Data Is Beautiful

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Fact about the left-handed people (lemmy.ml)

submitted 3 months ago by NahMarcas@lemmy.ml to c/dataisbeautiful@lemmy.ml

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[–] Mighty@lemmy.world 17 points 3 months ago (1 children)

This hurts to read. As a lefty, I read these "studies" my whole life. The statistic that doesn't show here is the one I remember most: that lefties are much more likely to commit suicide than righties. Also none of these mention the sociological factors here. How until very(!) recently, lots of people were forced into right-handedness by schools or church. I would guess that this plays a big part in these numbers. Especially when viewing the gendered handedness. Would be interesting to examine that more.

[–] sanguinepar@lemmy.world 3 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

lefties are much more likely to commit suicide than righties.

That's interesting (and tragic, obviously).

The idea that it could be an environmental thing (pressure to conform in a right-handed world, the schools and church stuff you mentioned) is quite compelling.

On the other hand, the increased prevalence of genius, and alcoholism, suggests maybe something genetic (or whatever) - like left handedness might go along with certain inherent psychological traits, which might also tend more towards self harming behaviour.

I know nothing about any of this stuff beyond a general interest, so I've no doubt it's a lot more complicated than that (and/or that this is just correlation rather than causation in one direction or another) but it's interesting regardless.