ArticleScientific reports2019
Left-handedness is associated with greater fighting success in humans.
Article in Scientific reports, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.
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Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed.
- Prevalence of left-handers and their role in antagonistic sports: beyond mere counts towards a more in-depth distributional analysis of ranking data.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- Intrasexual Selection for Upper Limb Length in Homo sapiens.American journal of human biology : the official journal of the Human Biology Council · 2025Article
- Is Left-Handedness Associated With Greater Success From the 7-Meter Line? An Analysis of 7-Meter Records Across Various Handball Competitions.Perceptual and motor skills · 2024Article
- Population-level lateralization of boxing displays enhances fighting success in male Great Himalayan leaf-nosed bats.Ecology and evolution · 2023Article
- Facial width-to-height ratio predicts fighting success: A direct replication and extension of Zilioli et al. (2014).Aggressive behavior · 2022Article
- Do Expert Fencers Engage the Same Visual Perception Strategies as Beginners?Journal of human kinetics · 2021Article
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
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Abstract
Left-handedness is a costly, sexually dimorphic trait found at low frequencies in all human populations. How the handedness polymorphism is maintained is unclear. The fighting hypothesis argues that left-handed men have a negative frequency-dependent advantage in violent intrasexual competition giving them a selective advantage. In support of this, many studies have found that left-handed men are overrepresented among modern professional fighters, but studies typically find no difference in fighting success between left and right-handed fighters. We studied over 13,800 professional boxers and mixed martial artists of varying abilities in three of the largest samples to test this hypothesis to date, finding robust evidence that left-handed fighters have greater fighting success. This held for both male and female fighters, and for both percentage of fights won and an objective measure of fighting ability. We replicated previous results showing that left-handed fighters are strongly overrepresented in professional combat sports, but left-handed fighters did not show greater variance in fighting ability, a hypothesis suggested in previous studies. Overall we find strong evidence consistent with the fighting hypothesis.
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