New Dialogue Toolkits?

We haven’t heard of this much in our dialogue and facilitation travels, but it appears the use of aroma therapy could play a useful role in creating successful dialogue processes! The Boston Globe writes here.

A team of researchers found that when people were in a room recently spritzed with a citrus-scented cleanser, they behaved more fairly when playing a classic trust game…

…a smell can provoke a mental leap between cleanliness and morality, making people think differently about the world around them.

And how about modifying brain waves? A new study reported in MITnews looked at the use of magnets to influence the brain and moral judgements (although not necessarily to positive effect).

“You think of morality as being a really high-level behavior,” [Liane Young, lead author] says. “To be able to apply (a magnetic field) to a specific brain region and change people’s moral judgments is really astonishing.”