I saw an interesting article today about how left handed people and right handed people perceive and handle the world differently. We know that the majority of the human population is right handed, but what most of us don’t know is how being right or left handed affects our life and our decisions in everyday life.

219 students from Stanford University and the University of California, Riverside, were told that a cartoon character loves zebras but hates pandas (or vice versa). On a paper with two boxes side by side, they had to draw a zebra in one and a panda in the other. A majority (74 percent) of left-handers drew the “good” animal in the box on the left, while most (67 percent) of the right-handers drew the good animal in the box on the right. Digging deeper into the statistics, it turns out that right-handers were nearly six times more likely than lefties to place the good animal on the right and the bad animal on the left. “Right-handers’ responses were consistent with the mental metaphor Good Is Right, and left-handers’ with the mental metaphor Good Is Left

Totally subconscious but it says a lot about human behavior. The side of our bodies that we use the most and come to rely on is the side we “trust”, and that comes into play in the real world. For example if you were at a restaurant deciding between two good dishes, one printed on the left side of the menu and one on the right side of the menu. Naturally, you probably feel most trusting of the food on the side of the menu that correlates with your dominant hand.

Casasanto showed 286 student volunteers pictures of “Fribbles” arrayed in two columns, side by side on a page. Between each pair was an instruction, such as “Circle the Fribble who looks more intelligent”—or more attractive, more honest, happier, less intelligent, less attractive, less honest, sadder. Of the participants who showed a directional preference, most left-handers (65 percent) attributed positive characteristics more often to Fribbles on the left, while most right-handers (54 percent) attributed positive characteristics more often to Fribbles on the right.

This specific study doesn’t exactly do it for me. They say “most” right-handers circled the aliens on the right side, but their data says 54% chose the right side. That’s only 5.4 people choosing the right side, and 4.6 choosing the left (statistically, not a huge difference at all). The percentage of the left handers was a little higher, but not as high as the first study.

371 volunteers read brief descriptions of products (mattresses, desk chairs, kiddie pools) on the left or right side of a page and then indicate which they’d like to buy. Again, most righties chose the product described on the right side, but most lefties—resisting whatever implicit message the righty culture conveys—chose the item on the left. And when volunteers read about two job candidates whose resumes were printed side-by-side, right-handers tended to choose the person described on the right, but left-handers chose the one on the left

Since there are more right handed people than left handed in the world, phrases knocking lefties like “two left feet” and “out in left field” stick with the left handed people among us. Meanwhile, right handed people get phrases like “my right-hand man”, “the right side of history” and “the right place at the right time”. Of course the word “right” has different meanings here, but these things can and do influence your subconscious thoughts.

So how do you see the world, “right and wrong” or “left and wrong”?