New Delhi: The widespread belief that left-handed people are more creative may not be true, according to researchers who analysed studies published since the 1900s that examined the relationship between handedness and creativity.

Researchers from Cornell University in the US and The Chinese University of Hong Kong discovered that right-handed individuals may be more creative. The findings were published in the journal ‘Psychonomic Bulletin and Review’.

Left-handed individuals, often referred to as “lefties”, make up about 10 per cent of the global population and are frequently perceived as more creative, the researchers claim.

This perception may stem from the idea that both left-handedness and creative genius are rare, leading to the assumption that one explains the other.

Moreover, left-handed individuals are more commonly found among musicians and artists, but they also experience higher rates of depression and schizophrenia, contributing to the belief that creative genius and mental illness are linked.

“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 lefty creativity myth,” Daniel Casasanto, the senior author and associate professor of psychology at Cornell University, said.

However, Casasanto emphasised that this “urban legend” results from statistical cherry-picking, where only a few studies with small or biased samples are cited.

“The focus on these two creative professions where lefties are over-represented — art and music — is a common and tempting statistical error that humans make all the time,” the senior author said.

The research team said they sifted through nearly 1,000 scientific papers published since 1900 and ultimately analysed 17 of them. Most studies were excluded due to non-standardised data reporting or because they included only right-handed participants.

The authors “found no evidence that left- or mixed-handers are more creative than right-handers.” “People generalised that there are 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,” Casasanto explained.

On the contrary, right-handers were found to score higher on divergent thinking in a lab test.

Divergent thinking, which is associated with the brain’s right hemisphere, involves generating numerous potential solutions to a problem quickly, often facilitating connections between seemingly unrelated concepts.

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