There was also an ingenious study by Italian researchers that showed, in noisy nightclubs, people more often offered their right ear when someone walked up and tried to talk to them and were also more likely to give someone a cigarette when the request was made in the right ear versus the left ear. It was a clever way of demonstrating the right-ear advantage in a natural setting, since there are not many environments where it’s possible to make a request into only one ear and have it not seem totally weird.