Geography Linked to Circle Drawing

The way a person draws a circle has been tied to where they come from.

If you want to do the experiment before reading, simply draw a circle with your finger, or use a pen and paper if you have them handy.

Americans, Brits, Czech, Australian and Finnish people draw their circles starting from the top and in a counterclockwise motion 80% of the time. In France, German, and the Philippines, 90%. Meanwhile in Japan 80% of circles are drawn the opposite way (from the bottom and counterclockwise). Around 55% for Chinese.

The research was done by Quartz, using data from Google's online "Quick, Draw!" game (which had 120k unique circles for them to study). Quartz doesn't know what the reason behind the standardized circle-drawing is, but they guess it might have to do with the way people in these countries learn to write.

They looked at triangle-drawing, too. Almost 100% of Taiwanese and 90% of Japanese and Korean triangles (which are also drawn with only one stroke) are drawn with counterclockwise. In the U.S., it was only a bit more than half the time.