Your Money or Your Sense of Smell? A Comparative Analysis of the Sensory and Psychological Value of Olfaction

Abstract

In public discourse, the sense of smell is typically characterized as the least important of the five senses. However, there are very little empirical data on this topic. Recently, much more attention has been brought to the sense of smell since olfactory dysfunction is a primary and often long-term symptom of COVID-19 infection. It was therefore of interest to expand research on the perceived value of olfaction in the current cultural condition. We developed a survey that directly compared the value of the senses of smell, hearing, and vision with each other and in relation to nine common items representing digital, material, personal, and physical commodities of varying social and emotional meaningfulness (phone, $10,000, favorite social media, online shopping, favorite streaming service, dream vacation, pet, hair, little left toe). In total, four hundred and seven female and male respondents comprising two life-stage groups (college students, general public adults) participated in our online survey study during winter-spring of 2021. The results reveal that the sense of smell was perceived as vastly less important than vision and hearing and much less valuable than various common commodities. We also found that life-stage and gender mediated our findings. For example, one-quarter of the college student respondents would give up their sense of smell in order to keep their phone and nearly half of all women would give up their sense of smell to keep their hair. Our data further illustrate that the senses of vision and hearing are valued relatively similarly. A number of questions arise from the present data and suggestions for ways in which our survey can be expanded and altered to address further research are discussed.

Keywords: COVID-19; commodities; gender; hearing; importance; life-stage; meaning; olfaction; smell; value; vision.

Figure 1

Willingness to give up each sense across all respondents by (a) forced choice between the three senses, (b) responses by sense collapsed over all commodities, and (c) responses by sense and commodity. Note: significance indicated by, ** p < 0.01, **** p < 0.0001; “/” indicates caution on interpretation due to low number of responses of one of the comparators (for details see Methods section).

Figure 2

Willingness to give up each sense between the General Population and College Student groups (a) by responses collapsed over all commodities for each sense (b) by responses to each commodity compared to smell, (c) by responses to each commodity compared to smell, (d) by responses to each commodity compared to vision. Note: significance indicated by * p < 0.05, ** p < 0.01, *** p < 0.001, **** p < 0.0001; / indicates caution on interpretation due to low number of responses of one of the comparators (for details see Methods section).

Figure 3

Willingness to give up each sense between Female and Male gender groups (a) by responses collapsed over all commodities for each sense, (b) by responses to each commodity compared to smell, (c) by responses to each commodity compared to hearing, (d) by responses to each commodity compared to vision. Note: significance indicated by * p < 0.05, ** p < 0.01; / indicates caution on interpretation due to low number of responses of one of the comparators (for details see Methods section).

Figure 4

Probability of giving up senses (a) across all respondents by sense and commodity, (b) collapsed across commodities by sense for genders, (c) collapsed across senses by commodity for genders, (d) collapsed across commodities by sense for general population and college student groups, and (e) collapsed across senses by commodity for general population and college student groups.