Overview

• Only 17 of the nearly 1,000 screened studies met standardized reporting criteria, yielding almost 50 effect sizes for analysis.
• The review found no overall creative advantage for left-handed or mixed-handed individuals, with right-handers showing a slight lead in certain divergent thinking tests.
• An occupational analysis of more than 770 professions indicates that left-handers are underrepresented in jobs requiring high creativity based on originality and inductive reasoning.
• Left-handed people are disproportionately common among artists and musicians but not in fields like architecture where creativity is often presumed.
• Researchers attribute the persistence of the left-handed creativity myth to statistical cherry-picking, cultural stereotypes of lefties as “tortured artists” and selective focus on specific professions.