Non-right-handedness as a contributor to incidents/accidents reported within the Aviation Safety Reporting System

Abstract

Individual differences in hand use preference are associated with individual differences in cognition, emotion, and behavior. Additional work suggests that non-right-handers (NRH) are more accident prone generally, more likely to suffer from a physical accident resulting in head or severe injury, are involved in more car accidents, and die earlier than righthanders (RH). It is unclear what causal factors result in these accident-related differences between handedness groups, but likely there is an interplay between both cognition and environment. Additionally, the ‘right-hand world hypothesis’ suggests that the environment is constructed in a manner that is implicitly biased toward right-handers, resulting in physical constraints on NRH performance. Given these differences between RH and NRH, the current work sought to determine if NRH was associated with incidents in air transportation as reported via the Aviation Safety Reporting System (ASRS), a public database consisting of voluntary safety reports about aviation safety events. Out of 225,897 reports from January 1988 to September 2023, two reports referred to left-handedness as being detrimental to performance as a result of the configuration of the environment. Broadly, results suggest limited impacts of NRH on ASRS reported incidents, though study limitations may result in underestimation of NRH-incident relationships.

Keywords: Handedness, Aviation, Human Performance, Laterality, Cognition, Left Handed

DOI: 10.54941/ahfe1005201