Whether weaving through a supermarket aisle or circling an exhibit in a museum, people may be following an instinctive script: turning left.
An international study has found that pedestrians naturally favour leftward movement, with researchers reporting that humans tend to move anti-clockwise in enclosed settings such as supermarkets, museums and empty rooms.
The pattern first emerged in experiments in Spain and was initially suspected to be tied to Spanish culture.
However, when researchers repeated the work in Japan, they saw the same turning tendency, pointing to a behaviour that appears to persist beyond national habits or local norms.
The study looked at “a broad range of pedestrians in varying group sizes” and concluded that “most factors, such as culture or gender, made little difference” to how people turned, according to the researchers.
“Only age showed a noticeable, but small change, in that younger people followed this pattern more strongly.
“This area of research could impact our understanding of the brain, and fields like design, engineering and architecture,” they added.
The project was sparked by video footage captured when social distancing rules were introduced during the Covid-19 pandemic, giving researchers an unexpected window into how people navigate shared spaces.
“When analysing the experiments, my colleagues realised, by chance, that in 32 out of 33 experimental trials, as people moved and turned, they noticeably preferred to turn counterclockwise,” said Project Associate Professor Claudio Feliciani, who worked in the University of Tokyo’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics.
“This was completely unexpected as, at least instinctively, when people walk around randomly, you imagine people turn as their needs suit them with little sign of an overall preference.
“But there was a definite, measurable tendency for people to turn counterclockwise over clockwise, all things being equal.
“The team had to understand the reason for this, and all good research practice dictates you test observations against multiple possible causes to narrow down what’s really going on.
“It’s this that led them to contact me in Japan, as initially, it was thought that cultural factors might impact turning preference. So, amongst other things, we tested against that.”
Prof Feliciani and his team watched pedestrians in both open and constrained environments, assessing behaviour “against cultural background, group size, gender, handedness and age”.
“Of all these things, the only thing that stood out was that kids tend to have a stronger bias for the counterclockwise direction, so probably age plays a role in making the effect weaker or stronger.
“Our results may appear as a minor, insignificant discovery, but in nature, most phenomena related to locomotion show that animals mostly walk without directional preference.
“The strong bias found in people hints to some asymmetry at the biomechanical level.”
The initial research was carried out by the Department of Physics and Mathematics at the University of Navarra in Spain.
The comparative follow-up experiments were conducted in Japan by the University of Tokyo team.
