Humans prefer to walk counter-clockwise, scientists find - but no one knows why

People walk past a currency exchange office screen displaying the exchange rates of U.S. Dollar and Euro to Russian Rubles in Moscow's downtown, Russia, Tuesday, March 29, 2022. (AP Photo)

If you’ve ever found yourself drifting left while wandering through a museum, shopping mall or empty room, you’re not alone.

A new study published Wednesday in Nature Communications has found that humans have a surprising tendency to walk in an counter-clockwise direction – and researchers still aren’t entirely sure why.

Researchers studied how people moved through shared spaces by reviewing video footage. They noticed crowds consistently seemed to drift in a counter-clockwise direction.

That observation sparked a series of experiments designed to determined whether the pattern was real.

Researchers from Spain and Japan conducted five separate studies involving individuals and groups of pedestrians in a variety of settings.

Participants were asked to roam freely, walk toward designated points or navigate enclosed spaces. Across nearly every experiment, people showed a preference for turning left and moving in an counter-clockwise direction.

“Our findings are highly consistent: regardless of crowd size, boundary effects, or laterality traits such as handedness, footedness, and eye dominance,” the researchers said.

The pattern appeared in Spain and Japan, among adults and children and in both individuals and crowds.

The findings challenge a long-held assumption that such movement patterns emerge mainly because of crowd dynamics. Instead, the study suggests the behaviour originates at the individual level, pointing to what researchers describe as “intrinsic locomotor bias.”

To test possible explanations, researchers examined whether handedness, foot dominance, eye dominance or cultural differences could account for the effect. They found no meaningful differences between men and women, right-handed or left-handed participants, or between Spanish and Japanese volunteers. Even experiments involving eye patches failed to alter the tendency.

The study said in one of the experiments “children, at least in this specific activity, tend to imitate their peers and end up walking in the same direction.”

The reasoning behind the direction

While the cause remains uncertain, researchers suspect the answer may lie somewhere lie somewhere in human biomechanics.

The study authors suggest subtle asymmetries in how the brain, muscles and body co-ordinate movement could be influencing the direction people naturally turn.

Better understanding how people move through the spaces may help improve crowd management, evacuation planning and the design of public venues such as airports, train stations and stadiums, the study said.

People across the culture appear to share an unconscious preference for turning left, but exactly why humans prefer to walk counter-clockwise is still, quite literally, an open question.