How teenage participants moved on a schoolground in Spain. © 2026 Echeverría-Huarte et al. CC-BY-ND If you were asked to stand up and walk in any direction, which way would you go? According to new research, regardless of if you are right-handed or left-handed, you are most likely to turn in a counterclockwise direction—and scientists have no idea why. The tendency came to light in a serendipitous turn of events.
While researching social distancing behaviors during the Covid-19 pandemic, scientists wanted to see how many people could easily walk in an enclosed space while still being apart from each other. When they reviewed their video footage, however, they noticed something peculiar.
“My colleagues realized by chance, that in 32 out of 33 experimental trials, as people moved and turned, they noticeably preferred to turn counterclockwise,” Claudio Feliciani, who studies crowd control at Waseda University in Tokyo, says in a statement. “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.”
Writing in a study published this week in the journal Nature Communications, Feliciani and colleagues investigated the matter in both Spain and Japan. They tested different walkers in groups of different sizes within varying environments. They observed that almost everyone preferred counterclockwise turning. Isolating certain variables, including gender and culture, barely moved the needle. The only notable, albeit small, difference they found was that the effect was stronger in younger people.
Importantly, “our findings demonstrate that this phenomenon arises from individual behavior rather than collectively emerging due to pedestrian-pedestrian or pedestrian-boundary interactions,” the team writes in the study. “We ruled out some of the most obvious individual symmetry breaking factors—such as handedness, footedness and eye dominance—thus leaving the precise origins of this intriguing behavior open for further investigation.”
Enrico Ronchi, a safety engineer at Lund University who did not participate in the study, tells the New York Times’ Rachel Nuwer that he’d be curious to know if the effect is still present in emergency evacuations or with people with disabilities, for example. Regardless, he says that the results “open up many new, interesting avenues in the field of crowd dynamics.”
These results stand in contrast to nature, where most occurrences associated with locomotion demonstrate that animals, in most cases, don’t have a directional preference when they walk, Feliciani explains in the statement. This apparent uniqueness in humans suggests a biomechanical asymmetry, but the team still doesn’t know exactly what causes this surprising bias. Some pondered whether a broad circumstance such as Earth’s magnetic field or the Coriolis force could be to blame, but Feliciani says that it appears unlikely based on their indications so far.
“We don’t know why it happens, but we think that by understanding the reasons, we could better understand how we perceive the world,” Feliciani tells the Guardiani’s Ian Sample. “It can help us make other discoveries that may be more important than this one.”
Other cultural stalwarts may have caught onto this trend prior. In a deep dive on the psychology of supermarkets, Michael Y. Park of Bon Appetit, writes, “Though the people who commission, design, and build it would be loath to call it a trap, almost every aspect of a supermarket has a primary goal in mind: to subtly convince shoppers to spend more time inside, thus giving products more opportunities to all but leap into their carts.” This includes guiding shoppers to move counter-clockwise through the store. According to experts quote in the article, this orientation allows right-handed shoppers to push their cart with their left hand while grabbing items with their right.
In the arena of sports, many competitive races, from track and field to NASCAR to horses, are run counter-clockwise. While this is believed to originate from the preponderance of humans whose right legs are stronger, the habit has held even for those competitions that aren’t on feet.
Moving forward, the team aims to carry out additional experiments with individuals.
Margherita Bassi is a freelance journalist and trilingual storyteller. Her work has appeared in publications including BBC Travel, Discover magazine, Live Science, Atlas Obscura and Hidden Compass.
