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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   31238 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022

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Good news everyone! We now have a formal, scientific scale for measuring wokeness! You can find the related preprint here.

Finland's newspaper of record, Helsingin Sanomat (HS) summarizes the meaning of "wokeness" (it's called "woke" in Finnish too, using the untranslated term - of course, it's an Anglo concept, after all).

In Finnish, woke means being awake, but it could also be translated as awareness.

Its supporters think it's relevant, and opponents think it's too sensitive to see things like racism, sexism and discrimination against gender minorities around.

There are two other English terms associated with the phenomenon: cancel and callout culture. Both mean actively intervening in the politically questionable activities or writings of others, for example on social media. Cancellation takes the interference up to a boycott of the person.

UNIVERSITY OF TURKU psychology researcher Oskari Lahtinen has developed a psychological meter that can be used to study the prevalence of woke attitudes. In his research, he calls them attitudes of social justice.

The research is now in a peer-reviewed scientific publication. You can read the preview version on the Psyarxiv service .

"I have been interested in how common such attitudes are in Finland," says Lahtinen.

"I take a small risk when I study the woke phenomenon, because people have really strongly differing opinions and strong feelings about it."

Later on some unsurprising results:

Lahtinen was not surprised that the strongest woke attitudes were in the humanities and social sciences, but the rise of psychology in his own field came as a nice surprise.

Among the students, the highest woke scores were obtained by psychology and social sciences students.

Natural science students, on the other hand, got the lowest scores on the scale. On average, they pretty clearly disagree with the woke claims.

AMONG THE UNIVERSITY staff, clearly the highest woke scores were in the humanities. Business scholars received the lowest scores. Those in the fields of natural sciences and medicine ranked in the middle, but they also disagreed with the woke claims on average.

Some other fields had so few respondents that the results are not reliable, according to Lahtinen.

It also turned out that in the entire material, women had stronger social justice attitudes than men based on the measure.

THE PARTICIPANTS also answered questions measuring anxiety, depression and happiness.

Those with high woke scores had more anxiety and depression than others. They were also less happy.

"It was interesting because this was the case regardless of whether the person had experiences of being oppressed themselves. The mere fact that you have such a worldview meant that you were also more depressed and anxious," says Lahtinen.

The differences in well-being were really big. Students with high wake scores had 71 percent more anxiety, 39 percent more depression, and almost seven percent less happiness than those with low wake scores.

HS has used this study to create an (intentionally facile) wokeness test. I'm linking to the original Finnish version, Google Translate couldn't get it to work. It's below the researcher guy's picture, clicking "Näytä lisää" will expand it. "Täysin samaa mieltä" means "Fully agree", "Jokseenkin samaa mieltä" means "Somewhat agree", "Jokseenkin eri mieltä" is "Somewhat disagree" and "Täysin eri mieltä" means "Fully disagree". The max score is 30.

The claims are:

  1. Human species has two biological genders.

  2. Trans women are women.

  3. It is not right to limit a privileged person's right to speech.

  4. Trans women in Olympics do not advance women's rights.

  5. One should not say things that might offend a disadvantaged person's feelings.

  6. We don’t need to talk more about the color of people’s skin.

  7. University reading lists should include fewer white and European authors.

  8. The police are by definition a racist institution.

  9. If white people have on average a higher level of income than black people, it is because of oppression.

  10. A white person cannot understand how a black person feels.

Human species has two biological genders.

You translated this from Finnish - does the original use a Finnish equivalent of "genders" here? Is any clarification offered in the original scale what they mean here? I can imagine people answering differently with slightly altered forms of the question:

  • The human species has two biological sexes.

  • The human species has only two biological sexes.

  • The human species has two genders.

  • The human species has only two genders.

Even if the original Finnish uses the equivalent of "gender" as opposed to "sex" without clarification, then it ends up functioning as a measure of wokeness more by being a shibboleth test than by being a good measure of underlying attitudes. English in particular uses "gender" euphemistically for "sex" in a lot of contexts, and it's only a small group of initiated individuals who make a strong sex-gender distinction in the first place.

Which other language than the English of the last few decades has separate words for the two? It's not that "oh in Finnish both translate to the same word" but that the distinction was made up recently in English (where they used to be synonyms, gender being a euphemism). When other languages need the distinction they have to loan the English word.

Croatian has one word for sex (male or female; a different word is used for coitus) and another for grammatical gender. I've seen some left-wing politicians use the word for grammatical gender like the word for sex, for example, talking about "gender discrimination".

A few years ago there was a controversy in Croatia regarding the adoption of the Istanbul Convention, an international treaty "Preventing and Combating Violence Against Women and Domestic Violence". The treaty mentions "gender", which some right-wing politicians interpreted as promoting homosexuality or something. It was eventually adopted and nothing of note has happened.

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