WHETHER right or left-handed, people associate 鈥済ood鈥� with their dominant side. But if that displeases you, it can be changed.
A team led by at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, showed 13 people who had had strokes a cartoon character in between two squares, and told them that it 鈥渓oves zebras and thinks they are good, but hates pandas and thinks they are bad鈥�. They then asked them which square the character would put each animal in.
All 13 people had once been right-handed, but eight had lost control of their right sides. Of these, seven said the zebra should go on the left side. The remaining five chose the right-hand square ().
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The team then asked 55 right-handed students to wear a heavy glove on one hand while trying to stand up dominoes. When they were then asked the panda/zebra question, the students were five times more likely to put the zebra in the box corresponding to their mobile hand.
鈥淚f wearing a glove for a few minutes can reverse our decisions about what鈥檚 good and bad, maybe the mind is more malleable than we thought鈥� says Casasanto.
