Olfaction plays an important role in human social communication, including multiple domains in which people often rely on their sense of smell in the social context. The importance of the sense of smell and its role can however vary inter-individually and culturally. Despite the growing body of literature on differences in olfactory performance or hedonic preferences across the globe, the aspects of a given culture as well as culturally universal individual differences affecting odor awareness in human social life remain unknown. Here, we conducted a large-scale analysis of data collected from 10 794 participants from 52 study sites from 44 countries all over the world. The aim of our research was to explore the potential individual and country-level correlates of odor awareness in the social context. The results show that the individual characteristics were more strongly related than country-level factors to self-reported odor awareness in different social contexts. A model including individual-level predictors (gender, age, material situation, education, and preferred social distance) provided a relatively good fit to the data, but adding country-level predictors (Human Development Index, population density, and average temperature) did not improve model parameters. Although there were some cross-cultural differences in social odor awareness, the main differentiating role was played by the individual differences. This suggests that people living in different cultures and different climate conditions may still share some similar patterns of odor awareness if they share other individual-level characteristics.

中文翻译：

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社会气味意识全球研究。

嗅觉在人类社会沟通中起着重要作用，包括人们在社交环境中经常依靠嗅觉的多个领域。但是，嗅觉的重要性及其作用可能因人而异和在文化上有所不同。尽管关于嗅觉表现或享乐主义偏好的差异在全球范围内的文献越来越多，但特定文化的各个方面以及影响人类社会生活中气味意识的文化普遍个体差异仍然未知。在这里，我们对从来自全球44个国家/地区的52个研究站点的10 794名参与者收集的数据进行了大规模分析。我们研究的目的是探讨社会背景下潜在的个人和国家/地区与气味意识的相关性。结果表明，在不同的社会环境中，个体特征比国家水平因素与自我报告的气味意识更紧密相关。包含个人水平的预测因素（性别，年龄，物质状况，教育程度和偏爱的社会距离）的模型相对较好地拟合了数据，但是添加了国家水平的预测因素（人类发展指数，人口密度和平均气温）无法改善模型参数。尽管社会气味意识存在一些跨文化差异，但主要的区别作用是个体差异。这表明，生活在不同文化和不同气候条件下的人们，如果他们具有其他个人层面的特征，他们仍然可能具有类似的气味意识模式。