Handedness
Left, right or mixed, and how many people share it. A meta-analysis of over 2 million people puts left-handedness at 9.3% and mixed-handedness at 0.6%.
You share this with
90.1%
of all humans, about 7.3 billion people
Notable right-handed people
What the research shows: Around 95% of right-handers process language mainly in the left hemisphere. The 90/10 split shows up in every population studied and in the hand stencils on cave walls from 30,000 years ago, so it is old and probably partly genetic, though no single gene explains much of it.
In context
Many animals have a preferred paw, but few species lean one way as a group the way humans do. Chimpanzees show a mild right bias in captivity and almost none in the wild. Parrots are mostly left-footed. Cats show a sex split in some studies, with females tending right and males left. The human 90/10 is unusually lopsided and unusually stable, which is why it keeps geneticists busy.
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About this test
Pick right, left or mixed. The module reports the global share from the largest meta-analysis on the subject, Papadatou-Pastou et al. (2020), 2.4 million participants across 200 studies: 90.1% right-handed, 9.34% left-handed, 0.56% mixed-handed.
The percentile is a rarity score, so left-handers land around the 91st percentile and mixed-handers around the 99th. The left-handed rate has been close to 10% for as long as anyone has measured it, and cave-painting hand stencils show a similar split.
What percentage of people are left-handed?
9.34% worldwide in Papadatou-Pastou et al. (2020). It is higher in the Netherlands (13.2%) and the US (11.3%) and lower in China (6.5%), Japan (6.2%) and India (5.8%), partly because of cultural pressure to write right-handed.
How rare is being ambidextrous?
True mixed-handedness, meaning no consistent preference across tasks, is about 0.56% of people, or roughly 1 in 180. Trained ambidexterity (a right-hander who learned to write left) is not the same thing and is not counted.
Are left-handers smarter or more creative?
The evidence is weak in both directions. Large studies find no meaningful IQ difference between left- and right-handers. Left-handedness is linked to somewhat different brain lateralisation, which is interesting but not a talent.
Percentiles above come from the same parameters the Handedness module uses. See the methodology for how they are calculated.