How to Judge People by What They Look Like

by Edward Dutton

What hand someone writes with – or, even better, waves with – will allow you to make cautious inferences about their psychology. Early research indicated that left-handers might be overrepresented among those with above average scores on specific measures of cognitive ability (Benbow, 1986; Halpern et al., 1998). However, a consistent pattern is emerging across studies with large samples and measures of general intelligence indicating that, on average, left-handed people are at a mild cognitive disadvantage relative to right-handers (Goodman, 2014; Johnston et al., 2013; Nicholls et al., 2010), and that this translates into real-world differences between the groups in terms of things like earnings (Goodman, 2014). So, those who have very high but narrow intelligence; where there are extraordinarily intelligent at just Maths, for example (Isaac Newton is an example) have elevated levels of left-handedness. However, in general, left-handed people are less intelligent than right-handed people.