People around the world instinctively prefer turning left while walking – and scientists have no explanation

A chance discovery

Researchers studying social distancing during the Covid-19 pandemic stumbled on a strange behavioral constant: in 32 out of 33 trials, participants chose to turn counterclockwise when moving around a space. The finding had nothing to do with the original study, but it was too striking to ignore.

Replicating the bias across continents

To rule out environmental quirks, the team led by Claudio Feliciani of Waseda University (Tokyo) and Iñaki Echeverría-Huarte of the University of Navarra moved the experiment outdoors. An overhead drone filmed about 100 adolescents in a school courtyard free to wander. Within seconds, roughly 80% were moving counterclockwise.

The tendency emerges almost immediately; it's not gradual.

When the scientists replicated the setup in Japan, where pedestrians keep left, they expected a clockwise preference. The same counterclockwise pattern appeared – 75% of participants turning left even when walking alone.

Ruling out the obvious

Handedness, foot dominance, eye dominance, gender and even cultural driving-side norms were all tested and excluded. To test whether the bias was a learned social convention, the team analyzed videos of 52 children running freely to music in a Japanese preschool. The children, too, moved counterclockwise.

This was completely unexpected. At least instinctively, when people walk around randomly, you imagine people turn as their needs suit them with little sign of an overall preference. But there was a definite, measurable tendency for people to turn counterclockwise over clockwise, all things being equal.

What’s left

With all individual-level factors dismissed, the study published in Nature Communications concludes the bias arises from a still-unidentified mechanism. The authors suggest it could influence the design of public spaces, crowd-flow models and evacuation planning. For now, the leftward pull remains an open question.