Impact of cultural pressures on self-reports of actual and approved hand use

A total of 389 Nigerian undergraduates completed 60-item handedness questionnaires requiring them either to indicate which hand they would prefer to use or which hand they thought should be used by people generally to perform each task. Results indicated minimal differences between Muslim and Christian students for personal hand preference, but that Muslims were more strongly insistent upon use of the right hand by people generally for the majority of tasks. Factor analyses of both sets of data identified factors relating both to the nature of the activities themselves and to social conformity pressures.