Your political views are written in your hands: left-handed people are generally left-oriented, research shows

Research has shown that left-handed people tend to lean more left-wing when it comes to their politics.

On a 10-point scale ranging from extreme right to radical left, leftists rate themselves as nearly half a point more left-wing than their right-handed counterparts.

That may not sound like much.

However, researchers say this difference is even more important than gender when it comes to political views.

By comparison, women were only 0.4 points more left-wing than men, despite the gender gap in politics being wider than ever before.

However, this difference disappeared when the researchers actually measured which hand people used for tasks, instead of asking whether they were left- or right-handed.

Lead author Professor Jérémie Bertrand from the IÉSEG School of Management told the Daily Mail: ‘That matters because the obvious biological story predicts exactly the opposite.

‘What seems to matter is whether someone agrees with the word. It’s the identity, not the hand.’

Where someone falls on the political spectrum is usually explained by factors such as income, age, job and education.

But Professor Bertrand and his co-authors wanted to see whether more subtle factors could also play an important role.

They surveyed 1,404 people in 18 Western countries, including France, Germany, the United States, Italy, Spain and a larger proportion of people from Britain.

At first, they simply asked them to indicate where they fell on the 10-point political scale and whether they were left- or right-handed.

This revealed an unexpected link between saying you are left-handed and believing in left-wing political views.

“If this happened through lateralization of the brain, then the effect should be more pronounced the more left-handed you are,” says Professor Bertrand.

The researchers had suspected that there might be a subtle difference in the way people’s brains are wired up, causing left-handedness and left-wing beliefs.

For example, left-handed people’s brain functions are slightly less evenly distributed across the hemispheres of their brains, with more communication between the hemispheres.

Some research has linked this to greater cognitive flexibility and openness to new ideas, characteristics typically associated with left-wing political leanings.

However, in a follow-up test, the researchers observed which hand people actually used on a range of tasks, including writing, using scissors, brushing their teeth and throwing a ball.

When they started measuring left-handedness in this way, the link between left-wing dominance and political left-wing tendencies disappeared.

This suggests that the link between being left-handed and left-wing politics is not biological, but psychological or social.

One theory is that people who call themselves left-handed may be more attracted to the political left because of their experience of being part of a minority group.

The researchers point out that left-handers make up only 10 percent of the population and have historically been subject to social stigma.

Until the 1970s, especially in France, many European children were forced to write with their right hand, even though they were naturally left-handed.

However, the researchers found that older left-handers who had to use their right hand did not lean harder to the left than their younger counterparts.

Alternatively, the researchers suggest that the linguistic connection between “left” and “left-handed” actually has a powerful psychological effect.

Psychologists have observed a phenomenon called implicit egoism, which means that we tend to be subconsciously attracted to things that are similar to us.

For example, studies have shown that FrPeople named Lawrence are more likely to become lawyers and people named Louis are more likely to move to St. Louis, Missouri.

The researchers suggest that something similar could happen to people who describe themselves as left-handed, and they point out that there is quite good evidence for this idea.

Co-author Dr Caroline Perrin, postdoctoral researcher involved in the RE Wiring Project, told the Daily Mail: ‘If a shared word does the work, the association should be strongest where that vocabulary actually structures political debate.

‘It is. This is considerably stronger in France, Spain, Italy and Portugal, where competition is explicitly organized along the left-right axis, than in the UK, where the divide is usually labeled Labor and Conservative.’

The researchers add that their findings do not mean that all left-handers vote left, or that changing ownership would change one’s political identity.

However, they say this research highlights the fact that our political views may be less rationally chosen than we think, and may be influenced by factors entirely outside our conscious awareness.