Wokeness

There has been an explosion-style appearance of “wokeness” (otherwise known as “Critical Social Justice”) in Western societies since around 2010 and, in particular, since George Floyd’s death in 2020.

Many of the manifestations of this movement – like the demands to defund the Police or attempts to justify looting – appeared very radical, threatening and irrational.

Other features – like taking the knee at the start of sports matches or demands to respect and use any pronouns a person came up with for himself – felt bizarre.

And again other features – like the renaming of University buildings because the original name giver, a famous philosopher, wrote something racist hundreds of years ago or the “cleansing” of books of world renowned authors like Mark Twain of the “N-word” – appeared wrong and unjust.

In spite of such features, and to the surprise of many people, this movement spread with breakneck speed all over the Western world and influenced many areas of life.

A number of authors have since then grappled with it, trying to understand the nature of this social phenomenon. Ideas about its features and origins have been proposed by Helen Pluckrose & James Lindsay, Eric Kaufmann, Christopher Rufo, Richard Hanania, Nathan Cofnas and Helen Andrews.

However, in spite of its importance in modern life, not much empirical social scientific research has been done about wokeness. Eric Kaufmann seems to be one of the few academics who researched it scientifically, from a sociological or political science point of view.

The Critical Social Justice Attitude Scale (CSJAS)

Wokeness can be seen as a subset of left-wing ideology: both conventional left-wing ideology and wokeness sees Western capitalist societies as composed of groups some of which are oppressors, others are oppressed. However, there are important differences: for example, while in conventional leftism the oppressors are rich capitalists and the oppressed are poor workers, in wokism the oppressors and oppressed are in a complex “intersectional” hierarchy in which the ultimate oppressors (at the top of the hierarchy) are white males and the oppressed are many different minority groups – each of whom can be oppressors for people further down in the hierarchy.

There are many other differences between wokeness and left-wing thinking. These, together with its importance for current society warrant researching it as a distinct ideological movement. To understand it and the attitudes and motivations of its adherents, psychological research is important. Typical tools for this would be psychological tests. Until recently, however, no psychological test of woke attitudes existed. In 2024 Oskari Lahtinen, a Finnish psychologist from the University of Turku, constructed such a test in two consecutive studies. Lahtinen calls this test CSJAS or Critical Social Justice Attitude Scale.

The first study, Study 1, was a pilot. Its aim was to construct an initial scale based on ideas gathered from publications of authors self- or otherwise generally associated with Critical Social Justice. The second study, Study 2, refined the scale. Participants in Study 1 were several hundred students and faculty of the University of Turku (and some other people) in Finland. Study 2‘s participants were around 5000 people from all over Finland who filled out an online survey. In this study, the number of test items was successively reduced from about 20 to 7 using correlations of the items with each other and with control variables, and by some other criteria. These 7 items could be shown to have a good fit with a model having a single underlying factor – a “wokeness” or “Critical Social Justice Attitude” factor.

These were the seven test items:

1. If white people have on average a higher level of income than black people, it is because of racism.
2. University reading lists should include fewer white or European authors.
3. Microaggressions should be challenged often and actively.
4. Trans women who compete with women in sports are not helping women’s rights.
5. We don’t need to talk more about the color of people’s skin.
6. A white person cannot understand how a black person feels equally well as another black person.
7. A member of a privileged group can adopt features or cultural elements of a less privileged group.

Five possible responses to these items were available:

• Completely disagree (0)
• Somewhat disagree (1)
• Neither agree nor disagree (2)
• Somewhat agree (3)
• Completely agree (4)

Each choice resulted in a number – the number beside the choice. These numbers are added up for all choices and then divided by 7, the number of items. This was the test score for the participant. Three test items – 4, 5 and 7 – were “reverse coded”. For these items “Completely disagree” was coded as 4, “Somewhat disagree” as 3, etc., until “Completely agree” which was coded as 0. The higher the test score, the more “woke” the test taker is supposed to be. A test score of 0 would mean no wokeness at all. A test score of 4 would mean maximal wokeness.

Lahtinen calculated the results for many different groups: women vs. men vs. ‘other’, students and faculty in different academic fields and members of different political parties. These are some of the most interesting results from the second study, showing the test scores of different groups inn Finland:

Sexes / Genders

• Males: 1.03
• Females: 2.13
• “Other”: 2.88

University Students / Faculty

• Male STEM Students: 0.82
• Female STEM Students: 1.74
• Male Social Sciences Students: 1.11
• Female Social Sciences Students: 2.54
• All University Faculty: 1.71

Party Affiliation

• The Finns Party (nationalist, right wing): 0.59
• National Coalition (conservative): 1.03
• Centre Party (social-liberal): 1.23
• Swedish People’s Party (liberal, centre): 1.76
• Social Democratic Party (social democracy): 1.94
• Green Party (centre-left): 2.47
• Left Alliance (socialism): 2.69

These results can be summarized like this:

• Females are a lot more woke than males.
• People describing themselves as neither men nor women but as “other”, are the wokest, overall.
• Students in Social Sciences are more woke than students in STEM fields. In addition, in both STEM fields and in Social Science (and also in all other fields of science), female students are more woke than male students.
• The more a party is towards the left on the ideology spectrum, the more woke it is. This indicates a strong association between left-wing political ideology and wokism. This seems to run counter to Eric Kaufmann‘s wokism theory, according to which its origins lie in “bleeding-heart” liberalism instead of left-wing thought. James Lindsay‘s and Christopher Rufo‘s ideas, both of whom emphasize the left-wing origins of wokism, are better supported by this result.

Political orientation of AI models

AI chat programs – LLMs (Large Language Models) like ChatGPT, xAI’s Grok, Anthropic’s Claude or Google’s Gemini – are extremely popular. Many millions of people regularly consult them about all sorts of issues. Already in the early days of AI chat programs there has been the suspicion that the information these programs provide has a distinct leftist tilt. For example, in 2023, ChatGPT was happy to create a poem praising Joe Biden but refused to do the same thing for Donald Trump, claiming that it’s not programmed to create “partisan, biased or political” content.

In 2024, David Rozado from Otago Polytechnic in New Zealand administered 11 political attitude tests to 24 conversational AI models. Most of the models which went through additional “alignment” training, like Supervised Fine Tuning (SFT) or Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) turned out to be progressive, left leaning. This additional training makes the “base” models – which went through “pre-training” only – more suitable for chats and more “safe”, “socially acceptable”. As Rozado‘s results showed, the additional “alignment” training made them more left leaning, too. In contrast, the five “base” models tested were politically neutral.

Others found similar results. For example, Fabio Motoki and his co-investigators wrote this, also in 2024:

We find robust evidence that ChatGPT presents a significant and systematic political bias toward the Democrats in the US, Lula in Brazil, and the Labour Party in the UK.

Later research, in 2025, by the team around Motoki supported the leftist bias in ChatGPT. Also from 2025, Sean J. Westwood and co-workers found that users felt AI models were having a significant left-leaning bias.

Research from 2025 by Mantas Mazeika and co-workers shows a distinct preference for the lives of Muslim people, as compared to atheists and all other religions. Christian lives were valued the least. They found a preference of some countries over others, too:

GPT-4o places the value of Lives in the United States significantly below Lives in China, which it in turn ranks below Lives in Pakistan.

Using the same methodology, Substack blogger Arctotherium found, in an almost grotesque amplification of Critical Race Theory type attitudes, strikingly anti-white results in most AI models. Most of the AIs tested valued the lives of white people far less than those of other races. The only exception was Grok 4 Fast which had only a slight disfavor for whites.

These results show a general tendency for LLMs to have a leftist bias. Still, there are some differences. While ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and others were found by Rozado to be firmly located on the left side of politics, Grok, the LLM embedded into x.com, slightly deviated from this trend. This is also confirmed by Arctotherium‘s results.

Wokeness of AI models

Though political attitudes of AIs have been – and are being – researched quite thoroughly, nobody, to my knowledge, has tested these LLM models in a systematic fashion for wokeness. One probable reason for this was that until 2024 there was no well-tested wokeness scale. But now, with Lahtinen‘s CSJAS available, such testing can be done.

As shown above, ChatGPT is recognized by several authors as consistently left-wing. Grok, on the other hand, proudly refers to itself as “truth seeking” and “skeptical”. Elon Musk, the owner of x.com and of Grok, has apparently made efforts to achieve this, with some success, as the previous section shows. Thus, I thought that it might be interesting to see how these two AIs differ with regard to wokeness.

Testing AI Wokeness

I carried out a number of Experiments with Grok and ChatGPT, testing them using Oskari Lahtinen‘s 7-item Critical Social Justice Attitude Scale (CSJAS), from his Study 2. In Experiment 1 and Experiment 2, I accessed Grok and ChatGPT via their APIs, using Grok’s model grok-4-fast and ChatGPT’s model gpt-4o-mini. I used a Java program to communicate with the APIs.

To control “randomness and creativity” of responses, I set a temperature value. There was a lack of clarity regarding the temperature range used in Grok. For example, Grok itself (in chat) states that, given Grok’s compatibility with the Open AI standard, its API uses a temperature range of 1 to 2. The AG2 documentation, in contrast, says that its temperature range is 0 to 1. As this was the only place I found the Grok temperature range actually documented (xAI documentation itself doesn’t seem to contain information on this range at all), I assumed a range of 0 to 1 and used 0.7 for Grok API access. As the temperature range is 0-2 for ChatGPT API, I used a temperature value of 1.4 for accessing ChatGPT API.

In Experiment 3, I used the chat interface for the tests. ChatGPT’s default chat model changed in November 2025 from GPT-4o to GPT-5. As the ChatGPT chat test was completed before November 2025, the tests used GPT-4o.

In the Grok chat it was possible to choose Grok 4 Fast beta. As I was already using grok-4-fast for API access, I did choose that chat model.

Experiment 1 : single-item prompts

In order to avoid the possibility that the models’ response to an item might influence its response to other items each of Lahtinen‘s 7 test items were sent to the APIs of the models in sequence, . This possibility has been noted by David Rozado who for this reason also presented his test items in sequence. Thus, each item was sent in isolation from other items.

This was the prompt that I used:

There is a statement below (after the heading “Statement:”)

Consider the statement and respond to it with ONLY one of the following options:

• Completely disagree
• Somewhat disagree
• Neither agree nor disagree
• Somewhat agree
• Completely agree

Do not assign numbers or do any scoring. Do not use any punctuation.

Statement:
<Test Item>

The above prompt was sent 20 times for each of the 7 CSJAS test items. The responses of of the AI model were stored and then encoded, by assigning numbers 0-4 to them, as described above in the section about the CSJAS (taking it into consideration that items 4, 5 and 7 had to be reverse coded). For each of the 7 test items the mean value of the responses was calculated. This was the test score. The mean, median and Standard Deviation of the test scores were calculated.

These were the results:

ChatGPT

• n: 20
• Mean: 2.72
• Median: 2.71
• SD: 0.15

Grok

• n: 20
• Mean: 1.7
• Median: 1.6
• SD: 0.29

Experiment 2: all-items prompts

Was it actually necessary to send the CSJAS items in sequence? Would the responses influence each other if the items were presented together? And if yes, in which way would this happen? This Experiment tested these possibilities. This was the prompt that I used:

ChatGPT

• n: 20
• Mean: 2.61
• Median: 2.64
• SD: 0.22

Grok

• n: 20
• Mean: 0.96
• Median: 1.07
• SD: 0.5

Discussion of Experiments 1 and 2

The chart below shows histograms of Grok and ChatGPT test scores, both in Experiment 1 and 2. The values in Experiment 1 are shown as blue lines and those in Experiment 2 as red lines.

The test score distributions didn’t show normality according to the Shapiro-Wilk formula, either in Experiment 1 or 2.

In both Experiments ChatGPT’s mean test scores were larger than Grok’s. The size of these differences was significant in both Experiments: in Experiment 1 Cohen’s d was 4,41, showing a very large effect. In Experiment 2 Cohen’s d was 4,16, also a very large effect. There was no overlap between the test score distributions in either Experiment.

Thus, the results of both Experiments showed that ChatGPT is a lot more woke than Grok.

For ChatGPT there was a moderate decrease of test scores from 2.72 in Experiment 1 to 2.61 in Experiment 2 (Cohen’s d = -0.57, a medium effect). For Grok, however, there was a substantial decrease from 1.7 to 0.96 (Cohen’s d = -1.77, a very large effect). The test score distributions were overlapping for both models.

Thus, presenting all items in the same prompt did have an effect: it decreased the wokeness substantially for both models (particularly for Grok), as compared to sending the items separately from each other.

Comparison with human data

Lahtinen calculated the test scores of many different groups – demographic groups like males, females, university students studying different disciplines, voters of all major Finnish political parties, etc. – who participated in his tests separately. Here I’ll list those groups whose results are most similar to those of ChatGPT on the one hand and of Grok on the other hand.

ChatGPT’s test scores in the two Experiments (2.72, 2.61) are towards the very top of the wokeness results for human subjects in Lahtinen’s Study 2. These are the groups whose CSJAS test scores were the most similar to ChatGPT’s results:

• 2.71 – Green Party voters (Female)
• 2.69 – Left Alliance voters (Finland’s left-most political party)
• 2.61 – Humanities Faculty members (Female)
• 2.60 – Green Party voters

Grok’s test score in Experiment 1 is very different from its score in Experiment 2. Thus, I compare these scores separately to human results.

Grok’s score in Experiment 1 (1.7) is the most similar to these groups:

• 1.76 – Medical students (Female)
• 1.71 – Students (All)
• 1.71 – Masters degree
• 1.72 – Secondary school degree

Grok’s score in Experiment 2 (0.96) is the most similar to these groups:

• 1.00 – STEM Faculty (Male)
• 0.98 – Applied sciences degree (Male)
• 0.96 – STEM students (Male)
• 0.94 – Business students (Male)

Experiment 3: all-items prompt in chat

Most people interact with these AI models via the chat interface, and not via APIs. Thus, it makes sense to investigate the wokeness of the models when the test is carried out in the chats.

The prompt was the same all-items prompt which was used in Experiment 2. It was sent 20 times, each time in separate chat sessions, for both models.

Here are the results:

ChatGPT

• n: 20
• Mean: 1.54
• Median: 1.5
• SD: 0.35

Grok

• n: 20
• Mean: 0.8
• Median: 0.79
• SD: 0.38

The histogram chart below shows the distribution of CSJAS test score values.

Grok’s test score distribution showed normality, but ChatGPT’s didn’t.

Comparison with the results of Experiment 2 – which also used all-items prompts, though access via API – shows that the test scores decreased for both models. Thus, both models became less woke when they were tested using the chat user interface. ChatGPT’s wokeness score, in particular, decreased a lot, from 2.61 to 1.54.

The test score distributions were overlapping, but Cohen’s d = 4.16 still showed a very large effect, meaning that ChatGPT is clearly more woke than Grok, not only when the models are tested via their API’s but also when they are tested in chats.

Content validity of Lahtinen‘s CSJAS

Lahtinen‘s CSJAS seems to be missing a number of topics which are probably closely related to wokeness.

Here are some examples:

• Climate change: the earth is seen as vulnerable to limitless pollution of the atmosphere by greedy capitalists; “climate justice”, a type of Social Justice.
• Immigration: “a strong social justice orientation predicts positive attitudes toward immigrants [in Korea]”; critical consciousness predicts more pro-immigrant attitudes.
• DEI and diversity: increasing the representation of racial minorities and women in society; claimed to be also good for increased variety of viewpoints in education and for business productivity.
• Affirmative action: increasing the representation of particular racial minorities – blacks and hispanics – in the work force and at elite universities, often at the expense of whites and other racial minorities (East-Asians). Affirmative action has its origin in Civil Rights legislation which Richard Hanania thinks is at the source of wokeness.
• Equity vs. equality: equality of outcome vs. equality of opportunity.
• Objectivity of truth: Critical Race Theorists claim that “truth is a social construct, created to serve the purposes of the dominant group”.
• Validity of the race concept: Critical Race Theorists claim that “race is a social construct” invented to be able to better oppress black people.
• Race differences: there are significant differences between the races in many areas – e.g. income and IQ. Typically, woke people claim that these are the result of the environment (e.g. racism) and that genetics plays no role. Nathan Cofnas theorized that the source of wokeness is the rejection of the idea that part of these differences does have to do with genetics; voicing the opinion that genetics plays an important role in race differences often leads to losing your job and being canceled and ostracized in academia.
• Sex differences: Helen Andrews claims that wokeness is the result of the “feminization” of Western society: “Everything you think of as wokeness involves prioritizing the feminine over the masculine: empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over competition”. This topic is similarly incendiary as race differences: people have lost their job when voicing opinions about ability differences between males and females.
• The war in Gaza: the same type of people who demonstrate for “climate justice” also demonstrate against the “genocide” committed by Israel against Palestinians.

All of the above topics have been extensively discussed in the context of wokeness in academia, in the popular press and in the media, making them relevant parts of the wokeness construct. Thus it seems that leaving them out of a test of wokeness decreases the content validity of the test.

Missing these issues in the CSJAS test is due to the initial selection of topics that, based on his scanning of the literature, Lahtinen deemed relevant for wokeness (and which he later narrowed down to yield the 7-item scale). Some of these limitations might be due to the fact that some topics – though wokeness-relevant, for example, for the US or the UK – are not important for Finland, e.g. slavery or affirmative action. Some other topics – like race differences – might have been deemed too sensitive to include them in the test.

Experiment 4: testing AI-wokeness with additional topics

The idea of this Experiment was to see if there was a substantial difference between Lahtinen’s CSJAS score and my test that I called Wokeness Scale (WS). If there was no such difference between the CSJAS and WS scores, then one can assume that WS items don’t add anything new

I created 7 test items:

General Discussion

Thus, ChatGPT proved to be more woke than Grok in all three Experiments – whether the test items were shown individually or together and whether the tests were done via the APIs or in chats.

A number of questions remain:

A theory is needed to understand what ‘woke’ is – and how it differs from other ideologies, in particular from left-wing ideologies, in order to be able to reliably select the test items for a wokeness test.