Have you heard the common trope that left-handed people are more successful in creative endeavours? There are plenty of anecdotal examples to make the case: Michelangelo, Albert Einstein, Paul McCartney, and Lady Gaga, to name a few.
But is there actual evidence that a dominant left hand provides a creative advantage? A team of Cornell researchers set out to answer that question, combining data from 17 studies conducted over the past 100 years. Their analysis—“Handedness and Creativity: Facts and Fictions,” published last month in the Psychonomic Bulletin and Review—found that left-handed people scored no better in laboratory tests designed to measure creativity. In fact, some studies found right-handed people had a slight advantage on the tests.
In a second analysis, the team analyzed data from nearly 12,000 U.S. residents, including information about occupation and handedness. Survey respondents worked in 770 professions, including jobs traditionally thought of as creative, such as artists and musicians, and others that also required creativity, such as mathematicians and physicists. This analysis found that left-handed people were actually underrepresented in the jobs that required the most creativity.
Owen Morgan, a doctoral student in psychology, was the lead author of the paper. Daniel Casasanto, associate professor of psychology at Cornell’s College of Human Ecology, and Siyi Zhao, a doctoral student at the Chinese University of Hong Kong who received a master’s degree from Cornell, were co-authors.
“The data do not support any advantage in creative thinking for lefties,” Casasanto said.
It would make sense if lefties were more creative, he explained, given what’s known about creativity in the brain. Divergent thinking, the ability to explore solutions and make unexpected connections, is supported more by the brain’s right hemisphere, which also controls the left hand. By using their left hand to perform everyday tasks like writing with a pen, lefties increase activity in the hemisphere that supports creativity.
But despite these facts about brains and bodies, the idea that lefties are more creative appears to be an urban legend. Yet this belief may be sustained by a grain of truth: Lefties are more common among two creative groups, artists and musicians.
“People focused on these two creative professions where lefties are overrepresented,” Casasanto said. “But if you do an unbiased survey of lots of professions, then the apparent lefty superiority disappears.”
The take-home message: Contrary to popular belief, there is no clear evidence that left-handed people are more creative than others.