If you are right-handed, chances are you will make different choices than your left-handed friends. A series of recent studies shows that we associate our dominant side with good and our nondominant side with bad, preferring products and people that happen to be on our “good” side over those closer to the other half of our body.

The theory of embodied cognition, widely embraced by cognitive scientists in recent years, holds that our abstract ideas are grounded in our physical experiences in the world. (See above: “embraced,” “holds,” “grounded.”) Daniel Casasanto, a psychologist at the New School for Social Research, began to wonder: If our bodies shape our thinking, do people with different bodies think differently? He has been using handedness as a test bed for this body-specific hypothesis.

In a set of studies published in 2009 Casasanto found that right-handers associate right with good and left with bad and that left-handers make the reverse associations. People prefer objects, job candidates and images of alien creatures on their dominant side to those on their nondominant side. In 2010 he reported that presidential candidates (Kerry, Bush, Obama and McCain) gesture with their dominant hands when making positive points and their weak hands to emphasize darker matters. And he has collected data to suggest that lefties hold higher opinions of their flight attendants when seated on the right side of a plane.

To rule out the possibility that this bias is purely genetic, like handedness is, Casasanto handicapped people's preferred hands. In a 2011 study he had subjects manipulate dominoes while wearing a bulky ski glove on their good hand. Afterward, they showed a bias against things on that side. The results suggest that we look kindly on half the world because we can interact with that side fluently. Make it a hassle, and opinions flip.

Most recently, Casasanto reported in January in Cognitive Science that children as young as six display a handedness bias. Kids were asked which animal in a series of cartoon pairs looked nicer or smarter. The right-handers more often chose the drawing on the right side, and the left-handers more often chose the animal on the left. They also elected to put away their preferred toys in boxes on their dominant side.

“We all walk around with these lopsided bodies and have to interact with our environment in systematically different ways,” Casasanto notes. Given how broadly those interactions can influence our thinking, he says, “body specificity may be shaping our judgments in the real world in ways that we never suspected.”

6 Comments

1. 1. dan kahn 11:00 AM 6/26/12

   It would be interesting to know if handedness influences peoples' political choices. Do right-handed people vote for right wing parties more than left-handed people? If so this would be a huge advantage for conservative parties. It would be fairly easy to ask on an exit poll what hand people are and see if there is a connection. Does anyone know about a study like this?

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2. 2. sbalcom 09:41 AM 7/30/12

   ..or do the ambidextrous tend to vote moderate? :-)

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3. 3. ryanharford 07:53 AM 7/31/12

   is this something to say training the weak side to become ambidextrous is more important than thought before , as a skater riding goofy is how i prefer ( right foot forward ) , as much as i try to train riding natural it's the muscles or the mental understanding of movement that seem's to lack , could being ambidextrous create a more balance living

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4. 4. Bruce Van Allen in reply to dan kahn 05:38 PM 8/1/12

   Well, "left" and "right" in politics don't refer to a physical relationship that we perceive. Just as the colors "red" and "blue" don't have any inherent political meaning -- otherwise, how could I have lived through a lifetime of being a "red" and suddenly without changing have become a "blue"?

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5. 5. tolson 10:58 PM 8/1/12

   What an obviously, practical observation. This article is based on the premise of human nature. therefore it is dumb, in a way. Prior to my traumatic brain injury at age 17, i was left-handed. i didn't favor only things on the left of me, in fact, i grew up learning to cut with right handed scissors because in elementary school, they never had left hand scissors available; this is just one example of how the brain is a malleable piece of equipment.

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6. 6. dan kahn in reply to Bruce Van Allen 01:32 AM 8/3/12

   I agree with Bruce Van Allen that there is no real relationship between left and right in politics. However symbolically on an unconcious level people may be influenced to a small extent by the symbols. It feels emotionally better to say I am "right" even if I don't agree with most of the candidates' policies. That is why I think a study of the voting of patterns of people by "handedness" might be interesting. The correlation may be "only" 1%, but that would have made Al Gore president in 2000.

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