An unexpected human behavioral tendency to prefer turning counterclockwise rather than clockwise has been uncovered by a team of researchers in Spain and Japan, and its cause remains unknown.
In a recent paper published in Nature Communications, the team sought to identify patterns in individual human behavior among large crowds and determine which factors influence them. Surprisingly, the team found that counterclockwise turning is the overwhelmingly common behavioral preference, regardless of gender or culture, with only age making a slight difference.
An Unexpected Behavior
The team’s work could have ramifications not only for psychology but also for architecture, engineering, and design, enabling more intuitive layouts. Work on the project began at Spain’s University of Navarra, before experiments continued at the University of Tokyo in Japan.
The University of Navarra team discovered the phenomenon entirely by accident while researching social distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic. Initially, their interest was in monitoring how effectively the recommended six-foot spacing could be maintained in public spaces. They observed how humans moved through spaces, such as museums, without a set route. While closely monitoring crowd video, they were surprised to witness the counterclockwise trend emerge.
“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,” said co-author Professor Claudio Feliciani from the University of Tokyo’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics.
“This was completely unexpected as, at least instinctively, when people walk around randomly, you imagine people turn as their needs suit them with little sign of an overall preference,” Feliciani added. “But there was a definite, measurable tendency for people to turn counterclockwise over clockwise, all things being equal.”
Exploring Internationally
With their curiosity piqued, the University of Navarro team sought to test their findings against further observations to determine which factors might be influencing the behavior. They decided to seek international follow-up observations. This brought them into contact with Claudio Feliciani, whose presence in Tokyo would allow the project to test how the trend played out across cultures, and among other factors.
For the second stage of the project, Feliciani and his team developed a series of experiments targeting age, handedness, gender, group size, and cultural influence. They observed pedestrian test subjects in both constrained and open environments.
“Of all these things, the only thing that stood out was that kids tend to have a stronger bias for the counterclockwise direction, so probably age plays a role in making the effect weaker or stronger,” said Feliciani. “Our results may appear as 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 to some asymmetry at the biomechanical level,” Feliciani added.
Unknown Behavioral Causes
With the international project having confirmed the counterclockwise trend, the researchers are now moving on to more granular exploration of the phenomenon at the individual level. They hope that this more individualized research will yield some information on what biomechanical factors may be driving the behavior.
“It likely does not come from the eyes, because we tried to patch people’s left or the right eyes and the bias was still there,” Feliciani said. “And some people asked us if it might be large-scale phenomena like the Coriolis force or Earth’s magnetic field, but this seems unlikely given what we have managed to point to so far. “
Both lead investigator Iñaki Echeverría Huarte and Feliciani say that the Coriolis effect has become something of a joke among the team, and that they are invariably asked about it when presenting their findings.
“As a curious aside, a friend and collaborator in Argentina was intrigued enough to run some similar experiments when he heard about this,” Huarte told The Debrief of the team’s research in an email. “He tells me that, with no proper scientific confirmation yet, the counterclockwise rotation still seems to be there in the southern hemisphere too.
“There are some interesting parallels to certain sports,” Feliciani concluded. “Some running and driving competitions are always, but inexplicably, taken on courses that run counterclockwise. But that’s an investigation for another time.”
The paper, “Individual Locomotor Bias Drives Counterclockwise Motion in Pedestrian Crowds,” appeared in Nature Communications on June 10, 2026.
Ryan Whalen covers science and technology for The Debrief. He holds an MA in History and a Master of Library and Information Science with a certificate in Data Science. He can be contacted at ryan@thedebrief.org, and follow him on Twitter @mdntwvlf.