RNZ — Science has now confirmed it; we prefer to move in a counterclockwise direction.

Two researchers, Dr. Iñaki Echeverría Huarte from the University of Navarra in Spain and Dr. Claudio Feliciani from Waseda University, Tokyo, have been conducting crowd experiments and have come to some interesting conclusions.

In 35 separate experiments in Spain, in various settings, every time people favored an anti-clockwise rotation, Haurte told RNZ’s Nights.

“So, this was really like the first red light for us as physicists to start thinking something weird is happening here and we want to understand why.”

So, they went back to the literature to see if the phenomenon had been studied before.

Just one study emerged, he says.

“That right-handed people prefer turning to the left when facing a wall or when making a turn, whereas left-hand people prefer turning to the right.”

If this was the case, then it would explain the results he was getting in Spain, he says.

“Most of our participants in this first experiment were right-handed.”

When 90 percent of participants are right-handed it made sense, he says, they preferred turning to the left – but he wanted to check experimentally what lay underneath this preference.

In Spain they discovered that regardless of whether people were left or right-handed, they still favored an anti-clockwise rotation.

“We did some experiments where all the people inside the arena preferred turning to the right. They are composed of both right-handed people and left-handed people, but all of them prefer turning to the right.

“One would expect that the rotation would occur in the other direction, in the clockwise direction, but it was not the case.”

The next question was is this societal conditioning? After all, Spanish people drive and walk on the right.

This is where Huarte’s colleague Claudio Feliciani came in, he was tasked with testing Japanese people.

“They wanted to show that if you do the experiments in a country where people drive and walk to the left, they were very sure that they would have the opposite result, so people working in the clockwise direction,” Feliciani says.

If the conclusions were as he anticipated, Huarte expected Tokyo to be the end of his investigations.

“So, I did the experiment in Japan. I sent them the video, and Iñaki was like, no way, this has to be wrong. Because also in Japan, people were moving to the counterclockwise direction,” Feliciani says.

The two men have any number of theories as to why this might be the case – none of them proven.

One hypothesis they want to explore is bio mechanical, Huarte says.

“We know that this bias, this anti-clockwise bias, it's individual.”

So, what is happening at an individual level?

“Our weight is not totally balanced from the left and from the right. So, our heart, for instance, is on the left side. And because of that, maybe we can add some noise while walking. And by noise, I mean some distortion of walking in a straight line.”

But exactly why we have this bias remains an “open question”, Huarte says.