In a new documentary by the Human Nature Lab at Yale University, NOMIS researcher Nicholas Christakis and his team describe their fascinating research into the role biology plays in human relationships, setting the stage for the next phase of their work, which will explore human social chemosignaling — how humans evolved to produce and detect odors that signal important social characteristics, such as trustworthiness, cooperativity and friendliness.
Natural selection has shaped our species to live in social networks and has endowed us with important capacities, such as love, friendship, and cooperation. Human biology reflects this. Our bodies respond to, and foster, social interactions in myriad ways. Prior biosocial work in the Human Nature Lab at Yale University in New Haven, US, has explored how our bodies respond to social isolation (modulating blood biomarkers); how our genes shape how many friends we have and whom we pick as friends; and how the social networks we form depend on, and affect, our gut microbiome (in a sample of isolated villages in Honduras).
The Human Nature Lab’s documentary, Social Network Biology and Human Chemosignaling, describes the design and setting of exciting new research that builds on this prior work to explore the fascinating topic of human social chemosignaling. Humans evolved to produce and detect odors that signal important social phenotypes — such as our trustworthiness,
