A new study from Cornell University goes against the grain of popular thought, arguing that left-handed people aren’t necessarily more creative than their right-handed counterparts after all.
It’s research that hits close to home for this writer. From an early age, I’ve worn my left-handedness as a badge of pride. As a kid, I always felt different from the other students in class, because I had to use a left-handed desk. Back then, I also had to use special scissors in home economics, bat on the “wrong” side of the plate at softball . . . the list goes on.
But despite the minor inconveniences, it was a label I readily embraced because I was told I was “special” (only 10% of the population is left-handed) and, perhaps most of all, because I knew I was in good company.
Who wouldn’t want to be a member of a club that includes Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Aristotle, one of the Beatles, Bill Gates, Nikola Tesla, Marie Curie, Babe Ruth, Bart Simpson, Oprah, and Jerry Seinfeld? In fact, five out of the last eight presidents have been left-handed: Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama. (President Trump is a rightie.)
To this day, I still make a mental note of who is and is not a lefty. Picasso and John Lennon aren’t, but Paul McCartney is. So is my best friend, Gaby, my editor, Connie, and my boss, Christopher. It’s a secret club we lefties share, believing there is something just a little special, a little more creative about us.
That’s why the new research from Cornell stopped me in my tracks.
The science of creativity
In “Handedness and Creativity: Facts and Fictions,” published in the Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, researchers argue that while there’s a plausible link between creativity and handedness based on theories that look at the neural basis of creativity, they found no evidence that left- or mixed-handed individuals are more creative than right-handers. In fact, they even found right-handers scored statistically higher on one standard test of divergent thinking (the alternate-uses test).
“The data do not support any advantage in creative thinking for lefties,” said the study’s senior author, Daniel Casasanto, associate professor of psychology at Cornell.
And while the Cornell researchers acknowledge that left- and mixed-handers may be overrepresented in art and music, they argue that southpaws are underrepresented in other creative professions, like architecture.
When determining which professions constitute creative fields, researchers drew on data from nearly 12,000 individuals in more than 770 professions, which were ranked by the creativity each requires. By combining “originality” and “inductive reasoning,” they concluded that physicists and mathematicians rank alongside fine artists as having the most creative jobs. Using this criteria—and considering the full range of professions—the researchers found that left-handers are underrepresented in fields that require the most creativity.
“The focus on these two creative professions where lefties are overrepresented, art and music, is a really common and tempting statistical error that humans make all the time,” Casasanto said. “People generalized that there are all these left-handed artists and musicians, so lefties must be more creative. But if you do an unbiased survey of lots of professions, then this apparent lefty superiority disappears.”
Casasanto did agree, however, that there are scientific reasons to believe that left-handed people would have an edge in creativity when it comes to “divergent thinking”—the ability to explore many possible solutions to a problem in a short time and make unexpected connections—which is supported more by the brain’s right hemisphere. But again, the study revealed that handedness makes little difference in the three most common laboratory tests of its link to divergent thinking; if anything, righties have a small advantage on some tests.
Finally, researchers conducted their meta-analysis by crunching the data from nearly 1,000 relevant scientific papers published since 1900. Most were weeded out because they did not report data in a standardized way, or included only righties (the norm in studies seeking homogeneous samples), leaving just 17 studies reporting nearly 50 effect sizes. This may be why the newest study came to a different conclusion than what is held in popular belief or prior scientific literature.
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