The Puzzle of Left-Handedness (31 page)
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Two Left Hands: The Ford Scale
The clumsiness of left-handers is proverbial. You only have to think of the appalling image painted by child psychologist Cyril Burt of little dolts blundering blindly through a china shop. On top of everything else, they’re said to be unable to tell their right from their left. But is this an accurate picture? Or is it another piece of conventional wisdom that has more to do with the logic of our thinking in opposites than with concrete, demonstrable facts?
Firstly we need to decide what we mean by dexterity. One thing it certainly doesn’t include is metaphorical nimbleness, in other words artfulness, a finely developed ability to slip through all kinds of legal, conventional and ethical nets. Nor do we mean sleight of hand, resourcefulness or ingenuity, an instinct for finding an unexpected but workable solution to every problem. It’s true that excellent manual dexterity can help make us more resourceful, but the main requirements are analytical skills and creativity. The lightning fingers of the conjurer are not what we have in mind either, since he relies at least as much on psychological insight as on deft motor skills. A good conjurer plays more with his audience than with his cards. All these forms of dexterity make a person special in a positive sense, whereas a normal, inconspicuous person isn’t expected to come up with any outstanding manual performances.
When we talk about dexterity in connection with hand preference, we are referring to how a person scores on the Ford scale. Vice-President Gerald Ford came to power in the United States more or less by accident in 1974, when Richard Nixon abandoned the sinking ship of his presidency. He remained in office until 1977 and he was a fantastic bungler, a man with an exceptional talent for tumbling down aircraft steps in public, bumping into waiters bearing full trays of drinks, and other embarrassing tricks of that kind. Ford was the sort of man who couldn’t look at a book without contributing a smudge or a crease, who couldn’t drink a cup of tea without leaving a footbath behind. He was a left-hander, and he proved both likeable and capable as a president, a rare combination. Yet he is remembered mainly for the fact that he had only a modicum of control over his large body – which was taken as incontrovertible proof of clumsiness in the left-handed – and so it seems appropriate to attach his name to the scale on which we measure this kind of control.
President Gerald Ford in two characteristic poses: at the bottom of the steps to Air Force One and on the ski piste.
The Ford scale provides an assessment of performance in the fields in which Ford so noticeably failed: everyday motor skills, and the ability to manoeuvre your body through the environment such that no one even recalls you were there. Unlike other forms of dexterity, these are skills at which you can distinguish yourself only in a negative sense. A high scorer on the Ford scale is a perfectly ordinary, inconspicuous person, someone who can use tools and utensils without instantly damaging them, doesn’t spill anything when filling cups and glasses, and after a little training could work perfectly successfully as a restaurant waiter. On the Ford scale everyone receives two scores: one for manual dexterity and hand-eye coordination, and one for the ability to navigate through the everyday world.
As far as manual dexterity and hand-eye coordination are concerned, all manner of research shows that there’s barely any detectable difference between left-handed and right-handed people. Researchers have looked at how quickly test subjects can stick pegs in holes, trace over a drawing, or drum their fingers on the table. Almost everyone turns out to be able to do these things better and more quickly with their preferred hand than with the other, which won’t greatly surprise any of us, but it also turns out that left-handed people can generally work as quickly and accurately with their left hands as right-handers can with their right. There’s a significant difference only when we look only at the most clumsy. In that group the percentage of left-handers is slightly higher than normal, a finding that can be explained by the relatively large number of pathological left-handers, in other words natural right-handers who have become left-handed because of some kind of brain damage and are therefore in fact working with their non-preferred hand because with the other they’re even less proficient.
As far as dexterity is concerned, therefore, left-handers will generally achieve normal scores on the Ford scale. Their reputation for clumsiness must be purely a matter of perception. They’re regarded as clumsy no matter how well they perform, and this isn’t so illogical as it may seem. Sometimes the cause lies in the design of instruments and appliances, which are not suitable for left-handed use, but there are other reasons that have nothing to do with the clumsiness of left-handers but everything to do with a lack of understanding on the part of the majority right-handed world for the minority left-handed world.
Left-handed people, for a start, do a lot of things the opposite way around, or at any rate differently from right-handed people. To the right-handed majority this always looks odd, even disturbing. The way a left-hander sets about knitting, slicing bread, or tying a necktie goes against all the rules deeply ingrained in every right-hander. One mother with a far from clumsy but nevertheless left-handed daughter was known to run out of the kitchen every time the girl started to slice bread, vegetables or meat, exclaiming that she couldn’t bear to watch those frightening goings on. Kitchen knives are dangerous things and ever since childhood it had quite rightly been impressed upon the mother that they should be used with great care and precisely as taught. Irrespective of the impeccable results of her actions, her daughter clearly had a habit of going against the inviolable laws of knife-usage.
Second, left-handed people sometimes use methods that seem a little strange, or less than elegant. One important reason is that they have received incorrect instructions, or none at all. The countless little skills that have to be learnt before we reach puberty are demonstrated right-handedly nine times out of ten, which is fine for right-handed children. They only have to copy the procedure as closely as they can. This won’t work for left-handers. They have to figure out for themselves how to reverse the process they’re being called upon to learn, if that’s possible at all in any straightforward way. Right-handers really ought to have more respect for the creativity of their left-handed brethren in practical matters, since they almost always come up with a perfectly good alternative, even if it defies right-handed rules.
On top of this comes the fact that the work of a left-hander often creates an awkward situation for the person who comes along next. Any right-hander allocated a desk that’s been used by a left-hander will be dismayed to find that all kinds of things are on the wrong side. Anyone attempting to slice bread that a left-hander has been at first stands a good chance of having to tackle a loaf cut at a slant in the wrong direction. The left-hander, by contrast, is completely at home with reversals of this kind. Nine times out of ten he or she takes over the work of a right-hander. It will therefore seem perfectly normal that things on the table are the wrong way round, that the lamp illuminates the work of the right hand rather than the left and so on. It no longer occurs to him or her to complain about the mess that a ‘clumsy’ right-handed predecessor has made of things.
Now we come to that other score on the Ford scale: body control. Left-handers have a poor reputation here as well, as if they were people who stumble and blunder their way through life like gangly teenagers learning to manage their suddenly much longer limbs. This is the kind of performance the French refer to as gauche, literally left. Again there’s probably little substance to the belief. No data have been collected on the subject – assuming it’s possible to design a test for such a thing.
Yet the absence of facts and figures doesn’t deter professional the or izers, people like the Canadian psychologist Stanley Coren, for example, who believes that left-handers are clumsy in social intercourse because they have a natural tendency to turn anticlockwise, whereas right-handers turn clockwise. As a result, the theory goes, they often bump into people.
Superficially this line of reasoning seems quite sensible. It’s a more or less well-known fact that the majority of people arriving at a fork in a path or entering a room have a tendency to turn right, and therefore clockwise. Supermarkets and exhibitions are often laid out in such a way that by repeatedly turning right you automatically walk past the maximum possible number of articles or artworks. It’s a tendency reflected in more formal situations too: all things being equal, if you’re required to turn around, you’re supposed to do so in a clockwise direction. In the armies of English-speaking countries the order to rotate through 180 degrees is simply ‘about turn!’ It apparently speaks for itself that you do this by turning to the right. In ballroom dancing most turns and espe cially the most complicated are to the right, which means that the leading man is required to turn on his axis and not around his outstretched left arm. This undoubtedly helps him to keep his balance. Accord ing to Coren, left-handed people have an irresistible urge to turn left, so they go against the flow and cause a great deal of turbulence all around them. He takes left-handed Gerald Ford as his prime example. It has to be said: the man was a master at that kind of thing.
Coren even carried out an ingenious experiment that appeared to confirm his theory. Appeared to, because as we shall see his reasoning was sound but not the conclusion he drew. The experiment went as follows. In a bare, square, windowless room, with the one door in the middle of the back wall covered with a curtain, he placed two precisely identical tables to the left and right of the centre, each with an identical chair, so that seen from the door, the room was completely symmetrically furnished. Before entering, the research subjects were given a pen and a list of questions and asked to fill out the answers inside the room. The list included questions about the participants’ hand preference, but in fact Coren was mainly interested in which of the two tables his subjects chose to use: would they turn left or right, and did their choice coincide with their hand preference?
The result was that the majority of subjects went to sit at the table to the right of the entrance to the room, just as they were expected to. They included more than two out of three right-handed people but only one in three of the left-handed subjects. The latter seemed to have a tendency to turn left that was 2.5 times greater than that of the right-handed. For Coren this proved the point: left-handers turn the wrong way, which explains their reputation as accident-prone.
But Coren spoke too soon, so pleased was he to have his prejudices confirmed. Look at what his results mean in the real world of a dance hall, for example. We would expect some 10 per cent of couples to be led by a left-handed man, the remaining 90 per cent by a right-hander. Based on Coren’s figures, a left-handed male dancer will make 2.5 times as many mistakes on the turns as a right-handed one. So if a right-hander fouls things up once in an evening by turning the wrong way, then each left-hander will do so 2.5 times. If there are a hundred couples in the dance hall, then the right-handed among them will cause crushed toes or bruised shins ninety times, with the left-handers responsible for 25 collisions, ten times 2.5. This means the likelihood that you have a left-hander to thank for a mishap is only around 20 per cent. Eight out of ten times it’s a right-handed klutz who wreaks havoc. That’s hardly a reason to single out left-handers as a particular target for resentment.
At fault two times out of ten and yet given all the blame, that’s surely rather unreasonable. Again it’s the combination of conventional wisdom and the way in which some people perceive what they’re seeing that causes left-handers to be regarded as clumsy, irrespective of the facts of the matter. If a right-hander treads on your toes, then he’s an annoying, careless character, and that’s an end to the matter. If a left-hander trips you up, then the reaction of people like Coren is to say: ‘What did I tell you? They’re all the same.’
Finally, popular wisdom attributes to left-handed people an inability to tell left from right. There may be some truth in this. Left-handers have learned since early childhood to reverse almost every activity demonstrated to them before copying it. This continues into adulthood: what right-handers do one way, they generally do the other. Worse still, what another person calls the right is often, for them, the left. It’s at least conceivable that this leads to permanent uncertainty about left and right. But let’s not forget Freud when indulging in this kind of speculation. Freud was a confirmed right-hander, who admitted to his friend Fliess not only that as a child he’d had difficulty with left and right but that even as an adult those paired concepts caused him problems. Spatial awareness was, he frankly admitted, not his strongest suit. Doubts of the Winnie the Pooh variety are clearly not the exclusive preserve of the left-handed.