Rightie? You might prefer things at your right—even people

WORLD SCIENCE

Right-hand­ed peo­ple are more likely to pre­fer ob­jects and peo­ple that are on their right—whereas “left­ies” take more of a shine to things on their own fa­vored side, a study has found.

If it makes you a bit quea­sy to think that such out-of-the-blue fac­tors col­or your likes and dis­likes, you might opt to make peace with it, re­flect­ing this is just part of what makes you you.

Not so fast. The study al­so sug­gests that all it might take is an in­ju­ry to your “good” hand to flip your pre­ferences the op­po­site way with­in min­utes.

Even can­di­dates for high of­fice might not be im­mune to your hand­ed­ness-related whims, the au­thors of the re­search spec­u­late, al­though they did­n’t in­ves­t­i­gate that sub­ject spe­cif­ic­ally.

The study is the lat­est in a string of re­cent re­search point­ing to seem­ingly ran­dom and ir­rel­e­vant con­sid­era­t­ions that sway our think­ing, in­clud­ing an odd as­sort­ment of sub­lim­i­nal sig­nals, our own ini­tials and the ease of pro­nounc­ing oth­er peo­ple’s names.

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