Abstract
Despite the lack of evidence that the 'putative human pheromones' androstadienone and estratetraenol ever were pheromones, almost 60 studies have claimed 'significant' results. These are quite possibly false positives and can be best seen as potential examples of the 'reproducibility crisis', sadly common in the rest of the life and biomedical sciences, which has many instances of whole fields based on false positives. Experiments on the effects of olfactory cues on human behaviour are also at risk of false positives because they look for subtle effects but use small sample sizes. Research on human chemical communication, much of it falling within psychology, would benefit from vigorously adopting the proposals made by psychologists to enable better, more reliable science, with an emphasis on enhancing reproducibility. A key change is the adoption of study pre-registration and/or Registered Reports which will also reduce publication bias. As we are mammals, and chemical communication is important to other mammals, it is likely that chemical cues are important in our behaviour and that humans may have pheromones, but new approaches will be needed to reliably demonstrate them. This article is part of the Theo Murphy meeting issue 'Olfactory communication in humans'.
Highlights
The study of human chemical communication, covering responses to human olfactory cues and possible human pheromones, is potentially at a turning point together with the rest of psychology
Our field is likely to be a victim of the ‘reproducibility crisis’ in psychology and other life sciences but it could be a beneficiary of the ideas rapidly emerging from psychology to improve the reproducibility and reliability of experiments [1,2,3,4]
Almost 60 papers report close to uniformly positive results from tests with these molecules, but it is quite possible that these are false positives. This might be surprising to some readers, but it is consistent with patterns demonstrated in other areas of the life sciences which have entire fields based on founding studies which turn out to be unreplicable false positives (§5)
Summary
The study of human chemical communication, covering responses to human olfactory cues and possible human pheromones, is potentially at a turning point together with the rest of psychology. Almost 60 papers report close to uniformly positive results from tests with these molecules (electronic supplementary material, file S1), but it is quite possible that these are false positives This might be surprising to some readers, but it is consistent with patterns demonstrated in other areas of the life sciences which have entire fields based on founding studies which turn out to be unreplicable false positives (spurious ‘significant’ results which cannot be replicated) (§5). After explaining briefly why human chemical communication research largely comes within psychology (§4), I explore the evidence for a ‘reproducibility crisis’ in psychology and the rest of the life sciences (§5) and the constructive responses to reduce the problem, ideas from what has been called ‘psychology’s renaissance’ (§6) [1,3,4,10]. I should say at the outset that I offer these observations respectfully: I am not a scientist actively experimenting in human chemical communication, but I can perhaps offer a disinterested perspective
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