Veering left

It’s not political. Rather, researchers have discovered that almost all of us have a natural tendency to wander in a counterclockwise direction. An applied physicist discovered this phenomenon when he was studying whether people maintain a certain distance between one another while walking. In reviewing the data from his 40 experiments, he noticed that most of his participants spontaneously veered to the left. This piqued his interest. He looked for additional data in the scientific literature and found a study showing that people who are lost usually wander in circles, but the study didn’t specify the direction.

As he continued his research, he found that veering left was unrelated to hand dominance, the layout of the room, or anything else that he could discern. He did find that the phenomenon holds true across demographics, cultures, and conditions. A study of 52 Japanese kindergarten children, who were moving about while music played, showed that most of the children moved counterclockwise.

To continue collecting data, scientists conducted further experiments. For example, they instructed study participants to wander about in an open schoolyard while a drone recorded their movements. Within seconds, they found that 80 percent of people were moving in a counterclockwise direction. As one researcher noted, “It’s not a gradual drift but rather a bias that emerges almost immediately.”

The scientists are baffled. As one physicist noted, "In principle, there is no reason for the fact that people prefer rotating counterclockwise."

I’ve never paid much attention to my own wanderings, although I’m aware that I usually tend to go left when exiting a hotel room, regardless of where I’m heading.

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