this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2025
861 points (98.9% liked)

People Twitter

10303 readers
989 users here now

People tweeting stuff. We allow tweets from anyone.

RULES:

  1. Mark NSFW content.
  2. No doxxing people.
  3. Must be a pic of the tweet or similar. No direct links to the tweet.
  4. No international politcs
  5. Be excellent to each other.
  6. Provide an archived link to the tweet (or similar) being shown if it's a major celebrity, figure or any politician. If you replace the "x" at their site with xcancel (so it beomes xcancel.com), and you're not on mobile, it will save video. https://web.archive.org/save is another great option. Archive.is is no longer recommended because they remove/alter content.
  7. If a tweet (or similar) makes a statement of fact, either mark it as "satire" in the body or provide the original source link backing up the statement

founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] kip@piefed.zip 1 points 10 months ago

The chart in the image was reproduced by the Washington Post from a 2009 study by I C McManus

The Post article makes a similar claim to the one in the screenshot

McManus theorizes that the late-Victorian dive in left-handedness reflects stigma against southpaws

https://archive.ph/y543P

But he actually said this is unlikely

One possibility, extensively discussed in the handedness literature, is that left-handers die earlier [...] An alternative explanation of the lower rate of left-handedness suggests that the elderly are more likely, because of social pressure, either to have been forced to shift from writing with the left hand to writing with the right hand, or they prefer to call themselves right-handed, because of a taboo against left-handedness. Both this and the differential mortality explanation become unlikely when one looks at the entire Gilbert and Wysocki database [...] The best account of the Gilbert and Wysocki data is that it directly reflects the actual rate of left-handedness in the population

(pdf): https://jhanley.biostat.mcgill.ca/bios601/CandHchapter06/HistoryGeographyHumanHandedness.pdf