If you've ever felt like you naturally drift a certain way while walking, a team of
Spanish physicists has some news: Virtually everyone seems to drift the same way. In
a Nature Communications study, researchers in Spain and Japan report that in
experiment after experiment with hundreds of volunteers, people tended to move
counterclockwise, whether in a lab, an open schoolyard, or walking alone, reports the
New York Times.
It didn't really matter if they were right or left handed, what direction
they turned at a wall, or even what country they were in. Consider that the pattern
held in Japan, where pedestrian norms run opposite to those in Spain, and even in a
video of kindergartners freely roaming to music. The vast majority of subjects favored
counterclockwise movement, and the tendency appeared almost immediately, not as
a slow drift. Outside experts say the findings could reshape how we think about crowd
behavior and emergency evacuations.