The success of Messi, Rafa Nadal or Muhammad Ali is undeniable, but there is a study that has revealed that left-handed people are better prepared than right-handed people for high-level competition. The research was published in the journal Scientific Reports and was carried out by a group of researchers from the Department of Psychology at the University of Chieti-Pescara in Italy.
The reasons why left-handed people are more successful than right-handed people
This study reveals that the majority of people are right-handed, but around 10.6% are left-handed, a trait that has sometimes been associated with advantages in various high-performance sports such as those practiced by Messi (soccer), Nadal (tennis) and Muhammad Ali (boxing).
These experts conducted two experiments. In the first, they gathered data from more than 1,100 people who completed several online questionnaires designed to measure their manual preference, psychological motivation and other personality traits. All of this was used to calculate the Lateralisation Quotient (LQ), a measure of a person’s handedness.
Once they responded, the team then selected more than 480 people with marked manual preference and another 50 with marked left-handed preference for other questionnaires, which were conducted to calculate their competitiveness and anxiety and depression, to see if any manual preference had anything to do with any of these personality traits.
Of these, 24 left-handed and 24 right-handed people completed the nine-hole peg test, placing them as quickly as possible on a board with one hand.
The study also showed that left-handers achieved much higher competitions in hypercompetitiveness and were less likely than right-handers to avoid competition because of anxiety, concluding that the drive to compete is in the mind and not in a particular physical skill.
In conclusion, the researchers’ theory is that being right-handed may be advantageous in large groups, but left-handedness gives more advantage when competing inone-on-one situations.
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