A week ago I asked you all to provide me with some data about left-handedness in Geologists. I was very pleased with the response and I thought it was about time to collate the results.

Twitter: a lot of you replied by Twitter. This was enormously helped by Chris Rowan lending a hand in spreading the word. He also captured it all in Storify.

These results are: 11 left, 17 right and 5 ambidextrous.

Blog comments and online form: Those of you who are non-tweeps (and one who is, who wasn’t double-counted) gave me information in the comments or on a Google form I set up.

These results are: 11 left, 11 right and 2 ambidextrous which added to Twitter data gives 39% left, 49% right and 12% ambidextrous. This is rather close to my guess of 40%. Too close perhaps?

Estimates of proportions: The chances of sampling bias on this data is rather high. Are left-handers more likely to click on a link with left-handed in the title? Of course we are, but this is impossible to quantify. Many of you provided another, perhaps more valuable form of data in estimates or counts of the number of left-handers in groups of geologists. Since you are all good scientists I’ll assume there is zero sampling bias on this data. The total sample size here is 205, of whom 43 are lefties (21%). No ambidextrous people mentioned.

Adding these two sets of data (adding ambidextrous and leftie together) gives a headline of 27% of Geologists are not right-handed.

Some of you gave percentages with no total. These were: 12.5-20%, 15-25% and “about a half”. Again this is in the same ball-park. I have two conclusions:

Social media is fantastic, especially with geologists involved.

Around a quarter of geologists are left-handed and they may be unusually ambidextrous too.

More research required, ideally of the rigorous sort, but there is enough data here to justify it. I’ll email my psychologist contact back…

I’m a cack-handed sinister southpaw and the chances are surprisingly high that you are too.

At University, about 40% of my peers studying Earth Sciences were left-handed. Faculty professors confirmed that this was normal, based on their experience of teaching geologists over the decades. This is of course an unusually high proportion. No, correction, this is an incredibly high proportion. A random selection of people would have around 10% of left-handers.

If Geologists are genuinely four times as likely to be left-handed then this is a remarkably strong pattern and someone should take a look into it. I emailed an academic psychologist of my acquaintance and he agreed that this merited more research. He seemed interested in talking more about how to make it happen.

So the first thing is, I need to improve the quality of my anecdotal evidence. My experience may be a statistical fluke, so I need your help. Are you a left-handed or right-handed geologist? In particular, if you teach geology to students, are they unusually prone to cack-handedness?

I reckon a mere minute of your time (“hands-up if you’re left-handed”) would provide me with some solid data, which I’ll collate and publish here. I’m thinking “x of y students from z were sinistrals”. Assuming a strong pattern holds I’ll then do my best to get some research happening. My current thinking is that this will involve match-making between someone involved in psychology research and others with access to geology students. I have various ideas of how to make this happen but would love to hear more.

I’m very excited about this, it’s the sort of thing that the Internet is for. A small amount of time from a lot of you could be the start of something rather good. Please comment away below. Or go to this simple form.

NB, I’ve collated the results of your replies; with more data, the pattern still holds.