Turning left

[ladyofastolat]

I've just reading something about school library design, and have come across the sentence, "Market research shows that faced with no clear direction, most people in the UK turn left." There's no source given, and I can't find anything online, so I have no idea what the evidence for this is, of what "most people" means. However, thinking about, I think that I do indeed default to turning left.

Is this because English is written from left to right? If I entered a room at an exhibition that had information panels around the perimeter wall, I'd expect the panels - like the words upon them - to be read from left to right, so I'd turn left. Do people from countries where writing goes from right to left tend to turn right?

Or is it related to driving on the left? Is it because turning left feels unobstructive, while turning right, even when on foot, feels like cutting across the traffic? Are people in all those countries that drive on the right less likely than people in the UK to turn to the left?

Or is it because turning left when you enter a large room will take you clockwise around the room?

Comments

[pellegrina.livejournal.com]

I don't drive here or in the States, and I tend to drift right anyway, unless I become self-conscious, in which case I dither and turn left because I am lefthanded. To be honest I wonder if in my case it is because among the shops we went into most frequently as a child, the only one you didn't walk straight into was the local grocery store, where you turned right immediately after entering.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

That might suggest that in a culture of right-turnees, turning right might become an inbuilt cultural preference even among the minority lefthanders?

Either way, he goes on to say that this preference is very easily broken by positioning of desirable stuff, but that once you've started people turning the 'abnormal' way you have to be careful, because once the diverting item has been inspected, they will return to type.

This can mean that if you have a bunch of right-drifters, you distract them to the left, then they start drifting right again, you can end up with areas of your shop virtually unvisited as you haven't let the customer do a natural circuit...