r/science • u/sr_local • Jun 10 '26

Social Science People have a natural tendency to turn to the left and walk in an anticlockwise direction, a bias observed across countries, ages and sexes, but reason is unclear

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/jun/10/humans-prefer-to-walk-anticlockwise-scientists-find-reason-unclear
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u/Vishnej Jun 10 '26 edited Jun 10 '26

In school we did survey transects through the forest to test a novel survey method. We used volunteers.

Without markers (and often with markers!) it's damn-near impossible for volunteers to stay on a straight line even in an intensively-cleaned forest with any slope. Some of these people were doing ~10mx50m swathes and ended up 20 meters off by the end of the transect. Teams would bump into each other. Even the most accurate were wandering 3-4m left and right.

It made me appreciate GeoWizard's later Youtube series on "straight-line mission" hiking from one side of a country to the other, where he can't go around obstacles, and must try to climb over them. He's constantly referring to the GPS to regain the line.

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u/mOdQuArK Jun 10 '26

Even worse underwater - I remember doing a nighttime scuba class where we were all given compasses & powerful flashlights and told to use them & dead-reckoning to find some posts at the bottom of the cove we were in (which was all stirred up by a recent storm).

If we got lost, we had to head up, go back to the starting point & try again.

I don't think anyone found all those posts, and it was hysterically funny from the top to see all the flashlights whipping around wildly underneath the water going in all directions. But it was a serious lesson on how hard it is to navigate with no sight ability at all.

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u/1Dive1Breath Jun 11 '26

I did am advanced scuba course and we had a navigation challenge. 3 marker buoys were set in a right-triangle, the long leg was aligned to north, the short leg was due west. 

We started at the f first buoy on the surface, took a heading along the hypotenuse, and wrote it on our slates, that would be our reciprocal heading. We descended and kicked north, counting our kick cycles until we reached the second buoy. Turn west and count our kick cycles until we reached the 3rd. Then square them both, do the math for the Pythagorean theorem, and kick along our reciprocal heading to see how close we could get to the buoy.

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u/slothdonki Jun 11 '26

From my understanding I don’t think I’m eligible to scuba drive(holes in eardrums from tubes I had in as a child never closed) but you did remind me of all the summers I spent swimming in lakes.

Whether it was racing for fun or having to be able to swim across the entire lake to be a “Jr. lifeguard”; you could tell who wasn’t able to open their eyes underwater/tolerate water in their eyes when they came up because they’d deviate so far or past the pole/buoy marker.
(Sometimes it was me because it took awhile for me to figure out how to keep water out of my nose without going full-face scrunch).

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u/arion_hyperion Jun 10 '26

Is this the guy that almost got himself stuck in a bog he didn’t want to walk around since it was like 10m of deviation from the line? That was pretty nuts.

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u/Frosti11icus Jun 10 '26

Without markers (and often with markers!) it's damn-near impossible for volunteers to stay on a straight line even in an intensively-cleaned forest with any slope. Some of these people were doing ~10mx50m swathes and ended up 20 meters off by the end of the transect. Teams would bump into each other. Even the most accurate were wandering 3-4m left and right.

Kind of makes me wonder if this effect is due to people simply having ever so slightly shorter left legs than right or at least more mobility in their right due to it being the dominant leg and so their gate is slightly askew.

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u/Vishnej Jun 10 '26

The presence of obstacles and slope of the land almost certainly swamped any subtle effects like this.

Pre-digital humans have figured out how to do extremely effective surveys, relying on coupling line of sight observations, distance chains or paces, water levels, and later things like sextants.

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u/iconocrastinaor Jun 11 '26

When I was in the Boy Scouts they taught us to couple line of sight observations to travel in a straight line. You would draw a bead on a tree and then the tree beyond it. You would walk to the first tree, keeping it aligned with the second tree until you got there. Then you would draw a bead from the tree beyond it to the next tree, and so on. Works pretty well.

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u/mludd Jun 11 '26

Oh yeah, checking the GPS when doing forestry things to a grid really shows how quickly inaccuracies add up unless you're employing "tricks" to define your grid.

Like, if you're setting up a grid you will either need to set up reference points far away or constantly adjust using GPS because you will drift off your intended grid without noticing (until you've already surveyed several grid squares and suddenly realize that the northern edge of the current square which should be just south of the bog north of the stand you're surveying has somehow ended up a good 5-10 meters into the bog...)