Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Do people move in predictable directions?

Episode Date: May 25, 2022

Depending on where you are in the world, you either have an instinct to go left or right when entering a place. Learn all about this today.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here sitting in

for Dave. So it's short stuff. It is the short stuff. Why don't you like short stuff? We're bringing me down. Oh, okay. Felt sure you're going Bill Murray there. I don't remember him saying you're bringing me down. Yeah, I think that was what he's saying in the Star Wars when he's saying the words to Star Wars. You're bringing me down. I don't remember that part. We are not talking about that though. We're talking about directional walking. And this is from our old colleagues at howstuffworks.com and not our old colleagues, but we used to use cracked all the time. I used to love that site. Back in the Jack O'Brien days. Yeah, I guess Jack O'Brien is now our colleague and has been for a while. So we're one degree removed. Check out the Daily Zeit, guys, if you

don't already. Great show. Yeah. Jack and Miles in the game. That's right. What else? You've been on that show. I haven't twice. I know. They're going to ask you a third time before they ask me. I would love that. I even had those guys some movie crush. I know, right? Whoa. That's okay. Now that you have them, I'm just kidding. This will get back to them somehow. Somehow, some way. So, Chuck, we're not talking about Daily Zeit, guys, today. We're not. I know. We're talking about something entirely different, which is the direction that people tend to move in. That's right. And generally, if you walk into like an amusement park or a store and we'll talk about shopping kind of toward the end, in general, in the United States, people tend to go in and move

to the right to a place and are indeed subtly or not so subtly steered to go to the right. Yeah, but from what I understand, it's like amplifying our natural tendency to move to the right, at least in the United States. In Great Britain, Japan, we need to hear from you because we are being told that you guys tend to move to the left. Like, say, when you enter a grocery store, do you guys, and this is a question to you in the UK and in Japan, when you enter a grocery store, do you move to the left or do you move to the right? Really stop and think about it and then email and let us know, okay? Because supposedly, you guys move to the left, we move to the right, and there's some pretty interesting explanations for why. Yeah, I mean, I can say

anecdotally, and I think you can agree with this. If you go to London or something and you're from the United States, you're going to be bumping into people a lot because they also tend, I think, to walk down the left side of like a hallway as opposed to the right side. Isn't that correct? Like maniacs. Yeah. And when you look at sports fields, like the way you run bases or race a car or a horse or race your legs, that is done in a, you know, a human. Yeah, I just never heard it put like that. That is counterclockwise and they've, you know, they found that when people walk up to like a track to go running, they instinctively move to the right, which is counterclockwise and jibes with how sports are done. Right. But then put differently, that's when you're entering like

a field of action from the outside. If you imagine the field of action being bounded by a circle, when you enter that field of action, you enter the circle, you move to the right, which takes you counterclockwise. But if you're already in the circle and you decide to just start taking right turns, you're actually moving clockwise, which is brain busting if you think about it. Okay. I literally did not understand that until you just said it that way. That's because it was really poorly put. Yeah, I did not get it at all because I was like, doesn't matter like which way you're facing to begin with. But if you continue to take rights is what the key is. Exactly. Because, you know, three wrongs don't make a right,

but three rights make a left. Is that how it goes? Yeah, especially if you say it like that. They've done some studies over the years because they thought handedness might have something to do with it. And this was in the Association for Psychological Science, is where it was printed, but it does. They did find though that lefties tend to prefer the left side and righties like the right. And they even studied stroke patients who lost use of their dominant hand and found that over time they had to reverse a natural bias to favor what was their original dominant hand with which way they would go. And these studies were very, very important in helping later determine how to best share a Twix bar. I was wondering what was going

coming up there. Do you want to take a break real quick? Sure. Okay, we're going to come back and keep talking about the direction people tend to move. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that Michael and a different

hot sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Etikler. And to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life in India. It's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell

me to stop running and pay attention because maybe there is magic in the stars if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you it got weird fast. Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world can crash down. The situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, Chuck. So you kind of said it. One thing that has been used to explain why people

move in certain directions has to do with, possibly has to do with the side of the road that you drive on. And yes, anecdotally, if you're in America and you're walking down a hallway, you're probably walking on the right side, your right side. Yes. Not your left side because then you would probably bump into a lot of people. That's just kind of how things are laid out. So it does make sense that we would kind of move to the right. And the reason why it would be significant if people in the UK go to the left in a store where in America they move to the right is because humans are animals. And it turns out there aren't any geographical differences in migration direction among wild animals, non-human animals. They tend to just go the same way

wherever every member of their species goes anywhere in the world. That's the direction they'll go. It's not like if one group of the species of gophers lives in North America and they go to the left. And then the African family of gophers move to the right when they migrate. That's not how it goes. They'll all gophers move, say, clockwise instead. Right. And these patterns, though, are generally based on aid from the wind. If you're a bird, any kind of weather pattern, like a solar pathway, maybe. The interesting thing in that we, as far as clockwise, I never really stopped to think why clockwise is clockwise and why the clock didn't go the other way. But it's based on the sundial. And it's based on specifically a Northern

hemispheric sundial because that's the way the sun will cast in the Northern Hemisphere. If it was based on a Southern hemispheric sundial, then the clock would literally, the one and the two and the three would be to the left of noon. Yeah. And just calling it clockwise kind of begs the question. It's a human constructed direction, but it seems like the most natural thing in the world. Because not only is it called clockwise, it's counterclockwise, which makes it seem radical and in opposition of the natural order of things to move leftward rather than rightward. Right. The only thing weirder than seeing a clock that would be laid out in reverse would be to see a baseball player hit a ball and run to third base. That would be very, very strange to

my brain. It would be, especially if somebody was timing it with a stopwatch that was running counterclockwise. I wish Japan did that because Japanese baseball is huge. That would be so cool as if they just ran in the opposite direction and that was kind of like their thing. Yeah, they could. I mean, intramural games between American MLB teams and Japanese teams would be a total mess, but it'd be super entertaining to watch. And then you've always got the one guy that just runs straight past the pitcher towards second. Right, exactly. Depending on who's rules you were playing, like that person would always be out because you just have to throw it to first base or throw the third base. They'd also be a double specialist, I guess. One way this can come

into play though is in architecture because architects like to have fun. And if they're designing something that they want to make you feel either ill at ease or just get your neurons firing in a different way, they can drive you left in the United States out of the bat and put things of more interest on the left. And it's pretty subtle. It's not like some radical shift when you walk in, you're like, oh my God, what's happening? But moving people in a different direction counter to what they usually move can make your brain do different things. Yeah, that's pretty neat. I love that. That's if you want to stimulate people in a weird way and make them slightly uncomfortable. In grocery stores and retail stores where you want people

to feel totally comfortable, so they want to stay long and spend lots of money there, you want to do the opposite. You want to kind of go with the natural flow. And we've talked about this extensively in videos, other podcasts about how they lay out grocery stores to basically, I hate to use the word manipulate you, but manipulate you into shelling out as much cash as possible. And a big part of that is funneling you to the right and then placing things strategically in that counterclockwise motion that they expect you to move through the store in. Yeah, I'd never think about it even though we've talked about it a lot, but I can't think of a single grocery store I go to where the produce and stuff isn't on the right. And

eventually you wind your way around and on the left are like the frozen foods and ice cream and stuff like that. And the idea is that if you go in and go to the right and there's all the kind of junk food, you might just get that and leave and not air go not spend as much money. I probably use air go wrong. But what they do is they wind you around to the right where you buy like your produce and the things that you need. And then on your way, technically on your way out of that counterclockwise circle, that's when you're going to do the impulse buys and say like, oh, well, let me have those, those chips and that ice cream or that whatever that whipped cream that it's cool whip that eats straight out of the bucket, which is because it's so, so good. So good.

Remember the peanut butter cool whip combo? No. Oh yeah. Yeah, I told you I got on that right after you told me it's so dangerous though. Well, I mean, we can't keep cool whip in our house. It's it's gone in a matter of a day and a half. We just can't do it. Like we'll get it for, for Thanksgiving for like pumpkin pie. And I always get an extra because I know that the pumpkin pie is not going to have any that's hilarious. Because Emily and I are just sneaking in there like a spoonful at a time. Good man. I'm totally my daughter doesn't know yet when she's introduced to that. It's all over because the freezer is low enough. Right. And you have plenty of stools handy. Yeah. And fingers or spoons. So now that the way you just described the grocery store,

now that I think about it, every grocery store I've gone into, the pharmacy is the last thing to your left when you go in. And there's basically no way to get directly to it. You have to go through other stuff. And then they give you the opposite at my Publix. Is that right? The pharmacy is the first thing on the right when you walk in. I'm thinking Publix too. I guess I'm in a different design or a different dimension. Maybe there's a Bernstein effect going on. Weird. Yeah. So you got anything else about the way people move? No. I mean this last thing is kind of funny. They did a test in a store in Philadelphia where they tried to funnel people to the left by putting up like pallets and all these big things that block your way.

And people were like literally crawling over pallets just so they could go to the right. It's kind of funny. It is pretty funny. Philly strong. That's right. So since Chuck said Philly strong everybody, of course that means that short stuff is out. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts on my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.