Whether you consider yourself left leaning or right leaning, it’s a good bet you always lean right when going in for a kiss. New research from the university of Bath (England) looked into the kissing bias of people and concluded it could have wider cognitive and neuroscience implications.
What the researchers found is those who kiss on the left are in the minority because most people are actually hardwired to lean to the right. This study published in the journal Scientific Reports is the first to explore this bias for turning the head to one side, and how partners match each other’s moves when kissing.
48 couples were invited to kiss at home, then go into different rooms and open an envelope and report on different aspects of the kiss—independently of one another. The results show a bias for both partners turning their heads to the right. Men were (not surprisingly) 15 times more likely to initiate kissing, and over two-thirds of couples leaned to the right.
If the initiator were right-handed, they almost always leaned right—however many left-handed recipients also went right in response to their partners. Researchers believe this matching was to avoid the discomfort of ending up with mirroring heads, leaning to the same side. This suggests an underlying cognitive mechanism is at work. Most interesting is that couples in the study from Bangladesh had the same experience as those from Western countries. In Bangladesh kissing is completely private and couples do not have any exposure to other’s kissing as they do in Western countries. Yet both followed this kissing pattern. This suggests that neurology is at work in how people kiss, very interesting.
So we now have scientific data to suggest that males initiate kissing more than females and that the majority of people across different cultures lean to the right—while kissing. The study authors hope this will lead to more study of neurology and social behavior.
