Short Stuff: Do people move in predictable directions?

Depending on where you are in the world, you either have an instinct to go left or right when entering a place. Learn all about this today.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, and welcome to the Short Stuff. I'm Josh, and
there's Chuck and Jerry's here sitting in for Dave. So
with short stuff, it is short stuff. Why don't you
like short Stuff? You're bringing me down? Okay, I felt sure,
you're going Bill Murray there, I don't remember him saying

(00:25):
you're bringing me down? Yeah, I think that was what
he's saying in the Star Wars when he sang the
words the Star Wars, you're bringing me down? Remember that
far Uh we are not talking about that though, we're
talking about directional walking. And this is from our old
colleagues at house stuffworks dot com and uh not our

(00:45):
old colleagues, but we used to use cracked all the time.
I used to love that site. Second to Jack O'Brien days. Yeah,
I guess Jack O'Brien is now our colleague and has
been for a while, so we're one degree removed. Check
out the Daily Zeitgeist if you don't all ready great show. Yep,
Jack and Miles in the game. That's right. What else
you've been on that show? I haven't twice. They're gonna

(01:09):
ask you a third time before they asked me. I
would love that. I even had those guys a movie crush.
I know, right, that's okay, this will get back to
them somehow, somehow, some way. So Chuck that we're not
talking about daily zeitgeist today. We're not. We're talking about

(01:30):
something entirely different, which is the direction that people tend
to move in. That's right. And uh, generally if you
walk into like an amusement park or a store, and
we'll talk about shopping kind of towards the end. In general,
in the United States, people tend to go in and
move to the right to a place and are indeed

(01:52):
subtly or not so subtly steered to go to the right. Yeah,
but from what I understand, it's like a amplifying our
natural tendency to move to the right, at least in
the United States and in Great Britain Japan. Um, we
need to hear from you because we are being told
that you guys tend to move to the left. Like, say,

(02:13):
when you enter a grocery store, do you, guys, and
this is a question to you in the UK and
in Japan, when you enter a grocery store, do you
move to the left or do you move to the right? Really,
stop and think about it and then email and let
us know. Okay, because supposedly you guys moved to the left,
we moved to the right. And there's some pretty interesting
explanations for why. Yeah. I mean, I can say anecdotally,

(02:36):
and I think you can agree with this. If you
go to London or something and you're from the United States,
you're gonna be bumping into people a lot because they
also tend, I think, to walk down the left side
of like a hallway as opposed to the right side.
Isn't that correct, like maniacs? Yeah? Uh. And when you
look at sports fields, like the way you run bases

(02:57):
or race a car or a horse or a or
RaSE your legs, that is done in a you know,
human Yeah, I've just never uh, that is counterclockwise. And
they've you know, they found that when people walk up
to like a track to go running, they instinctively moved
to the right, which is counterclockwise and jibes with how

(03:19):
sports are done. Right. But then put differently, that's when
you're entering like a field of action from the outside.
If you imagine the field of action being bounded by
a circle. When you enter that field of action, you
enter the circle you move to the right, which takes
you counter clockwise. But if you're already in the circle

(03:43):
and you decide to just start taking right turns, you're
actually moving clockwise, which is brain busting if you think
about it. Okay, I literally did not understand that until
you just said it that way. I I. That's because
it was really poorly put. Yeah. I did not get
it at all, because I was like, doesn't matter like
which way you're facing to begin with, but if you

(04:06):
continue to take rights, is what the key? Because you know,
three wrongs don't make a right, but three rights make
a left. Is that how it goes, especially if you
say it like that. Uh. They've done some studies over
the years because they thought handedness might have something to
do with it, and this was in the Association of
for Psychological Science is where it was printed. It sounds,

(04:28):
but they it does. They did find though, that lefties
tend to prefer the left side and right he's like
the right. And they even studied stroke patients who lost
use of their dominant hand and found that over time
they had to reverse a natural bias to favor what
was their original dominant hand, with with which way they

(04:50):
would go and these studies were very very important in
helping later determine how to best share a TwixT. Bar
I was wondered, what was going coming up there? Do
you you want to take a break real quick? Sure? Okay,
we're gonna come back and keep talking about the direction
people tend to move, All right, Chuck, So you kind

(05:36):
of said it. One thing that has been used to
explain why people move in certain directions UM has to
do with possibly has to do with the side of
the road that you drive on. And yes, anecdotally, if
you're in America and you're walking down the hallway, you're
probably walking on the right side, your right side, yes,

(05:57):
not your left side, because then you would probably bump
into a lot of people. That's just kind of how
things are laid out. So it does make sense that
we would kind of move to the right. Um. And
the reason why it would be significant if you know,
people in the UK um go to the left in
a store, where in America they moved to the right

(06:18):
is because humans are animals, And it turns out there
there aren't any geographical differences in migration direction among wild
animals non human animals. UM, they tend to just go
the same way. Wherever every member of their species goes
anywhere in the world, that's the direction they'll go. It's
not like if one, one group of the species of

(06:41):
gophers lives in North America and they go to the
last and then the African family of gophers moved to
the right when they migrate, That's not how it goes.
They'll all all gophers move, say, clockwise instead right. And
these patterns that are generally based on aid from the
wind if you're a bird, any kind of uh weather
weather pattern like a solar pathway maybe. Um. The interesting

(07:04):
thing in that we uh as far as clockwise, Like
I've never really stopped to think why clockwise is clock
one o'clock didn't go the other way? But it's based
on the sun dial, And it's based on specifically a
northern hemispheric sun dial, because that's the way the sun
will cast in the northern hemisphere. If it was based

(07:26):
on a southern hemispheric sun dial, then the clock would
literally you know, the one and the two and the
three would be to the left of noon. Yeah, and
just calling it clockwise kind of begs the question, you know,
like it's a human constructed direction. But we it seems
like the most natural thing in the world because not
only is it called clockwise, it's counter clockwise, which makes

(07:48):
it seem radical and in opposition of the natural order
of things to move left word rather than right word right.
The only thing weirder than seeing a clock that would
be laid out in reverse would be to see a
base pop player hit a ball and run to third base.
That would be very, very strange to my brain, would

(08:08):
be especially if somebody was timing with the stopwatch that
was running counterclockwise. I wish Japan did that, because Japanese
baseball huge. That is huge. That would be so cool
is if they just ran in the opposite direction and
that was kind of like their thing they could. I mean,
intramural games between American MLB teams and Japanese teams would
be a total mess, but it'd be super entertaining to watch.

(08:30):
And then you've always got the one guy that just
runs straight past the picture towards second depending on I'm
just going there and depending on whose rules you were
playing like, that person would always be out because you
just have to throw the first base or third third base.
They'd also be a double specialist. I guess. Um. One
way this can come into play those in architecture, because

(08:51):
architects like to have fun, and that if they're designing
something that they want to make you feel sort of
either ill at e is or just sort of get
your neurons firing in a different way. They can sort
of drive you left in the United States out of
the bat and put things of more interest on the left.
Because and it's you know, it's pretty subtle. It's not

(09:12):
like some radical ship when you walk in you're like,
oh my god, what's happening. But you know, moving people
in a different direction counter to what they usually move
can can make your brain do different things. That's pretty neat.
I love that. Um. That's if you want to like
stimulate people in a weird way and make them slightly uncomfortable.
In grocery stores and retail stores where you want people

(09:33):
to feel totally comfortable so they want to stay long
and spend lots of money there, you want to do
the opposite. You want to kind of go with the
natural flow, and we've done We've talked about this extensively
in videos think other podcasts about how they lay out
grocery stores to basically I hate to use the word
manipulate you, but manipulate you into you know, shelling out

(09:54):
as much cash as possible. And a big part of
that is funneling you to the right and then placing
things strategically in that counterclockwise motion that they expect you
to move through the store in. Yeah, it's I'd never
think about it, even though we've talked about it a lot,
But I can't think of a single grocery store I
go to where the produce and stuff isn't on the right,

(10:18):
and eventually you wind your way around and on the
left are like the frozen foods and ice cream and
stuff like that. And the idea is that if you
go in and go to the right and there's all
the kind of junk food, you might just get that
and leave and not er go not spend as much money.
I probably choose airgo wrong. But uh, what they do

(10:38):
is they wind you around to the right, where you
buy like your produce and the things that you need,
and then on your way technically on your way out
of that counterclockwise circle. That's when you're gonna do the
impulse buys and say like, oh well, let me have
those those chips in that ice cream or that whatever,
that whip cream that it's cool whip that ate straight
out of the bucket. Well, it's just because it's so

(11:01):
so good, so good. Remember the peanut butter cool whip combo.
No oh yeah, yeah, I told you. I got on
that right after you told me it's so dangerous though. Well,
I mean, we can't keep cool ap in our house.
It's it's gone in a matter of a day and
a half. We just can't do it. Like we'll get
it for for Thanksgiving, for like pumpkin pie, and I
always get an extra because I know that the pumpkin

(11:22):
pot is not gonna have anything, because Emily and I
are just sneaking in there like a spoonful at a time.
And my daughter doesn't know yet. When she's introduced to that,
it's all over because the freezer is low enough, right,
and you have plenty of stools, handy yeah, and fingers
or spoons. So now that the way you just describe
the grocery store, now they think about it. Every grocery

(11:43):
store I've gone into. The pharmacy is the last thing
to your left when you go in, and there's basically
no way to get directly to it. You have to
go through other stuff and then they give you the
opposite At my public is that right, the pharmamer she is.
It's the first thing on the right when you walk in.
I'm thinking publics too. I guess I'm I'm in a

(12:04):
different design or a different dimension. Maybe there's a barren
sting effect going on. Weird. Yeah, so, um, you got
anything else about the way people move? No? I mean
this last thing is kind of funny. They did a
test in a store in Philadelphia where they tried to
funnel people to the left by putting up like palettes
and all these big things that block your way, and

(12:25):
people were like literally crawling over palets just so they
could go to the right. It's it's pretty funny. Philly Strong,
that's right. So since Chuck said Philly Strong, everybody, of course,
that means that short stuff is out. Stuff you should
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(12:46):
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