A new study finds that being an extreme, left-wing, wokester is bad for your mental health.
Tell us something that isn’t completely obvious, won’t you?
The study, which is entitled “Construction and validation of a scale for assessing critical social justice attitudes,” was conducted by Oskari Lahtinen, a senior researcher at the INVEST Research Flagship Centre at the University of Turku. Lahtinen was amassing data on the prevalence of the “woke” worldview in Finland and the kinds of people who advocate for such views.
According to the journal PsyPost:
An intriguing aspect of the study was its exploration of the relationship between critical social justice and mental well-being. Lahtinen found a correlation between higher agreement with critical social justice attitudes and increased reports of anxiety and depression. Agreement with the statement “If white people have on average a higher income than black people, it is because of racism” exhibited the largest positive correlation with anxiety and depression, and the largest negative correlation with happiness.
However, these associations were more strongly correlated with participants’ political orientation than with critical social justice attitudes per se. Specifically, being on the political left was more predictive of lower mental well-being than high critical social justice scores alone. This suggests that the link between critical social justice attitudes and mental health is complex and may be mediated by broader political and ideological beliefs.
For her part, Lahtinen said that the woke ideology has been washing over Finland for years and she wanted to see what sort of effect it was having.
“This debate was largely data-free,” she pointed out, “and it could thus be considered a worthwhile question to study how prevalent these attitudes are. No reliable and valid instrument existed prior to the study to assess the extent and prevalence of these attitudes in different populations, so I set out to develop one.”
“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,” she said.
Her efforts led to a series of seven questions to detect the level of wokeness:
- “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)
- “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 her findings showed that women are more woke than men. But also, that those who accept wokeness are rife with anxiety and depression.
As I said in my headline, one is tempted to just say, “Well, DUH!” to this.
Liberalism has always been filled with hate, jealousy, and mental disorders.
Liberalism has always been a mental disorder. And “woke” is just liberalism’s latest bitter flavor.
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