How lefties, righties see the world differently

msnbc:

Be careful next time you cast a vote. Your “handedness” might make you choose the wrong candidate, according to a research review published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

The research sheds light on the so-called “body-specificity hypothesis” which simply means that how we make decisions and how we communicate with each other is influenced not only by our minds, but by our physical bodies.

“Handedness is a good tool (to use) because it’s easily measurable, and our hands our important in how we interact with the physical world,” explains lead author Daniel Casasanto, Ph.D., a cognitive scientist and assistant professor at the New School for Social Research in New York.

Experiments show that right-handed people tend to view things situated on the right hand side of a page, for example, as being more positive. And if you’re a leftie, well, you favor those things on the left hand side. When participants were asked which of two products to buy, which of two job applicants to hire, or which of two alien creatures looked more trustworthy, right-handers routinely chose the product, person, or creature they saw on the right side of the page. Left-handers preferred the ones on left hand side of the page.

Read the whole story: msnbc