposite in females. It’s called HEX[1].

https://www.science.org/content/article/chemical-emitted-bab....

The effort to untangle a 500 million year old codebase with zero comments leads to some strange discoveries.

With janky disassemblers, for an incompletely understood massively parallel processing environment, featuring non-deterministic execution into the bargain.

Yeah. Going to need more coffee..

Plus no tests, no original developers, and most of the time - _but just most of the time_ - it "just works"...

I'd say the coding and testing toolchain doesn't work most of the time. In fact it rarely does. But since we only see code changes that didn't kill the entire system permanently, we're left with a a huge amount of legacy trash and a few things on top of it that worked out by amazing coincidences accumulated over millions of years.

So what you're saying is that the universe does cargo cult :kekw:

It's even worse. A cargo cult has a reasonable, comparatively narrow scenario or goal to start with.

I mean, from the universe's perspective, the whole of Earth is a quite small thing

There's an integration test called natural selection.

And you do NOT want to get the "unbounded replication error"

Biology is probably the most obvious example of a maze of Chesterton fences all around.

The systems evolved spontaneously, with no design plan beforehand, so they often don't make immediate sense to us, logical creatures. Many of the features are weird, but we must be careful around them, because we don't know which purpose they serve or once served.

https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/

This is exactly the kind of the study that created the replication crisis in social psychology. It's an absurdly large effect size, a very small sample size, with no plausible mechanism. They also used unusual statistics -- a bootstrap rather than a straightforward unpaired t-test -- and got marginally significant effects (p = .029). This will not replicate.

From the study:

> Moreover, although we tested tears from women donors, we speculate that all tears would have a similar effect. This becomes particularly ecologically relevant with infant tears, as infants lack verbal tools to curb aggression against them and are therefore more likely to rely on chemosignals.

It's not like infants cry silently

> Twenty-five men

So, not a very large size.

I think I'll wait for some replication before taking these results as established.

Sample size isn't holy.

Indeed, the prior probability is important too. That's quite low for this study so it needs an even larger than normal sample size to be believed. 25 is definitely insufficient.

It's only a matter of time now until the military industrial complex picks up on this and puts it in a missile. I can see it already "M-249 Mistifier - wide area pheromonal aggression reducer. Safely pacify opposing forces with no civilian casualties and no reputational damage."

Marketing drove up demand, production had to be ramped up, and that's how we ended up in the dystopian nightmare of dozens of single women in open warehouses watching tragic romantic comedies, crying into a trough.

Vice then released the following documentary "How low-income southeast Asian single cis and trans women are paid 3$/h to cry"

5 years later Prof. von Tränenberg is awarded the Nobel prizes of Chemistry and Peace for the discovery of synthetic female tears.

Miranda!

Completely reasonable when understood from an evolutionary point of view.

Only if male aggression leads to the death of the woman. Otherwise you have to explain how producing tears and sensing tears leads to more offspring.

Male aggression brings retaliation by her relatives and society in general. Extreme aggression is sub-optimal. We are social beings.

Spraying some into opponent's corner before a fight match to increase chances of winning a bet?

These were sad tears. I wonder if there are “angry” female tears that increase male aggression.

Anecdotally and historically, there have been times when female tears were the cause of male aggression against the person who had caused the female tears.

The downside is that it's difficult and troublesome to collect them in quantity.

How could they mass produce ethically sourced human female tears? Could they pay women to watch sad movies and harvest their tears?

Would baby tears be as effective? They might be cheaper and more ethical to produce, since babies cry all the time.

A big enough cry-baby might be able to collect enough tears to pay its way through grad school!

There should be a brand of poppers called Women's Tears.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38735409

>subordinate male blind mole rats cover themselves in tears to reduce dominant male aggression toward them.

Is this an established fact?

What an absolutely random thing....

It's most certainly not random.

"what a random thing to research" more like.

Or a design feature

Conceptualize the aroma

Does it only work with women's tears, or would the same effect happen with men's tears? So interesting!

I see they compared women's tears with saline solution, they should compare male tears and female tears next!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38743921

The comments are brilliant and nail this idiotic research perefectly.

One more thing to note: 6 women aged 22-25, so the title should have included "young fertile women".

And still one more: a research on 25 subjects is laughable. 25 000 would make a little more sense.

Average HN front page headline

To be followed by a Show HN listing for someone's Women's-Tears-as-a-Service startup

Reply on news.ycombinator.com