Paper co-authored by Associate Professor FELICIANI Claudio has been published on Nature Communications.
“Individual locomotor bias drives counterclockwise motion in pedestrian crowds”
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-73713-w
Project Overview and Related Websites (Provided by Associate Professor Feliciani)
Why Do Humans Prefer to Move Counter-Clockwise?
In a joint research project involving the University of Navarra and WIAS member Claudio Feliciani (among others), researchers found that people tend to turn left and therefore move counter-clockwise when walking in either open or confined spaces.
The research began in Spain during the COVID-19 pandemic, when Iker Zuriguel and his collaborator Iñaki Echeverría Huarte (among others) wanted to quantify how many people could move within a room while maintaining social distancing. Their result was 0.16 people per square meter.
However, another unexpected finding emerged. When analyzing the experiments, the researchers noticed that in almost all cases people moved counter-clockwise.
In an attempt to understand this peculiar behavior, the Spanish researchers embarked on a long journey, testing several hypotheses. At one point, they wondered whether people living in a left-driving, left-walking country would tend to turn in the opposite direction, that is, clockwise.
One person quickly came to mind: Claudio Feliciani, who had spent a few weeks in Pamplona several years earlier and had already established a good relationship with the group. Claudio (who at the time was at the University of Tokyo in the group of Katsuhiro Nishinari) repeated the Spanish experiments in Japan. To everyone’s surprise, people still moved counter-clockwise.
After testing additional hypotheses and still failing to identify the cause, the researchers reached a conclusion: the tendency appears to be an individual bias that is remarkably common across different groups of people. Right-handed people turn counter-clockwise, left-handed people turn counter-clockwise, and so do males and females, people in Japan and Spain, children and adults. Regardless of the population studied, around 65% of people prefer to move counter-clockwise.
Although the underlying reason remains unknown, the researchers decided to publish their findings and share their discovery with others. The work attracted unexpected interest from both the scientific community and the general public.
For further reading, you can refer to the following news articles, some of which are available in languages other than English:
(English, free) https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/jun/10/humans-prefer-to-walk-anticlockwise-scientists-find-reason-unclear
(English, paywalled) https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/10/science/humans-walking-veer-left-counterclockwise.html
(Spanish, free) https://elpais.com/ciencia/2026-06-10/el-misterio-de-por-que-casi-siempre-nos-giramos-hacia-la-izquierda-es-algo-inherente-al-ser-humano.html
(Italian, free) https://www.ilpost.it/2026/06/11/tendenza-camminare-sinistra-senso-antiorario/
(Japanese, paywalled) https://digital.asahi.com/articles/ASV6B2VG6V6BUTFL002M.html?iref=comtop_Tech_science_01
Funny facts:
- Claudio was the examiner for Iñaki’s PhD defense, where he presented his initial findings on counter-clockwise rotation. Iñaki passed with excellent evaluations.
- Claudio was visiting Spain and working with Iñaki and his colleagues when COVID-19 began.
- Most of the authors of this work will meet in a few days in Bristol for the TGF Conference on traffic and crowd dynamics.
