Study Finds Humans Have Inherent Preference for Counterclockwise Motion

Researchers from the University of Navarra in Spain and the University of Tokyo conducted five experimental campaigns across Spain and Japan to investigate directional preferences in pedestrian movement. Using circular arenas, open schoolyards, and nursery schools, they measured collective polarization — a metric of rotational tendency — and found a consistent counterclockwise bias across nearly all conditions, with average polarization values of approximately 0.17 in the Spanish arena, 0.21 in the Spanish schoolyard, 0.12 in the Japanese arena, and a notably stronger 0.73 in nursery school children. The bias persisted regardless of handedness, footedness, eye dominance, sex, or cultural background, and was even observed when individuals walked alone in an enclosure, ruling out crowd dynamics as the primary driver. Children showed the strongest bias, suggesting age moderates the effect, while the cross-cultural replication in Japan — where pedestrians typically form lanes on the left rather than the right — ruled out learned social norms as the cause. Researchers have also eliminated eye dominance (tested via eye-patching), the Coriolis force, and Earth's magnetic field as explanations, leaving the precise biological mechanism an open question. The findings have practical implications for urban planning, public space design, and the modeling of crowd evacuations, and parallel the longstanding convention in athletics and motorsport of running or racing counterclockwise.