Humans prefer to walk anticlockwise, scientists find – but reason is unclear

“I’m not an ambi-turner,” laments Derek Zoolander in the eponymous noughties satire about the world’s hottest male model and his rare catwalk hangup. “It’s a problem I’ve had since I was a baby … I can’t turn left.”Now, research suggests that the fashionista’s career-threatening quirk was even more unusual than previously thought. Tests reveal that when people are ambling about, they have a natural tendency to turn to the left and walk in an anticlockwise direction.“If you simply ask someone to start walking, whether they are wandering around a museum, a supermarket, or even an empty room, it is surprisingly likely that they will drift counterclockwise,” said Dr Iñaki Echeverría Huarte at University of Navarra in Spain.As with many critical discoveries in science, the revelation owes a debt to serendipity. During the pandemic, the researchers ran experiments to see how many people could share a space while keeping a safe distance. On reviewing the video, they noticed that crowds overwhelmingly walked in an anticlockwise direction.The surprise set in motion an entire research project. The scientists conducted a series of experiments in which individual pedestrians or small crowds roamed around enclosed spaces. Time and again, the researchers observed the tendency to walk in an anticlockwise direction.Tourists inside the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. Photograph: Emilio Morenatti/APSuspecting that cultural norms might play a role, the team joined forces with Dr Claudio Feliciani at the University of Tokyo. He found the same results in Japan. The finding held when the researchers accounted for people being right-handed, right-footed and right-eye dominant, and was seen in both male and female walkers. The only difference they spotted was a more pronounced bias in children.“Each of us carries a small personal bias to turn slightly to one side, and when many people share a space, those tiny biases add up into a net counterclockwise rotation,” said Echeverría Huarte. Details are published in Nature Communications.The scientists are not sure where the bias comes from, but have performed further experiments in virtual reality, and others in which people pretended one leg was broken, in the hope of making headway. Wags on the team joked that the opposite trend might be seen in Australia and that the Coriolis effect, in which Earth’s rotation deflects the direction of the wind, was at work.“We don’t know why it happens, but we think that by understanding the reasons, we could better understand how we perceive the world,” Feliciani said. “It can help us make other discoveries which may be more important than this one.”Humans are not the only species to show such preference. Researchers in Bristol have shown that rock ants have a left-turn bias when exploring unknown nests.Suspicion has fallen on biomechanics. “None of us is perfectly symmetrical, and the way each person’s brain gathers sensory information and coordinates it with the muscles seems to tip them gently to one side,” said Echeverría Huarte. “I should be honest, though,” he added. “We have tested several ideas and the bias stubbornly keeps showing up, so the exact mechanism is still an open question.”Understanding the bias could make crowd and evacuation simulations more realistic, and help to design the spaces we move through every day, from museums to supermarkets to train stations, Echeverría Huarte said.Georgia Hunter Bell of Great Britain leading the women's 1500m in Rome last week. Photograph: Andrea Staccioli/Insidefoto/ShutterstockIn the first modern Olympics in 1896, athletes ran clockwise around the track, but this was changed in 1913 because the majority of athletes felt it was an “unnatural direction to run”, said Prof Gareth Irwin, head of sport and exercise biomechanics at Cardiff Metropolitan University.Running anticlockwise is now written into the Laws of Athletics. “It is reasonable to assume that this emerged due to the right-leg dominance of the population.” he said. “Running around the bend in an anticlockwise direction puts more internal force on the right side of the body.”But it may be less about biomechanics than the social dominance of right-leg-dominant people, he added. “The idea of right-sided dominance transcends sport and athletics, and can be seen in other areas such as supermarket design, impacting on the direction companies aim to walk and direct you around the shop,” he said.