The World Looks Smaller when you Lean Left

Which way do you lean? I don't mean politically, I mean physically -- you should probably check that because how you're leaning may be affecting what you're thinking. It seems bizarre, but leaning physically to the left causes people to estimate sizes as being smaller. Where would that come from?

Anita Eerland and her colleagues at Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands asked 33 people to guess the numerical answer to questions while stood on a Wii-console balance board. A third of the questions were asked while the volunteers were perfectly upright. The rest of the questions were asked when - unbeknownst to the volunteers - the board was altered so that it would give a "perfectly balanced" readout only if volunteers tilted slightly to either the left or right. ....

As none of the participants got any of the questions exactly right, all answers were treated as estimates. When Eerland's team compared the answers given by participants they found that, on average, people made smaller estimates when they were tilted to the left

Source: New Scientist, 10 December 2011

Why would leaning left cause us to estimate things to be smaller instead of bigger? Why not right, or backwards, or forwards? Martin Fischer at Potsdam University thinks that there's something fundamentally cultural going on because he thinks that the opposite results would appear among people from cultures where they count from right to left. I don't know if that study has been done yet but I hope it is soon.

Assuming for a moment that the results are what Fischer expects, what would that mean? What sort of cultural bias would cause people to unconsciously create lower estimates when leaning in the direction where they start counting from? Is it simply because that's where lower numbers tend to be?

It's not clear if this study only looked at the use of hard numbers or not, and that would be interesting to test. For example, do people tend to estimate that someone or something is "less" in a non-numerical way when they are leaning left? Would they estimate that someone is "less" honest, educated, strong, helpful, etc.? If so, then this isn't just about numbers and counting.

I wonder how easy it would be to manipulate people this way?