René Westerhausen

Tag: retraining

  • “Use Your Nice Hand!” – The Retraining of Left-Handers in 20th-Century Germany

    “Use Your Nice Hand!” – The Retraining of Left-Handers in 20th-Century Germany

    Based on historic documents and recently published survey data, the post explores the history of the retraining of left-handers in Germany during the 20th century.

    Whenever I read about the retraining of left-handers, I am transported back to this one episode from my childhood. Sitting at the kitchen table at my grandparents’ house, I was busying myself by with a colouring book. I must have been only about three years old, but I remember how my grandmother joined me. Sitting down next to me in her light blue apron, she gently instructed me with a “use your nice hand!”, as I, according to her opinion, was holding the crayons in the wrong, left hand [1].

    There was no explanation for why the right hand was deemed “nicer”, and had I asked her for a reason, she likely would have shrugged. For her generation, born and raised in rural Germany in the 1920s, it was just obvious that writing or drawing had to be done with the right hand.

    The practise of training left-handed children to write with their right-hand, arguably, has a long tradition in Germany [2], like it has in most, if not all, other countries. Caregivers at home or teachers at school would instruct children, sometimes even using rather ungentle measures, to use their right hand. The personal accounts of many “first-hand victims” of this strange practise can easily be found in the various online forums dedicated to the topic [3]. And whenever you find a SoMe post concerning left handedness, you can be almost certain to also find comments below it that report such retraining experience. Yet, as the saying goes, times change, and this practice – while not complete overcome – has gone increasingly out of fashion. The continuously rising number of left-handers across the globe can be seen as evidence for this development [4].

    While handedness retraining in Germany is well-documented by countless anecdotal reports, it is much more difficult to find reliable information on how frequent it actual was, or until when exactly it was systematically practised. A bit of “snooping” through publicly available political and pedagogical archives [5] reveals that handedness – or its retraining – only very rarely appears as a concern in these texts. And were it does, it is promoting tolerance of left-handed writing rather than the opposite. I was not able to find a single serious document instructing pedagogues to retrain their left-handed students.

    For example, already in 1920, the Minster for Education of Prussia, Konrad Haenisch, explicitly advised teachers in the states’ schools to allow left-handed writing [6]. He ordered that, after carefully confirming a student’s left handedness, it should be left up to the student’s own choice whether they prefer to write with their left or right hand. Or, to quote the German original:

    “[Es] ist den Schülern freizustellen, ob sie beim Schreiben von der linken oder rechten Hand Gebrauch machen wollen.”

    Such a progressive policy in the by far largest federal state of the young German republic could be predicted to have a huge impact, potentially leading to a significant increase in left-handed writers in subsequent generations. However, the available data does not really support this expectation. Instead, it did not have any measurable immediate effect.

    This conclusion is based on a recent study on this topic [7], which analysed data from a representative survey on the economic situation of German households, incorporating handedness information from approximately 13,000 men and women born between 1920 and 1997. Recognising that overall handedness and writing hand are not necessarily the same, the designers of the survey had included the two simple handedness questions: “Are you a natural right- or left-hander?” and “With which hand do you actually write?“

    The graph below shows how the participants of the study answered these questions by featuring two key plots. The first, represented by the bold solid line at the top, shows the proportion of participants from each birth cohort who identify as “natural left-handers.” The second – the bold dashed line – shows the proportion of participants who actually write with their left hand.

    Graph illustrating the data as described in the the text.
    Figure adapted from Guber (2019) [6]. The graph shows the proportion of individuals indicating that they are natural left-handers (bold solid curve) and left-handed writers (dashed solid). The thinner dashed lines represent “error margins” for the fitting of the curves into the available data. The closer they are to the fitted curve, the more confident one can be in the fitted value.

    If there had been no retraining at all, all natural left-handers would also write with their left hand. That is, we would expect the two plots to overlap almost entirely. As can be seen, however, this is not the case for most of the cohorts. There is a significant gap between the two lines, which persists until the 1990s. So, it appears that until then, handedness retraining was practised in Germany, if not nationwide so at least in a few classrooms or around some kitchen tables.

    The proportion of left-handed writers did, however, steadily increase across the generations, with a noticeable acceleration starting with those cohorts born from around the 1960s. As a result, the “retraining gap” between the two curves was successively closing. Eyeballing the graph, one can also guess that from the 1970s cohorts onwards less than 50% of the left-handers experienced retraining attempts of lasting “success”, while this number seems below 25% for those born in the 1980s.

    Interesting is also what this graph does not show. There are no noticeable dips or bumps in the curve representing the proportion of left-handed writers. For example, the aforementioned 1920 directive by the Prussian Ministry of Education – allowing students to write with their left hand – did not result in the expected increase in left-handed writing rates. Also, other historical changes in German government with their dramatic shifts in political ideology, seem not have left a noticeable mark in these curves.

    Taken together, it has taken Germany at least 70 years – from the first federal state endorsing left-handed writing in schools to a virtually stop of the practise of retraining in the 1990s. It was a slow but steady societal shift toward greater tolerance of left-handedness rather than a sudden jump caused by political decisions. Of note, the members of Gen Z might well be the first Germans not to learn from others which of their two hands is supposed to be the “nicer” one.

    [1] I am not sure what effect this and similar episodes had on my own hand preference. Likely none, as I am strongly right handed today, and I am quite certain that I also without this early intervention by my grandmother would have turned out be a boring right-hander.

    [2] see also evidence from the 19th century, shown here: https://westerhausen.dk/retraining-of-left-handers-evidence-from-a-mid-19th-century-caricature/

    [3] Take, for example, the subreddit on handedness: https://www.reddit.com/r/handedness/

    [4] McManus, I. C., Moore, J., Freegard, M., & Rawles, R. (2010). Science in the Making: Right Hand, Left Hand. III: Estimating historical rates of left-handedness. Laterality, 15(1-2), 186-208. https://doi.org/10.1080/13576500802565313

    [5] one excellent source is https://scripta.bbf.dipf.de/viewer/index/

    [6] It is a directive targeted at regional school administrations; published on page 322-323 in: Ministerium für Wissenschaft, Kunst und Volksbildung (1920). Zentralblatt für die gesamte Unterrichtsverwaltung in Preußen. Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, Berlin

    [7] Guber, R. (2019). Making it right? Social norms, handwriting and human capital. Labour Economics, 56, 44-57. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.labeco.2018.11.005

  • Left-Handed Footballers at the FIFA World Cup 2026

    Left-Handed Footballers at the FIFA World Cup 2026

    The tactical demand for left‑footed players should, in theory, lead to a higher proportion of left-handed footballers at the FIFA World Cup 2026 – yet, left-handers are surprisingly scarce among the left-footed players.

    The football World Cup is upon us again, and I have to admit that I have a mild football fever these days. I like to watch the occasional match, and the other night, while waiting for the match between France and Senegal to kick off, I found myself scrolling through some random clips of the French national team. What I saw was not really surprising. Just the typical “football stuff”. Players sprinting, kicking, shooting, celebrating, followed by taking selfies with fans or trophies.

    Then, I came across a scene featuring Ousmane Dembélé, the central forward of L’équipe tricolore. In the clip, one could see the football star sitting at some gala event, wearing a fine suite, while a football jersey bearing his name was nicely draped on a table in front of him. He was supposed to sign it and so he took hold of a felt‑pen with his his left-hand and graced the jersey with his autograph.

    That Ousmane Dembélé prefers to write with his left hand is not remarkable in itself. With around 12% of men being left‑handed [1], any starting line-up of eleven players – at the World Cup or anywhere else – should statistically include about one left‑handed player. And in a sport that mainly revolves around kicking a ball with one’s feet, a player’s handedness should anyway be largely irrelevant, right?

    Yet, when I tried to find pictures of the other players of the French squad signing jerseys, fans, or contracts, I came across a curious accumulation of left-handers. Besides Dembélé, also Kylian Mbappé, Adrien Rabiot, Lucas Hernandez, Lucas Digne, Rayan Cherki, and the goalkeeper Brice Samba apparently prefer to use their left hand, suggesting that 7 out of the 26 strong squad – so, roughly 27% – are likely left-handers, more than doubling the expected value of 12%.

    With such a small sample, it could easily be a coincidence – and maybe that is where I should have left it. But this finding stuck with me, and I even came up with a little hypothesis concerning the reason for this accumulation of left-handers.

    Handedness is strongly associated with “footedness”, in that left‑handers are more likely to prefer their left foot while the vast majority of right‑handers favour their right [2]. To add some numbers: it can be estimated that roughly 60% of all left‑footed individuals should be left‑handed [3]. So, should there be any tactical demand for recruiting more left-footed players, this should – as a side effect – also increase the number of left-handers in a squad.

    With which foot a player prefers to “handle” the ball is obviously very relevant in football. It affects the footballer’s playing style, the angles of the passes and shots, or the preferred movement patterns on the pitch. It also may determine the player’s positioning. Left-footed players preferably occupy positions on the left-side of the pitch, and team managers actively search for left-footed players to fill out these positions. If you pay close attention at the World Cup matches, you will find that virtually all left-backs – so those playing on the left side of the defence line viewed from the goalkeeper – are left-footed players. In case of the French squad these are, for example, Lucas Hernandez and Lucas Digne; two of the left-handers mentioned earlier.

    Ousmane Dembélé’s footedness is, by the way, a bit more complicated. In a rather remarkable interview early in his career, Dembélé was asked about his preferred foot. His answer was that he was left-footed. Apparently not entirely satisfied with this answer, the journalist inquired why he then shoots penalties with his right foot – as he indeed does as can be seen in the featured image above. Dembélé replied: “Because I shoot better with my right foot.” Maybe this is also the reason why the webpages tracking the careers of professional footballers, such as transfermarkt.com, inform us that he is “both” footed. Or, should we just take his word for it and classify him as left-footed?

    In any case, left- and both-footedness is far less common in the general population than right-footedness. Estimates suggests that only about 15 to 20% of men fall into this category [2]. When it comes to football, however, this percentage is nowhere near sufficient. Given the tactical systems most teams employ today, squads typically need three to four capable left‑footed players – around 27% to 36% of the starting line-up – to adequately cover all positions on the left side of the pitch. So, there seems to be a mismatch between the demand for left-footed footballers and the supply of naturally left-footed individuals. As a result, left‑footed players are well sought after, and there are indications for a selection bias in their favour already in young ages [4].

    Also at this year’s world cup, the proportion of left‑footed players exceeds what one would expect based on the general population. A quick scan of the full squads of the top-ten teams of the FIFA‑World ranking, finds that 80 left- or both-footed footballers in the total 260 nominated players, so roughly 31 percent [5]. As can be seen in the Figure below, Brazil (11 of 26, or 42%) and Argentina (10 of 26, or 38%) are topping this unofficial left-footedness ranking, but all but two teams show a comparatively high incidence of left-footedness. Only in the English (19%) and the Dutch squad (15%) the proportion of left-footed players is in the “normal”, that is, the expected range.

    Graph showing that Brazil and Argentina have most left-footed players in their ranks
    Left-footedness and handedness of the top-ranked teams at the FIFA World Cup 2026. The footedness information was taken from transfermarkt.com; handedness was determined by finding pictures of the players signing autographs. Left-handed footballers who prefer the left foot, are unexpectedly rare. (Data source: transfermarkt.com, background image from https://pixnio.com/)

    Coming back to my earlier hypothesis, the question is whether this high rate of left-footed players also results in an increase in left-handers? The answer is: apparently not! I was able to track down pictures or clips showing 255 of the 260 players of the ten top-teams while writing, and 30 of them were doing so with the left hand – notably including the better known stars Kevin De Bruyne, Joshua Kimmich, Alejandro Grimaldo, or Jordan Pickford [6]. However, this only made for 11.8% of all players, which is arguably very close to the expected 12% left-handers among men. So, no excessive amount of left-handed footballers at the World Cup!

    Before wrapping up this excursion into the world of football, I could not resist taking another look at the relationship between handedness and footedness – and, to my surprise, left-handers were astonishingly rare among the left‑footed players. As the graph above shows, both Brazil and Argentina field sizeable groups of left‑footed players, yet each squad includes only a single left-hander. Even more striking, none of the nine left‑footed players on Belgium’s team appears to be left‑handed. Added up across all ten teams, 22 out of the 80 left- or both-footed players (28%) were left-handers: just about half of the 60% percent that could be reasonably expected [3].

    It is difficult to say what might have caused this lack of left-handers among the left-footed players. The general need for left-footed players could have forced some right-footed right-handers at young age to practise their left foot to be able to occupy the positions on the left side of the pitch, so that they today appear left-footed. Conversely, many of the left‑footed right‑handers could be natural left‑handers who were retrained to write with their right hand at home or in school. However, the practise of retraining has luckily gone out of fashion in most countries and should not really have affected this generation of players which is born – or at least mostly raised – in the 21st century.

    It seems the French squad – including Ousmane Dembélé – is just an outlier when it comes to left‑handed footballers, and my intuitive hypothesis turned out to be one of these misguided attempts of making sense of insufficient data. Among the top‑teams, there are indeed more left‑ or both‑footed players than expected, but this does not translate into a noticeable increase in left‑handedness at the FIFA World Cup 2026.

    [1] The incidence of left-handedness is about 2% higher in men compared with women, so roughly 12%; see Papadatou-Pastou, M. et al. (2020). Human handedness: A meta-analysis. Psychol. Bulletin, 146, 481-524. https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000229

    [2] Packheiser, J., Schmitz, J., Berretz, G., Carey, D. P., Paracchini, S., Papadatou-Pastou, M., & Ocklenburg, S. (2020). Four meta-analyses across 164 studies on atypical footedness prevalence and its relation to handedness. Scientific Reports, 10, 14501. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-71478-w

    [3] Even when factoring in that right‑handers outnumber left‑handers nine to one, the pattern still suggests that left‑footed individuals should, in principle, be left‑handed more often than right‑handed. According to the data from [2] of 100 men, about 12 should be left-handers of which 66% should be left-footed, so about 8 individuals. Of the 88 right-handers, 6% should be left-footed, so, roughly 5. Left-handed left-footers should outnumber right-handed left-footers 8 to 5 – in percentage, about 60% of all left-footed individuals should also be left-handers

    [4] Verbeek, J., Elferink-Gemser, M. T., Jonker, L., Huijgen, B. C., & Visscher, C. (2017). Laterality related to the successive selection of Dutch national youth soccer players. Journal of Sports Sciences, 35(22), 2220-2224. https://doi.org/10.1080/02640414.2016.1262544

    [5] I extracted the data from transfermarkt.com; of note “both”-footedness is rarely reported, so I kept them together with left-footedness for simplicity

    [6] Of the total 260 players, Kevin De Bruyne, Joshua Kimmich, and Kylian Mbappé are three of only eight left-handed footballers who are right-footed.

  • Left-Right Confusion in Left-handers: The Case of Mr. Macdonald Hastings

    Left-Right Confusion in Left-handers: The Case of Mr. Macdonald Hastings

    Inspired by the case of the British journalist Douglas Macdonald Hastings, the post explores the phenomenon of left-right confusion in left-handers.

    Douglas Macdonald Hastings (1909 – 1982)[1] was a British author, television broadcaster, and journalist. He became known to a wider UK audience through his World War II reporting for the Picture Post magazine, accompanying the troops during their campaign to liberate France. In the end of the 1950s, he also was a familiar face on the BBC programme Tonight, and over the course of his career he authored numerous books, including several detective novels.

    According to piece he published in the London Newspaper The Evening News in April 1937, he also was a left-hander [2].

    In this rather intriguing article, Hastings offers a glimpse into the life of a left-hander born in the early 20th century UK. He complains that the society he is living in, is biased against left-handers. In a world dominated by right-handers, left-handedness is considered a significant flaw:

    Screenshot of the article title
    Titel of Mcdonald Hastings article, published in The Evening News, April 27th, 1937. (source: https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/)

    “Just because right is might, anybody that isn’t right must be wrong”.

    He recalls that he had been made to write with his right hand in school, against his innate inclination to draw and paint with his left hand. A common practise in schools of that time. But he also reports that these challenges did not stop with childhood. He describes the concerned look on the faces of his right-handed friends that appeared whenever he picked up a knife with his left hand to slice bread. These looks were often accompanied by well-meant comments that, however, unmasked the latent prejudices his friends held against him as a left-hander:

    “it is certain that someone will warn me to be careful not to cut myself”

    Surprisingly, however, Hastings himself appears not to be entirely free from such stereotypes. He starts the article with a strong warning about his ability to give directions, a deficit, which he directly attributes to his left handedness. It reads:

    “If you chance to meet me in the street and, politely raising your hat, ask me the way, don’t believe a word I tell you. Better than that, if you hope to reach your destination, do precisely the opposite to my instructions. That is not because I don’t know the way […] Neither am I of an anti-social disposition. It is simply that I am unable to distinguish between left and right. I am left-handed.”

    The phenomenon he describes is known as left-right confusion. It refers to a person’s difficulty in reliably and rapidly distinguishing left from right – whether on one’s own body or in external space, as for example, when giving directions. The reasons for suffering from this phenomenon are not known, but it is typically not tied to any medical condition. What is known, however, is that left-right confusion is remarkably common. Recent studies estimate that approximately 15% of the general population experience it regularly [3].

    Supporting Hastings’ suspicion, some studies did indeed suggest that left‑handers experience left-right confusion more often than right‑handers. However, these earlier findings have not consistently been replicated, and modern accounts typically contradict the notion of a meaningful difference between left- and right-handers.

    One recent example is a study by Hikari Yamashita conducted at the University of Osaka, Japan [4]. He tested each 64 left‑ and right‑handers in a map-navigation task. Participants were asked to follow a predefined route on a map placed in front of them and, at each of 32 turning points, they had to state whether a “left” or “right” turn was required. Left- and right-handers showed comparable performance: both the number of errors and the total time needed to complete the route were similar.

    So, Hastings was likely wrong in blaming his left-handedness for the left-right confusion. It appears more plausible that he, by mere chance, had been a member of two minorities: the 10% of the population that are left-handers, and the 15% of population that mix left and right. It was a coincidence, not a causal relation in any direction.

    Should you, like Hastings, often find yourself confusing left and right, he also offers a memory hook to help in such situations. Follow your heart! It usually beats on the left side of the body. Unless, of course, you happen to have an extremely rare condition called situs inversus [5], in which case the logic is naturally reversed. But that is a different story altogether.

    [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macdonald_Hastings

    [2] Macdonald Hastings, D. (April 27th, 1937). I am Left-Handed. The Evening News . Retrieved from https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/

    [3] van der Ham, I. J., Dijkerman, H. C., & van Stralen, H. E. (2021). Distinguishing left from right: A large-scale investigation of left–right confusion in healthy individuals. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 74(3), 497-509. https://doi.org/10.1177/1747021820968519

    [4] Yamashita, H. (2022). Investigating individual differences in left-right confusion among healthy Japanese young adults. Culture and Brain, 10(Suppl 1), 49-64. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40167-022-00112-5

    [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situs_inversus

  • Retraining of left handers: evidence from 19th century caricature

    Retraining of left handers: evidence from 19th century caricature

    A caricature from 1856 reveals that the retraining of left handers was a recognised practise in 19th‑century Germany.

    On one of my virtual excursions into the excellent digital historical library of the University of Heidelberg [1], I came across the weekly Bavarian-German magazine called Fliegende Blätter, so, Flying Pages. Founded in 1844, the magazine ran for more than 100 years, and was widely appreciated for its sure‑footed, satirical portrayal of the German bourgeoisie.

    The caricature above, which I found in a 1856 issue [2], nicely reflects this sentiment. It is drawn by the physician and artist Ferdinand Schröder and entitled Das Mutterauge, the eye of a mother. And with this eye, the mother observes how her dear little boy Emil is about to hit his (likely) nanny with a stick. The mother does not like what she sees and, as every good mother would, decides to intervene, although for slightly different reason than expected.

    “Aber lieber Emil, wie oft soll ich es Dir denn sagen?!“, she exclaims, “Schlägst Du schon wieder mit der linken Hand!!“

    Translated:

    “But dear Emil, how often do I have to tell you?! Again you are hitting with your left hand!!“

    The dear son is using the wrong hand! He should rather hit the poor nanny with the stick in his right hand! This unexpected reason for the intervention is obviously meant as a social criticism. The servants do not really matter to those wealthy people. The seemingly trivial matter of the son’s hand preference is more important than the well being of the nanny. A moral bankruptcy.

    The caricature does also show, however, that the retraining of left handers — the forced conversion of children to use their right instead of their preferred left hand — was “a thing” in mid-19th century Germany. Using it as a topic for mocking the rich people assumes that the reader is familiar with the concept. And indeed, it can be expected that retraining was quite frequently done at this time, and not only in Germany.

    Today, we know that left handedness is at least partly determined by genetic factors [3], letting it appear barbaric to retrain a child against its innate preference. In the 19th century, however, it was usually assumed that handedness is just a matter of education and upbringing. And a person brought up well, so the common opinion, was to be right handed. A rule of proper etiquette. Real or want-to-be bourgeoisie parents had to train their children to write with their right hands. Raising a left-handed child, or being openly left handed, would have been a social embarrassment.

    The retraining has luckily increasingly gone out of fashion, and left-handed members of Gen Z living in Europe or North-America will likely not have suffered through it. But many left handers of earlier generations[4] or of different cultural origin [5] have certainly experienced retraining. So, unfortunately, there are still too many out there with a first-hand experience of retraining.

    [1] Heidelberg historic literature – digitized;

    [2] source of caricature: https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.2122#0021

    [3] review by Paracchini, S. (2021); https://doi.org/10.3390/sym13101792

    [4] example from Germany: Guber, R. (2019). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.labeco.2018.11.005

    [5] example from Africa: Alhassan, A.B. (2018).http://dx.doi.org/10.19080/GJAA.2018.07.555713