A bit about myself
Hi, I’m a 26 male living in California. I’m act extremely different around close friends and strangers. I’m very warm, silly, and approachable around friends, but cold, distant and professional around strangers. I find it very hard for myself to act vice versa. It’s also hard for me to have acquaintances… I’m an all or nothing kind of person. Sometimes I’ve been called cliquey.
Why I’m here
I want to know if Pheromones really work. The few articles I were able to find from scientific journals are inconclusive. One said they had no effect, another said they had some effect, and yet another said they had an effect, but on something biological not social. Given the obvious marketing and commercial interest ties with the rest of the information, it’s pretty hard to judge anything about it.
Pheromones are a bit like the specialized nutritional and body-building supplement companies-- they both can make a lot of money from the desperate hopes and loneliness of their consumers, they both have flagship websites that attempts to offer information paired along with a consumer community (e.g. bodybuilding.com). The big difference between pheromones and sports nutritional supplements is that the former is much more difficult to study than the latter. The nature of the product requires an experimental setting, which works fine when you’re measuring something like how many extra pounds are you able to benchpress. But when the dependent variable is something social, it’s hard to design an experiment up to the same kind of ecological conditioning of real social environments.
Because of the above, I’m willing to forgive the “mainstream-truth” test for pheromones. The basic line of thought is that if a product was indeed effective, then everyone would talking about it. We live in a highly-connected society and the diffusion of innovation, information, and attitudes happens lightning quick. I’ve always known what pheromones were, but I never heard anything on its effectiveness until I saw an ad and decided to google around and do some research on it.
So far the results on this forum are overwhelmingly positive, with very few exceptions. I don’t know if it’s a real effect, or the effect of very clever moderation and marketing, or a bit of both.
There is also a difference between asking “does it work?” and “does it work for me?” An experiment with random sampling of subjects may give a representative picture, but our social networks are anything but representative. People tend to make friends that share similar interests, values, and have similar social status (etc), which makes their social environments very unrepresentative. But at the same time, that unrepresentative picture is all that really matters to them… no one lives in a representative world. That is why forum communities are important-- to see how it works for what kind of people, and it’s also important to just try the thing for yourself (which is why I’m making this post here to get the GC).
What I hope Pheromones will do for me
I used to do the bar and club scene, but I’ve been anti-social for the past year or so due to heavy academic work. But I’m interested in getting that social life back for my final year in school. Los Angeles has a very competitive, harsh, nightlife environment, so if pheromones really worked, that would be one more tool in the toolkit.
I know a little bit about all the cognitive biases we have, and I’m a researcher by trade (though my research topic has nothing to do with pheromones or nutritional supplements), so I’ll probably be among the hardest of evaluators for pheromones. If they really change social interaction, I would have found on a personal level, something to use for myself, and on a career level, a link between something biological and social. So far the closest things out there are probably allostatic load and cortisol, and they’re not even really of social interest, but rather demographic (in the study of mortality and ageing).
