In 32 out of 33 experimental trials, something unexpected emerged from the video footage: people turn counterclockwise far more often than they turn the other way. Researchers in Spain and Japan have discovered that this preference is nearly universal, challenging the assumption that humans move without directional bias. The finding, published in Nature Communications, reveals a hidden pattern in the most ordinary human behavior—the simple act of turning.
The research began with a practical question about pandemic safety. During COVID-19, public health officials in Spain and elsewhere needed to understand how pedestrians moved through shared spaces while maintaining the recommended 2-meter social distance. Researchers at the University of Navarra's Department of Physics and Mathematics started filming people in group settings, looking for patterns that might inform design decisions. What they found instead was something far more fundamental: an apparent hardwired preference for counterclockwise motion that had nothing to do with rules or culture.
Project Associate Professor Claudio Feliciani from the University of Tokyo, who led the comparative experiments, was struck by the consistency. "When analyzing the experiments, my colleagues realized by chance that in 32 out of 33 experimental trials, as people moved and turned, they noticeably preferred to turn counterclockwise," he said. "This was completely unexpected." To understand whether this was truly universal or shaped by cultural factors, Feliciani's team in Tokyo ran parallel studies with the Spanish researchers, testing pedestrians in both countries across varying conditions. They examined group size, gender, handedness, age, and even tested whether eyesight played a role by patching participants' eyes. Nearly every variable proved irrelevant to the turning preference.
Only one factor made a measurable difference: age. Younger people showed an even stronger bias toward counterclockwise turning than older adults, suggesting that this preference may weaken over time. Yet the overall pattern held remarkably steady. "Of all these things, the only thing that stood out was that kids tend to have a stronger bias for the counterclockwise direction," Feliciani noted. "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. The strong bias found in people hints at some asymmetry at the biomechanical level."
What causes this asymmetry remains a mystery. Feliciani and his colleagues have begun ruling out possibilities: it likely isn't vision-based, and large-scale forces like Earth's magnetic field or the Coriolis effect seem unlikely. The researchers plan to conduct more detailed experiments with individuals rather than groups, hoping to pinpoint something physical in the body's movement mechanics. Intriguingly, sports have long relied on counterclockwise courses for running and driving competitions without anyone quite understanding why—a pattern the research team is eager to explore further.
The implications ripple across multiple fields. Understanding how humans naturally move and turn could reshape design, engineering, and architecture in ways that work with human preference rather than against it. It also opens windows into how the brain coordinates movement and decision-making. What began as a hunt for pandemic safety data has instead uncovered a fundamental preference wired into human nature—one that, quite literally, makes us go in circles.