Does Scent Make People More Social? What a Controlled Study Found About Shared Spaces

Most shared commercial spaces exist so that people will do something together in them. A senior living dining room works when residents sit down and talk. A clubhouse earns its square footage when someone stays rather than collecting a package and leaving. A hotel lobby bar is profitable in direct proportion to how long people are willing to remain in it.

That outcome is unusually hard to influence with design alone. You can buy better furniture, warm the lighting, soften the acoustics, and still end up with a beautiful room people walk through. Scent rarely enters that conversation, largely because there has been very little evidence that it belongs there.

There is at least one controlled study that speaks to it directly, and it is worth knowing about.

What the study was

In 2003, Deborah M. V. Zemke completed a doctoral dissertation at the William F. Harrah College of Hotel Administration at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, titled The Effect of Ambient Scent on Affiliation Behaviors and Social Interactions.

The design was a 2×2 factorial experiment. One factor was the presence or absence of an ambient scent in the room. The second divided participants by their disposition toward slot machine play — people who had tried it and liked it, and people who had tried it and did not.

Participants were seated in a waiting room for fifteen minutes before a focus group. Some waited in the room with an ambient scent present; the rest waited in the same room with no scent. Everything else was deliberately held still: the same temperature, the same lighting, the same furniture in the same arrangement. The sessions were videotaped, and the recordings were later coded for social interaction behaviors.

One detail matters more than any other: the room was on the UNLV campus, not in a casino, a hotel, or any other operating venue. This was a laboratory environment built to isolate a single variable. It was not a field test of a commercial scenting program, and it should not be read as one.

What it found

Scent had a statistically significant effect on the social interaction behaviors the participants displayed. Adding the scent to the waiting room, the author reported, “resulted in more social interaction behaviors than were exhibited in the unscented room.”

That is the entire finding, and its plainness is the point. Same room, same wait, same fifteen minutes, one variable changed — and what people did in the room changed with it.

The work did not stop at the dissertation. Four years later, Zemke and Stowe Shoemaker published a related study in the International Journal of Hospitality Management under the title “Scent across a crowded room,” framed explicitly around service environments — the paper opens on hotel conference rooms and lobbies — and reporting ambient scent to have a significant, positive influence on the number of social interactions participants displayed. So the finding cleared peer review in a hospitality journal, not only a dissertation committee. We should be straight about one thing: that paper sits behind a paywall and we have read only its abstract, so everything described in detail above comes from the dissertation, which anyone can read in full.

Why this is an unusual piece of evidence

Most claims about scent and behavior in commercial space trace back to research where the measured outcome is transactional: time spent in a store, money spent, willingness to pay a higher price. Those studies are useful, and we have written about a casino-floor study measured in coin-in elsewhere.

This one is different in kind. The outcome was not what people bought. It was whether they engaged with each other. For an entire category of rooms whose purpose is that people stay and interact, that is a much closer match to the job the room is actually being asked to do.

Where the argument applies

Senior living dining rooms and common areas

A dining room is the social engine of a senior living community, and it is also the room families read most closely on a tour. Whether people are sitting and talking in it is not a soft impression — it is the thing a prospective family is actually evaluating. Scent is usually specified in those buildings for odor management and for the lobby impression. This study suggests the dining room and the common areas deserve their own consideration, for a different reason.

Multifamily clubhouses and amenity spaces

Amenity space is expensive, and its value is judged by whether it gets used. A clubhouse, a co-working lounge, or a resident lounge that sits empty is a line item; the same room with people in it is a leasing asset. Prospects on a tour read an occupied amenity space very differently from an empty one. In multifamily properties, scenting tends to stop at the leasing office and the corridors. The amenity spaces are arguably where a social effect would be worth the most.

Hotel lobbies, bars, and mixed-use ground floors

Lobby bars and hotel lounges monetize lingering directly. So, less directly, do the ground-floor common areas of a mixed-use or Class A building, where tenant satisfaction and renewal decisions are shaped by whether the shared spaces feel alive. A room that encourages people to stop and talk is doing commercial work, not just decorative work. It is worth noting that the published version of this research was written for exactly this audience.

What the study does not show

We would rather state the limits than have someone else find them.

• It was a campus waiting room, not a venue. Fifteen minutes, in a controlled space, with a group of strangers. Real buildings have history, traffic, competing odors, and people who have been there before.
• The recordings had no audio. Coding was based on visible behavior, not on what anyone actually said.
• One scent, one manipulation. The study does not tell you which fragrance, at what intensity, in what kind of room.
• The data-collection window was short, with no variation across seasons or conditions.
• Participants were paid focus-group recruits who chose to take part. People who volunteer for a group discussion may be more inclined to interact than average, and people who know they are being observed do not always behave as they otherwise would.
• The published paper calls itself exploratory. That is the authors' own word, and it is the right one.
• The research was sponsored by a gaming supplier, disclosed by the author in the dissertation.
• It measured behavior in a room. Not revenue, not move-ins, not lease-ups, not renewals.

So the defensible claim is a narrow one: ambient scent can change how people behave socially in a shared room, under controlled conditions. It is not evidence that scenting your clubhouse will fill it, and we are not going to make that argument.

How we would actually use this

Three practical consequences follow from it.

1. Treat the social rooms as scenting decisions in their own right. Most programs are specified from the entrance outward — lobby first, then odor problems. If a room's job is for people to stay in it, that room warrants its own fragrance and its own intensity, not a leftover setting from the front door.
2. Use scent intentionally in rooms designed for people to gather. A controlled UNLV study found that people in a scented waiting room displayed more social interaction behaviors than those in the unscented room. That does not mean scent will automatically increase engagement in every clubhouse, lounge, dining room, or bar, but it provides a credible reason to consider fragrance as part of the environment in spaces designed for people to spend time together.
3. Measure the thing you care about during the trial. If the reason you are scenting the clubhouse is usage, then usage — counts, dwell, staff observation — is what should be watched during the demo period. Not whether the room smells nice, which it will.

That last point is why we put equipment in the actual building for seven days at no cost, with free return shipping. A controlled study tells you a mechanism exists. Only your own room, with your own people in it, tells you whether it is worth paying for.

Editorial note and sources

This article summarizes independent academic research and does not describe results from an Aroma Impressions installation. No client outcomes, percentages, or performance figures are implied.

Zemke, D. M. V. (2003). The Effect of Ambient Scent on Affiliation Behaviors and Social Interactions. Doctoral dissertation, William F. Harrah College of Hotel Administration, University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Examined by a university committee and publicly available in full. Read the full dissertation.

Zemke, D. M. V., & Shoemaker, S. (2007). Scent across a crowded room: Exploring the effect of ambient scent on social interactions. International Journal of Hospitality Management, 26(4), 927–940. doi:10.1016/j.ijhm.2006.10.009. Peer-reviewed and paywalled; abstract freely readable.

It applies across every vertical we serve, including apartment and multifamily scenting, casino scent marketing, senior living scenting, commercial property scenting, and hotel scenting. Related reading: How Ambient Scent Changes the Way a Commercial Space Is Perceived, The Lobby Effect: How Scent Shapes Leasing Decisions and Renewal Rates.