Finnish study on attitudes to social justice - surprising finding

[RoyalCorgi]

I came across this earlier. It's about a Finnish academic who developed a scale to measure how committed people were to social justice ideas. (He found that the more 'woke' you were, the more likely to be depressed, but leave that for one moment.) The scale for measuring wokeness included asking about attitudes towards race and transgender issues.

The study found that "critical social justice attitudes are not as widespread in Finland as might be inferred from public and media discussions. Overall, the findings suggested a cautious reception towards critical social justice among the general population. This observation was particularly pronounced among male participants, who showed considerably lower agreement with the statements compared to their female counterparts."

While three out of five women view "woke" ideas positively, only one out of seven men do.

I'm not completely surprised that people aren't as woke as you think (we all know about preference falsification) but I am a little surprised at the large difference between men and women.

https://www.psypost.org/study-woke-attitudes-linked-to-anxiety-depression-and-a-lack-of-happiness/

It's in a differernt language group. Scandinavian languages come from Old Norse, Finnish is from a differernt group and is more like Estonian.

It's considered Norse though, with the Scandinavian countries, IIRC.

I agree

This is an important point, efforts to tackle genuine social issues are mocked or unfairly labeled as "woke", and I would not be surprised if that kind of perception is worsened by the sort of transgender activism that disregards women's concerns based on their sex class.

I don't believe Brexit is an apt comparison here; women's rights campaigners expressing concerns about how transgender activism clashes with female rights are not motivated by racism or xenophobia, but it's hard to deny that some (or many, depending on one's social circles) supporters of Brexit were influenced by racist or xenophobic rhetoric.

It doesn’t surprise me re. Race. In this article here Finland came top in a survey of racist attitudes and attacks in the EU back in 2018 https://www.thenation.com/article/world/racism-finland-finns-party/tnamp/ And I’ve heard various other similar things.

I taught a bunch of EU kids in a residential summer camp , all rich kids if that makes a difference? And they were all very inclusive and open with each other and more generally, except the Finnish kids.

They very much were more insular and kept more to themselves than the others who were from Spain, Italy, Sweden, Norway and Denmark and mixed well . And there was an incident where one Finnish kid was cracking racist jokes. Obviously this is anecdotal evidence and I can’t make wider conclusions about a whole nation from my 3 week summer camp teaching experience alone, but there seems to be lots of evidence to suggest what I noticed was more representative of Finland.

I also worked for a local government which sent a visiting team over to Finland to check out some of their policies. One particularly non-woke member of staff came back and said she found it odd that they always made sure they had the whitest blondest people for all their Local government information posters etc and they seemed quietly but actively anti-diversity. As I said this wasn’t the most “woke” person and she happened to be blonde and blue eyes herself so it must’ve been quite obvious if even she had picked up on it.

https://www.euronews.com/2023/08/31/finnish-government-renounces-racism-after-a-summer-rocked-by-racist-scandals

Not that the political parties here haven’t had their own share of racism eg. Frank Hester comments on Dianne Abbot, but reading what some of Finlands leading ministers have said on social media is very shocking.

A woman who now the Finance Minister or at least was back in 2023 was said to have said this on Twitter in the past :

"Is anyone up for spitting on beggars and beating n**r children today in Helsinki?," she asked.
"I'm so full of hate and pure rage that I'm about to melt on my chair. Holy hell what are you doing to my psyche, Islam?" 'riikka' wrote in January 2008.
And in September 2008 'riikka' wrote "If I were given a gun, there would be dead bodies even on the commuter train."

The Finns' Party is full of racists, its what its well known for, yet people still vote them in under the mistaken belief that they are the party for the working classes then act surprised when they show that they don't care for workers at all and carry on being racists.

Finland is Nordic, along with the Scandinavian countries, but not Scandi because language and because only a small part is on the Scandinavian peninsular.

They very much were more insular and kept more to themselves than the others who were from Spain, Italy, Sweden, Norway and Denmark and mixed well .

From my observation of the jokes, memes and perhaps stereotypes the Finnish themselves put forth, there seems to be a culture of comparative insularity. During lockdown there were jokes about how it's easy for Finns to social distance because their preferred bubble of personal space has a 3 mile diameter.

I once knew a Finnish lady who had emigrated to the UK. She seemed quite sweet but she was very quiet.

Of course my observations have been very limited.

During lockdown there were jokes about how it's easy for Finns to social distance because their preferred bubble of personal space has a 3 mile diameter.

Well that’s one thing I’d get along with them on lol

I met two lovely friends who are Finnish in my 20s , I met them while they were studying in the UK. One of them who I’m still quite close with now currently lives in America.

She hasn’t explicitly said but I think before she went to America, she struggled being back in Finland for various reasons, especially as she tends to date interracially.

coureur
it is absolutely unremarkable to work with other women in roles from the deeply technical, to senior management. In the UK by contrast, I have customers without a single woman in the IT department, or if there are a couple they will be in non-technical roles. Perhaps this is where their mindset was?

Absolutely I think that's the case - but they couldn't see at all that that wasn't the case elsewhere even though the evidence and a woman telling them how hard it was was right in front of their eyes, or understand why my tiny tweak might help that (current IT dept in Asia 2 women out of 15 staff - even with my determination to hire more women)

Wow, everyone trotting out the same boring stereotypes and laying into the Finns now? We actually have a Finnish member of this board, who has actually contributed to the thread - wonder how she feels about this shit.

It's most closely related to Hungarian. They are both Finno-Ugric languages, and pretty unique (and very complicated regarding grammar).

Edited because auto-carrot dun its thing again

Thank you for the information about Finnish, I knew it was a very different language but thought Scandinavia was a geographical area rather than a linguistic one. I realise now I'm thinking of "Nordic"!

I thought that for ages too!

It also took me an embarrassingly long time to realise Denmark was part of Scandinavia.

And now I've read the word Scandinavia so many times it's beginning to look a bit odd.

It's most closely related to Hungarian.

Hungarian and Finnish are really not that closely related. Hungarian is in the same family (just as English, Bengali, Greek and Norwegian all are), but there's no hope of mutual comprehension. Hungarian might be the closest language with similar number of speakers, but far from the closest - it's the "other end" of the family.

Finnish is really close to Estonian, and a bunch of other minority languages used near Finland, including Sami and Livonian - Finns and Estonians could communicate (with some confusion over words whose meanings have shifted).

thought Scandinavia was a geographical area rather than a linguistic one

The whole thing is a bit fuzzy - it can be either, and I'm not sure which distinction came first - the language difference mirrors the geography. I suspect only pedants care :)

There's a town in northern Finland that uses "Capital of Northern Scandinavia" as an English marketing slogan. You occasionally see a pisstake of that calling it the "Capital of Western Siberia".

This echoes my experience of living and working in Finland with Finns in the noughties. Before I arrived there Finns warned me of the cultural differences, including the fact that they don't do smalltalk, and while they were making fun of themselves they were broadly accurate. People were friendly to meet and greet but I did spend several evenings out with colleagues sitting silently around dining tables. There were things said by apparently civilised, educated people about the Sami population and people of colour that would have been regarded as shockingly racist in the UK.

Finland's a big country with a relatively small population (around 5 million when I was there). It was Soviet-adjacent for years and is now obviously facing the Russian threat. As people have pointed out the Finnish language is unrelated to its neighbours. Factor in a climate that used to isolate communities for large chunks of the year until relatively recently and the influence of Lutheranism and it's fairly obvious why Finns aren't like the Italians, say.

It's both, the geographical area consists of Sweden, Norway, Denmark and a small part of Finland and of course the language connections of Swedish, Norwegian and Danish. The Nordic area is those three plus Finland and Iceland (and Estonia wants in the gang)

Curiously whilst Finland used to be at the top of the educational PISA tables, Estonia is up there now.

The whole quietness thing, Finns can be quiet with strangers but not with people they know. Certainly the guys in my school never fucking shut up

I have fond memories of the schools I visited. So relaxed when compared to the British system at that time — and yes, noisy! Another random observation: I remember being astonished at the huge quantities of incredibly strong black coffee most of the teachers drank. Rocket fuel. I learned very quickly to carry my own teabags. (I know, embarrassingly British, but my heart couldn't cope with all the caffeine).

I can't find the figures but it seems to be the case that when it comes to mixed marriages, there are far more white women married to black men than black women married to white men, which suggests that women are perhaps less racist than men.

If this is true it would be quite a leap to conclude that it was due to the racism of white men. It could just as easily suggest that black women are not interested in dating white men.

While three out of five women view "woke" ideas positively, only one out of seven men do.

I'm not completely surprised that people aren't as woke as you think (we all know about preference falsification) but I am a little surprised at the large difference between men and women.

I think Jordan Peterson has expressed this idea in the past in terms of women being (on average) more agreeable than men. He’s always got into so much trouble for saying such things.

But it does seem to go some way to explain why so many women are so eager to give away the rights of women and girls for the sake of a tiny minority of men.

I'm in a vocational school, adult class, but as noisy as the teenagers, chaotic at times. And yes, so much coffee! I keep a box of teabags for me and the one other tea drinker though.

Thanks so much for sharing. It's so important to take cultural/language/religious etc differences into consideration when talking about these topics.