Study: Why my baby is less disgusting than yours

When a mother compares and contrasts the stench from her baby’s nappies with that from those of someone else’s baby, the question of disgust arises. The question drove a team of psychologists to do an experiment. Richard Stevenson and Trevor Case, of Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, and Betty Repacholi of the University of Washington in Seattle issued a report called My Baby Doesn’t Smell As Bad As Yours – The Plasticity of Disgust. It appeared in a 2006 issue of the journal Evolution and Human Behavior.

Stevenson, Case, and Repacholi present their work as an addition to a body of earlier smelly investigation….

So begins this week’s Improbable Research column in The Guardian.