Correlations: Left-Handers and Right-Wingers (new study)

“It seems axiomatic to assume that handedness is unrelated to actual placement on the political spectrum. Nevertheless, primed by my longstanding research interest in personality and political preference (e.g., McCann, 1997, 2014a, 2014b), I was struck by the rough similarity of a map of the percentage of left-handers in each state in 1986 (McManus, 2009, p. 48) to a map of the Republican and Democratic states in the U.S. presidential election of 2012.”

The author of a new paper for the journal Laterality, Professor Stewart J. H. McCann  of the Department of Psychology, Cape Breton University, Sydney, Canada, has found that, in the US, state levels of left-handedness correlate to an extremely high degree with Conservative-Republican preference.

An explanation, though, is currently lacking :

“Faced with the results of the present research, we should strive to arrive at the best explanation, regardless of the theoretical and procedural difficulties or the existing boundaries of disciplinary and sub-disciplinary persuasions. To understand the links between personality, political orientation, handedness, and genetics has profound implications for the dynamics of democracy.”

See: Handedness predicts Conservative-Republican preference and eliminates relations of Big Five personality to political orientation using the 48 contiguous American states as analytical units

[ Research research by Martin Gardiner ]