Kissing Right?

Absence of Rightward Directional Turning Bias During First Kiss Encounters

Among Strangers

The research looked at adult couples consensually kissing and whether they reflected a bias in
the direction that their head turned. They believed that romantic kissing between adults
typically resulted in heads going to the right. They believed this due to humans demonstrating
lateral preferences based on innate mechanisms. The head-turning bias seen during kissing was
discovered by Gunturkun in which 124 adult couples were observed in public spaces. From
here, Gunturkun observed a clear bias as about 65% of couples turned to the right while 35% of
couples turned to the left. Gunturkun also observed humans with a non-human kissing partner
(a mannequin head) to eliminate any possibility of non-verbal cues between partners and again
saw a right head turning bias of between 66% - 81% of individuals from Western cultures. This
observation as well as the observation of fetuses displaying lateral head preferences around 38
weeks of gestation were all used to support the hypothesis that two kissing adults would
display a right-turning head preference. This goal of this study was to see whether or not this
was true.

The research was conducted via 23 videos from YouTube involving 230 adult couples kissing.
These videos were viewed and observed, and coded; the initiation of the kiss being the point of
interest for the coding direction. The variables coded were the direction of the kiss (left, right,
centre or ambiguous) and the genders of the couples (man-woman, man-man, woman-
woman). Of the 230 couples, 4 resulted in ambiguous results, so 226 couples were successfully
observed in regards to their direction preference during kissing. From these 226 couples, nearly
a 1:1 ratio of right preference to left (48.2%) preference was observed (50.9%). This goes
against Gunturkun’s previous research as a right turn bias was seen, but in this case there was
no significant bias seen between the two directions. Some limitations of this study involve the
dynamics of the relationship between the couples. In Gunturkun’s case, couples were observed
in public but it can be assumed that many of these couples had an established relationship and
perhaps a “kissing routine.” In this study, videos of strangers kissing were observed online, in
these cases the two adults have little to no knowledge about their kissing partner nor really
know their partner’s kissing preferences which is why we may see right and left turning almost
equally. Another limitation is the editing of the videos, we do not know if the scenes were
flipped and if so that could also affect the perceived results.

In conclusion the research demonstrates that there is no significant directional turn bias
between two kissing non-romantic partners, unlike the right-turn bias that was consistently
seen between Western couples by Gunturkun.