We Humans Tend to Walk Counter-Clockwise

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 matter if they were right- or left-handed, what direction they turned at a wall, or even what country they were in.

"Our results may appear to be a minor, insignificant discovery, but in nature, most phenomena related to locomotion show that animals mostly walk without directional preference," says researcher Claudio Feliciani of the University of Tokyo, per Phys.org. "The strong bias found in people hints at some asymmetry at the biomechanical level." A key word there is "hints"—researchers are currently at a loss to explain the bias.

Consider that the pattern held in Japan, where pedestrian norms run opposite to Spain's, and even in 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.