Measurement tools developed for studying ‘woke’ attitudes on political left and right

Oskari Lahtinen, Senior Researcher at the INVEST Research Flagship Centre at the University of Turku in Finland, has developed validated tools for studying ‘woke’ attitudes on both the political left and the political right. In the study, higher levels of left-wing ‘woke’ attitudes were associated with greater acceptance of political violence.

 Senior Researcher Oskari Lahtinen created the first scale for measuring left-wing ‘woke’ attitudes two years ago. Until his recently published study, no research-based scale had been developed to measure ‘woke’ attitudes on the political right. 

“The term ‘woke right’ only really entered broader public discussion last spring, when the identity politics of the American right began to be analysed in mainstream media.  Until now, there has been no instrument to measure it. The scales I have developed and updated performed very effectively psychometrically in this study,” says Lahtinen.  

 To test the scales, Lahtinen conducted a survey study with more than 600 respondents from Finland. Due to the characteristics of the sample, the results of the study cannot be directly generalised to the Finnish population as a whole.  

 In his study, the respondents’ attitudes were examined from the perspectives of both critical social justice (commonly referred to as ‘woke’) and the critical right (‘woke right’). Lahtinen revised the scale he had developed for measuring critical social justice attitudes (CSJAS-R) two years ago and developed a completely new scale for measuring critical right-wing attitudes (CRS) alongside it.  

In Lahtinen’s study, all participants answered the same set of questions. Background variables included respondents’ self-placement on the left–right political spectrum. The scales made it possible to examine how different attitudes are distributed across political groups.  

 “Left-wing ‘woke’ attitudes were measured through questions about issues such as structural racism and safer spaces, while critical right-wing attitudes were assessed through questions about planned population replacement and perceived discrimination against white people in society,” explains Lahtinen.  

 The study has been published in the Scandinavian Journal of Psychology.  With the publication, both measurement scales are now openly available for use by other researchers.   

  “When we study a social phenomenon, the first step is to define it and create tools to measure it. The first studies using the ‘woke’ scale I developed two years ago have now begun to appear,” says Lahtinen, describing the need for such instruments.  

Study examined respondents’ attitudes in Finland 

 According to Lahtinen, the new data show a clear change in the relationship between left-wing ‘woke’ attitudes and acceptance of political violence compared to data collected two years earlier. In the current data, the ‘woke’ attitudes on the left had a weak to moderate correlation with whether a person considered violence against ‘politically dangerous’ individuals to be justified. Previously, such views were more strongly rejected.  

  “The correlation was 0.28. A value of 0.3 is usually considered the threshold for a moderate association. In this dataset, this represents a clear increase compared with three years ago,” says Lahtinen.   

  Right-wing ‘woke’ attitudes were defined in particular by respondents’ belief that the country’s population is being deliberately replaced. Overall, critical right-wing attitudes were only weakly associated with personally experienced feelings of oppression. This association was primarily characterised by the belief in population replacement, which was supported by the majority of respondents supporting the Finns Party in Finland. 

Participants were recruited through communication channels of the University of Turku, its Research Flagship Centre INVEST and, because of the newly developed scale, channels associated with right-leaning Finnish political actors in order to ensure a sufficiently large response base.   

>> Lahtinen Oskari (2026). Two Kinds of “Woke”? Psychometric Validation of the Critical Right Scale and Revised Critical Social Justice Attitudes Scale. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology.