More "woke people are unhappy" pseudoscience

Political psychology continues to suffer from the usual empirical problems.

Photo by David Matos on Unsplash

Political science literature, particularly in the past few years, has produced a growing body of studies and surveys that demonstrate variations on the same basic theme: liberals are unhappy. In late 2022, for example, a survey by Brigham Young University showed that 15% fewer liberals than conservatives said they were “completely happy with life”. Another study published around the same time in SSM - Mental Health showed that liberals had higher depressive affect scores that conservatives. And today, a new study in the Scandinavian Journal of Psychology by Oskari Lahtin is making the rounds showing that “woke people are more likely to be unhappy, anxious, and depressed.”

The main consequence of studies like this, as far as I can tell, has simply been to launch a politicized debate over their implications. The right reads them as an indictment of wokeness, either arguing that wokeness is making people irrationally unhappy or that being irrational makes people woke; the liberal-left, meanwhile, typically replies that unhappiness is an appropriate response to an unequal and unjust world.

What consistently strikes me about this research, however, is its persistent disinterest in the rigors of formulation and empirical description that define the natural sciences.