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Our perception of “right” and “left” can influence how we shop, who we vote for – and even what names we choose for our children.
Our world is imprisoned for right-handers. This can be confirmed by any left-handed person who has tried to cut something with ordinary scissors. Right-handers make up about 90% of all people. But this imbalance affects the lives of lefties on a more subtle and deeper level than the use of office supplies. Daniel Casasanto, a psychologist at the University of Chicago, explains how our “right” and “left” beliefs determine how we behave in a variety of situations.
Pass the tests
- Mind and emotions
- Which hemisphere is your dominant?
Right means good?
There is a connection in language between space and abstract ideas, which originally did not carry any indication of location in space. For example, when talking about the afterlife, we hope that our souls will go up to heaven. The same is true for horizontal movement. In our culture, there are words that describe positive qualities, such as “just cause”, “correct mistakes”. If we are talking about something bad, low quality and ill-gotten, we say “left”. In some cultures, this difference is even more significant. For example, in Ghana you should not point with your left hand because it is for unclean deeds. In some Islamic cultures, you are required to enter the mosque with your right foot, and with your left – only in the latrine.
Most people are right handed. Social psychologists note that we correlate dexterity and skill with a sense of quality. If during our life we notice that we are more skillful with one hand or foot, we mark the side on which this hand is located as happier. This is how preference arises, which penetrates into various spheres: from religious rites, where all gestures are strictly defined and symbolic, to purchases that we make spontaneously, without thinking about where the product lies and with which hand we take it.
“We started with a simple experiment: we showed people images of aliens on the right and left sides of the page and asked them to identify which one looked smarter, more honest and more attractive,” says Casasanto. “On average, right-handed people tended to have more positive qualities about the aliens on the right side, while left-handed people liked the creatures on the left side more.”
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Politicians and parents
“But we also wanted to understand whether this pattern would be observed in natural conditions,” the psychologist continues. “One of the ways we wanted to test this was by analyzing spontaneous speech and gestures. Recordings of debates between US presidential candidates helped us a lot. It so happened that between 2004 and 2008, among the candidates, two were left-handed and two were right-handed, and from different political parties. Left-handers include Barack Obama and John McCain, and right-handers include John Kerry and George W. Bush.
Psychologists from the Casasanto team broke down all the speeches into separate small statements and began to look at which of these statements carried a positive and negative message (if this could be accurately determined). The researchers then examined the gestures that the candidates used and noted which gestures the candidates used their right hand for and which they used their left. In general, each of them gesticulated more with their right hand, but when it was about positive things (for example, when they discussed a desirable vision of the future or something that aroused the approval of the audience), right-handers and left-handers used their dominant hand more.
There is also an inverse relationship: if we constantly use one hand for some action, we begin to endow this action with a certain meaning. “It turned out that words that contain more letters from the right side of the keyboard (which are typed by the right hand) are marked by respondents as more positive, and words with letters from the left side are more likely to be negative,” explains Casasanto. It turns out that the arrangement of words on the keyboard even influences the choice of a name for a newborn. Starting in 1990, names with right-handed letters became incredibly popular – that is, just when computers with a modern keyboard layout began to spread everywhere.
Read more:
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Motivation – left and right
Casasanto and his colleagues also found that people use different hands depending on what motivates their actions. You have probably noticed that if you need to catch a thrown ball, you will reach for it with your dominant hand. But if the ball is thrown in your face, you will instinctively cover yourself with your other hand. It is not difficult to guess that it is natural for us to use the dominant hand for actions that require more dexterity. But here’s what’s interesting: if we need to defend, we’ll pick a non-primary hand.
Neuroscientists suggest that the left hemisphere of the brain specializes in approach motivation, while the right hemisphere specializes in avoidance motivation. For example, when we hear music we like and want to get closer, this is the work of approach motivation. And if we hear gunshots, avoidance motivation encourages us to find a secluded place to wait out the danger. Since neural pathways connect the hemisphere to the opposite side of the body, the right hand is responsible for approaching, while the left hand is responsible for avoiding. But it is possible that in some left-handers who hold weapons in their left hand, the center of motivation is located in the right hemisphere.
“We did our experiments in the laboratory, which proves this assumption,” says Casasanto. – It turned out that the motivation for approach in right-handers and left-handers corresponds to a different pattern of neural activity. In the former, during the experiment, activity was observed in the left hemisphere, in the latter, in the right.”
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Brain on the favorite side
Casasanto hopes that his observations will help explain some phenomena that were not fully understood before. For example, there is a classic study from 1978. Its authors studied the effect that aromas have on buyers. Social psychologists lined up goods in a row and sprayed them with various perfumes. It turned out that the smell did not have any significant impact on the judgments of consumers. What really mattered was whether the item was on the left or right of the row. The researchers were puzzled. But today, it seems, psychologists have found an explanation.
“When I realized that people prefer things that are on the right, I began to observe myself,” says Casasanto. I lived in Holland for a while. There was an open market with a stall selling sausages. The seller laid out samples of goods on the table from right to left. Every week I bought sausages in this tent, and I always preferred those that lay on the right.
So, we know that our preference for the left side or the right side can determine our preferences so deeply that we are not even aware of it. For example, how candidates are ranked on the voting list affects how many votes they receive. This opens wide simply for the manipulation of our choices. “We can only oppose this with our own conscience: for example, make sure that the names of the candidates are arranged in such a way as not to give any of them an advantage,” Casasanto suggests. “If we understand in what situations in our brain these mechanisms work, we will at least be less susceptible to them.”
See more at editions of The Atlantic.