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The pantheon of artists and musicians is littered with lefties: Vincent van Gogh, Jimi Hendrix, Emily Dickinson, David Bowie, Lady Gaga, to name just a few. In the popular imagination, left-handedness and creative genius have long been linked. In the scientific literature, too.
This is partly because the right hemisphere of the brain, which lights up with neural activity during creative thinking in neuroimaging studies, tends to be dominant in left-handed individuals. Standard tests of creative problem solving and novel idea generation—convergent and divergent thinking—also seem to favor the left-handed, according to many studies.
But recently, scientists from Cornell University and The Chinese University of Hong Kong reviewed a large body of scientific literature and found that this link between the lefties and creativity is likely a myth. The researchers sorted through 1,000 relevant studies published since 1900, ultimately identifying 17 papers of sufficient rigor involving 10,000 participants, and found that left-handed people are no better at creative thinking than right-handed people. In fact, they found that right-handed people may even have a slight advantage.
“Creativity is hard to define, like any other psychological construct,” writes Daniel Casasanto, in an email. “But we analyzed data from the [three] tests that have been used the most often for the psychological measurement of creativity, for decades. We found that, by this gold standard, lefties are not more creative.” Casasanto pointed out that while a couple of older small-sample size studies had suggested a creativity advantage among the lefthanded, when the studies were aggregated, the pattern disappeared.
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To determine whether lefties dominate creative professions, despite this relative disadvantage, the researchers reviewed another 19 studies. They found that while lefties are over-represented in the visual arts, creative writing, and music, the pattern did not hold in other creative professions, including architecture, physics, and mathematics. Instead, right-handers were found to be over-represented in professions thought to demand the most creativity, according to United States Department of Labor criteria, taken as a whole.
“Most of the professions that you’d think of as parade cases of ‘creative professions’ do not show an overrepresentation of lefties,” writes Casasanto. But “you can fool yourself into thinking there’s a pattern if you focus on the few ‘creative’ professions where lefties are overrepresented.”
If you’re a rightie, perhaps it’s time to give some extra attention to your muse.
Lead image: Brazhyk / Shutterstock
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