Are left-handed people more creative?

By Stephen Beech

Left-handed people may not be so creative after all, suggests new research.

Previous studies have suggested that "lefties" are more intelligent, more creative and have better problem-solving skills than their right-handed peers.

Famous examples of creative left-handers include composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, artist Vincent van Gogh and inventor Nikola Tesla.

But American researchers who scoured more than 100 years of studies that explored links between handedness and creativity found the widespread belief that lefties are more creative is not actually true.

And "righties" are overrepresented in professions that require the most creativity, according to their findings published in the journal Psychonomic Bulletin and Review.

Study senior author Professor Daniel Casasanto, of Cornell University in New York, said: “The data do not support any advantage in creative thinking for lefties.

“In fact, there is some evidence that righties are more creative in some laboratory tests, and strong evidence that righties are overrepresented in professions that require the greatest creativity.”

He says there are scientific reasons to believe that left-handed people, estimated to comprise about 10% of the population, would have an edge in creativity.

Casasanto explained that "divergent thinking" – the ability to explore many possible solutions to a problem in a short time and make unexpected connections – is supported more by the brain’s right hemisphere.

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The research team conducted a meta-analysis, sorting through nearly 1,000 relevant scientific papers published since 1900.

Most were discarded because they did not report data in a standardized way or included only right-handed people, leaving 17 studies reporting nearly 50 effect sizes.

The analysis revealed that handedness made little difference in the three most common lab tests of its link to divergent thinking; if anything, right-handers had a small advantage on some tests.

Casasanto said: “If you look at the literature on the whole, this claim of left-handed creativity is simply not supported.”

The researchers believe that a factor that has sustained belief in left-handers’ special creativity is "left-handed exceptionalism" - the idea that it’s rare to be a leftie and rare to be a creative genius, so perhaps one explains the other.

They suspect another factor is the popular perception that creative genius is linked to mental illness.

It turns out left-handers, who are more likely to be artists, experience higher rates of depression and schizophrenia.

Casasanto said: “This idea that left-handedness, art and mental illness go together – what we call the ‘myth of the tortured artist’ – could contribute to the appeal and the staying power of the leftie creativity myth."

He says the idea of left-handers being more creative is a case study in statistical cherry picking, frequently citing over the years a small number of studies with small or biased samples.

He added: “The focus on these two creative professions where lefties are overrepresented, art and music, is a really common and tempting statistical error that humans make all the time.

“People generalized that there all these left-handed artists and musicians, so lefties must be more creative.

"But if you do an unbiased survey of lots of professions, then this apparent lefty superiority disappears.”