Wired to Walk Counterclockwise

There’s a city park near my house with a small lake surrounded by a 2/3-mile trail that’s just perfect for running. It’s almost perfectly flat, and two large fountains spraying up from the lake’s surface produce a constant, soothing background noise that helps to keep one’s mind off of the laps-completed vs. laps-yet-to-run ratio.

My wife often joins me on these visits to the park to walk while I run, and when we met back at the car after a recent walk/run, she asked me a question that had occurred to her as we passed each other during one of our loops. “Why do you always run in the same direction?” she asked. “Don’t you ever want to mix things up a bit and run the other way around?”

Faced with her question, it occurred to me that I do, in fact, always run the lake loop in the same direction—counterclockwise—and, in fact, have never seriously considered running it the other way around. The thought of running clockwise around the lake just somehow seems awkward, and even a little unnatural.

Reflecting for a moment on why I feel this way about the lake loop, it occurred to me that years of running track in high school and college had mentally conditioned me to go counterclockwise whenever running laps of any kind, and this is the explanation that I gave to my wife. A recent study in Spain and Japan, however, suggests that my counterclockwise bias may run far deeper than my own personal experience with track and field.

A Social Distancing Discovery

During the COVID pandemic, a group of scientists conducting research on social distancing was observing a video of pedestrians moving about in an enclosed space. As they monitored walking patterns to see how well the people in the video steered clear of one another, they made an unexpected discovery that had nothing to do with public safety and contagion. Regardless of whether or not the pedestrians maintained a safe distance, whenever they turned in the course of their walking, they showed a peculiar tendency to turn in a counterclockwise direction.

Curious to root out the reasons for this counterclockwise bias, a team of researchers in Spain conducted a series of experiments designed to target different variables that might be responsible for the behavior. One hypothesis was that the tendency might be culturally based, so the team collaborated with researchers in Japan, where some public pedestrian patterns differ from those in other parts of the world (such as the tendency of people approaching each other in a confined space to spontaneously form lanes to the left instead of the right, as is common elsewhere).

Walking in Crowds and Against Boundaries

At the heart of all of the study’s experiments was the question of whether the bias was an emergent phenomenon, growing out of interactions among groups of people, or was actually rooted in inherent individual tendencies. In other words, is turning counterclockwise something that people do because other people are doing it—in response to cultural norms, say, or some kind of unspoken mutual communications—or something we’re prewired to do, whether in the middle of a bustling crowd or all by ourselves?

Since it is in crowded environments that collective motions such as waves and lane formation occur, the team investigated the impact of crowding and the presence of obstacles on counterclockwise pedestrian movement. In one experiment, conducted in Spain, groups of people in an enclosed circular space were instructed to walk in straight lines until reaching a wall, and then do a 180-degree turn and walk back in the other direction. Since right-handed people have a slight bias for turning left when they meet an obstacle, each group was made up of people with different handedness and turning preferences.

When they weren’t executing their straight lines to the wall and back, participants roamed freely about the space, and regardless of their handedness or whether they turned right or left at the wall, they exhibited a pronounced counterclockwise bias in their random movement. And the bias remained unchanged when group size was increased, suggesting neither crowding nor the presence of obstacles was responsible for the counterclockwise motion.

The Cultural Factor

To examine the role that pedestrian-pedestrian interactions play in the counterclockwise bias, a similar experiment was conducted in Japan, where pedestrians meeting one another tend to step to the left to avoid a collision, instead of to the right as they do in most European countries, including Spain. In spite of their different preferences in bidirectional line formation, the test subjects in Japan exhibited the same counterclockwise tendency as the subjects in Spain.

To eliminate boundaries from the equation, two other experiments—one in Spain and one in Japan—examined pedestrian behavior in wide-open spaces. In Spain, a group of teenage students was observed milling about an open schoolyard. Despite the absence of boundaries, however, the students tended to move in a counterclockwise direction, just as the enclosed subjects in the previous experiments did.

A group of students was also observed in the Japan study, but this time, it was preschool rather than high school students. During periods of free-running, the children not only exhibited a counterclockwise bias, but did so at a higher rate than the older subjects in the other experiments, reducing the likelihood that the bias is a learned behavior or a result of social convention. This finding was reinforced by another experiment in which questionnaires on social expectations suggested that, if social conventions were indeed the driving force behind the bias, the tendency would be to move clockwise, rather than counterclockwise.

A final experiment removed collective behavior from the equation altogether by having individual participants move freely about an enclosed space for a period of sixty seconds. Even in the absence of other pedestrians, the walkers still showed a marked tendency to move in a counterclockwise direction.

Together, the experiments revealed that the apparent counterclockwise bias serendipitously observed in the COVID distancing research is, in fact, a real phenomenon. Even more interestingly, they strongly suggest that the phenomenon reflects an innate, individual human tendency—that we’re somehow simply wired to walk and run in a counterclockwise direction.

Which means that, while my preference for running counterclockwise around the lake might indeed stem from a habit of running counterclockwise around the track, the universal practice of counterclockwise track running on which that habit is based goes back much, much farther.

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