Do People Walk In Predictable Paths?

What guides the direction a person chooses to move? Learn about what habit and handedness have to do with it in this BrainStuff episode.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works. Hey, brain Stuff,
it's Christian Sager here. Do you want to beat the
lines during your next theme park outing? When you enter
the theme park? Just turn right. It's incredibly simple advice,
But experts say you'll avoid the longest lines because most
people tend to instinctively veer to the left upon entering.

(00:24):
If you go right, you'll be going against the grain
and against the intent of the amusement park designers. But
do most people tend to walk in a clockwise direction
in other situations. It's an intriguing question, especially since it's
common practice for runners to move counterclockwise on athletic tracks.
The same counterclockwise action goes for horse and car races

(00:48):
and for baseball players running the basis. There is even
evidence that the chariot races at ancient rome Circus Maximus
ran counterclockwise too. To test the idea that a person
right or left handedness influences their directional preferences, researchers studied
the use of dominant hands. But they found, according to

(01:09):
the results published by the Association for Psychological Science, is
that lefties prefer the left side and right he's like
the right Now this may not sound astounding, but the
way these tendencies manifest offers clues into our clockwise counterclockwise behaviors.
Scientists studied the reaction of stroke patients who had lost

(01:29):
the use of their dominant hand. Over time, the patients
reversed their natural bias and associated the good side of
objects spatially speaking with the side they were forced to use.
Scientists studied other groups who were artificially forced to use
their non dominant hand and found similar results. Right handed

(01:52):
participants who used their left hand to sort dominoes almost
immediately showed a lefty bias when identifying the good side
of an object. A number of theories address why these
directional habits began, but it's continuation has everything to do
with predictability. People move in predictable patterns, and for the

(02:12):
most part, this is a good thing. Take driving a car,
for example. If automobile drivers didn't move in a way
that other drivers expected, chaos would erupt and many situations,
including four waste stops, would become accident zones. Some researchers
also point to the rotational patterns in nature, such as
the clockwise migration patterns of elephant herds, penguins, and most

(02:36):
songbird species often, say researchers, this migration is guided by
wind and weather patterns that help herds conserve energy, or
by solar pathways that shape their movements, and it's not
so different for us humans. Today's episode was written by

(02:57):
Lori L. Dove, produced by Dylan fag And. For more
on this and other topics, please visit us at how
stuff Works dot com m