A study from Finland found that those who adhere to “woke” attitudes and beliefs are more likely to experience depression, anxiety, and an absence of happiness in life.
A paper published last week in the Scandinavian Journal of Psychology announced the development of a new psychological assessment that measures woke beliefs, or “critical social justice attitudes” (CSJA).
Its creator is Oskari Lahtinen, a senior researcher at the INVEST Research Flagship Centre at the University of Turku. Lahtinen wrote that while other researchers have found a correlation between CSJA and “poorer mental well-being in their work implicitly,” they have not set out to directly study them.
The author describes critical social justice as having a focus on various group identities that view themselves as victims of systemic inequality and marginalization, a perception that has greatly influenced “academia, politics, and everyday life.”
Lahtinen notes:
This particular orientation towards social justice — often associated with concepts like intersectionality, antiracism, and, colloquially, “wokeness” — has been both lauded for its recognition of systemic barriers faced by marginalized groups and critiqued for its approach to identity and free speech.
Lahtinen conducted two large studies with a combined 5,878 participants. He developed a pilot scale in the first study, then used it to create the final scale in the second study.
The studies not only assessed the quality of the scale itself, and its ability to meet reliability and validity criteria. They also assessed the prevalence of CSJAs in various populations and the scale’s correlations with other variables, including anxiety, depression, and happiness, as measured by other psychological assessments.
Both studies found that “having high CSJAS scores was linked to anxiety, depression, and a lack of happiness.”
Lahtinen explained his second study “indicated that this lower level of mental well-being was mostly associated with being on the political left and not specifically with having a high CSJAS score.”
“The association between lower mental health and supporting the political left is in line with what other studies have found prior to this one,” he said.
“Critical social justice attitudes were somewhat prevalent in women, but not so much in men,” he observed. “Men rejected all but one item in the final CSJA scale, whereas women were cautiously supportive of scale items.”
“People who supported left-wing parties and female university students in social sciences, education, and humanities, as well as people with ‘other’ gender, were the most in support of the scale items,” the researcher found.
The seven items on the final scale are:
- “If white people have on average a higher level of income than black people, it is because of racism.”
- “University reading lists should include fewer white or European authors.”
- “Microaggressions should be challenged often and actively.”
- “Trans* women who compete with women in sports are not helping women’s rights.” (reverse scored) (* = born male, identify as female)
- “We don’t need to talk more about the color of people’s skin.”
- “A white person cannot understand how a black person feels equally well as another black person.”
- “A member of a privileged group can adopt features or cultural elements of a less privileged group.” (reverse scored)
Lahtinen said he grew interested in developing such a scale because he had been “paying attention to a development in American universities, where a new discourse on social justice became prevalent in the 2010s,” PsyPost reported.
“While critical social justice (or intersectional or ‘woke’) discourse draws mainly from dynamics within American society it has now surfaced in other Western countries as well,” he said. “The arrival of a critical social justice (often called ‘woke’) discourse sparked much debate in Finnish media in the last couple of years.”
Nevertheless, no empirical data had been collected about the effects of such woke attitudes and beliefs, despite their pervasiveness.
“[I]t could thus be considered a worthwhile question to study how prevalent these attitudes are,” he said. “No reliable and valid instrument existed prior to the study to assess the extent and prevalence of these attitudes in different populations.”
He told PsyPost:
The studies were quite robust with a sample size above 5,000 and good psychometric properties. However, the scale would need to be validated in North American samples in order to know how these attitudes manifest there. I encourage colleagues in the United States to study the prevalence of these attitudes in the country where they originate from.
