A crowd does not need a leader to fall into step. In public spaces, people sort themselves into lanes, avoid collisions, and slip through bottlenecks with surprising ease. Now a new study suggests that when people move freely and turn, most lean in one direction: counterclockwise. That pattern appeared so consistently that it stopped being a curiosity and became the main story. Researchers from the University of Navarra in Spain, working with collaborators at the University of Tokyo in Japan, tested pedestrians in several settings to see whether turning behavior followed any clear rules. Across experiments in both countries, people showed a strong preference for turning counterclockwise rather than clockwise. The findings were published in Nature Communications. The project began during the COVID-19 pandemic, when scientists were studying how people move through shared spaces and how to preserve social distance of about 2 meters, or 6.6 feet. But while reviewing video from one experiment, the team noticed something unexpected. Taken from above, this annotated image shows a school ground in Spain and the motions of …