Episode 134: Hormones and the Endocrine System
The Science of Everything Podcast
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Do Humans Respond to Pheromones?
It's not clear where the humans respond to pheromones, and I suspect that they don't. There are some studies which have purportedly found results, although the methodology of these studies has been contested. In order to test whether a pheromone is having a behavioral effect, you need to control for all other possible sources of flu-like behavior - including odor. So it seems pretty unlikely to me that peromones play any very significant behavioral role in humans. We can't rule it out altogether, it is possible evolutionarily that there could be something there, but the evidence isn't strong.
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