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Here's a test. It's an odd question…but do you tend to prefer the right side or the left side of anything?
It turns out that right-handed folks prefer the right and lefties prefer the left. The preference informs the choice of one of a pair of products, two job applicants, even a couple of alien creatures.
Researchers theorize that since people have better control of their dominant hand they unconsciously associate good things with what’s called their "fluent side of space." To test this idea, scientists studied the reaction of stroke patients who had lost the use of their so-called "fluent hand." These patients flipped the natural bias and associated "good" with the side that they were now forced to use.
Even more striking, the same results were found when healthy right-handed subjects were forced to become lefties. They had to wear a bulky ski glove on their agile hand while arranging dominos for 12 minutes. The subjects were then moved to another room and in a separate experiment they showed lefty bias, choosing to place items considered to be "good" in a box on the left.
We'd like to feel we make choices based on solid reasoning. But that’s not necessarily right. Or is it left?
—Christie Nicholson
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5 Comments
Add CommentInteresting piece of work, the sort of study one might expect to have been done 100 ways a 100 years ago.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Researchers theorize that since people have better control of their dominant hand they unconsciously associate good things..." While an unconscious association is noted, it is not passive & trivial as these researchers seem to imply (at least, in the recap reported).
It's about speed & survival (measured in ms)! Look for an underlying wired survival basis for the observed phenomena. The handed bias puts the best (fastest, most experience etc) hand in optimal position for rapid response to threat or opportunity. Position has real purpose in the real (natural) world. Just as it's no coincidence that the left hemisphere works the right side (with regard to the cerebrum, not the cerebellum which doesn't follow the contra-lateral effect - maybe do to little usefulness in mitigating engaged fighting injuries). This preferred positioning bias, with its survival bases, extends to all manner of situations. I recall hearing of a study that found, people enjoy pictures more when they have a view with survival value etc.
An additional thought, sometimes in nature a single supremely important "position" can be controlling. For example, a bug that goes into his fighting position at all manner of non-fighting cues. The (on average, in real world) fallback position with most survival value is assumed.
R. Carlson
I love psychology but studies like this one are why psychology is often not considered a science. Right people prefer things on the right...really? A caveman could have told you that. Psychology often takes simple behavioral data and tries to make it more complicated and sophisticated. It's still a bit soft despite advancing a great deal over the years.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCognitive neuroscience and neuroscience in general will take over psychology before too long.
I find this interesting...I consider my self right handed...based on writing and several childhood proficiencies such as batting a ball...then again now days I find both/or either hand works just as well for a given task...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisJust because something seems obvious, doesn't mean it is simple or shouldn't be studied scientifically. That's what is so fascinating about psychology - it uses scientific methods to study the things we may notice in everyday life. In fact, there's a term for thinking that you already knew something - it's "hindsight bias" and it trips up all of us sometimes. The implications of the kind of handedness bias they found are big - we like to think we're clear headed and objective, but if something so simple like handedness can affect our judgment and preferences, we may not be being objective at all!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt's obvious that you didn't understand the context of this study, which actually has massive implications for the mind-body problem.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI'll try to give you some context. (You should really read the empirical journal article instead of a summary in a magazine, by the way.) Traditionally, philosophers and cognitive scientists have assumed that mental functions occur independently of bodily functions. For example, being right-handed should have no bearing on your conception of good vs. evil, on the traditional account. But alas - it does. Embodied cognition is the theory that the contents of your mind depend critically on the structure of your body. Everything about cognition is context-dependent; in particular, it depends on the physical state of your body (i.e., embodiment), as well as environmental, social, and cultural contexts.
These studies show that bodily experience alters cognition in a way that most people (including scientists) would not predict. Just by using your right hand for most tasks, you are creating an implicit association between the right side of your world and the abstract concept of "goodness." However - this is the really interesting part - you could completely reverse that pattern with 12 minutes of training. Just by practicing a simple task with an impediment on your right hand, you would create an implicit preference for your left side, which would in turn cause your mind to map "goodness" onto the left side of your world. This is completely novel and ground-breaking.
I am a student of cognitive neuroscience, so I am inclined to agree with your last statement - but you would be wrong to dichotomize the field in that way. Almost all of psychology is interfacing with neuroscience at some level, but the key is that psychologists examine relationships between behavioral data and brain data. The importance of behavioral data cannot be overstated, and it will never be "replaced" by pure neuroscience. And FYI, Daniel Casasanto (the scientist who conducted these studies) actually used three cognitive neuroscience methods at various stages of this work, those being fMRI, EEG, and rTMS. So you were wrong to assume that his research is somehow "soft."