Trigger warnings, popular on college campuses, are warnings offered in advance of potentially upsetting discussions or content, meant to minimize harm and offense. But they might have the exact opposite of their intended effect, according to a Harvard study released this month.
Harvard psychologists Payton Jones, Benjamin Bellet, and Richard McNally found that trigger warnings actually increased the self-reported anxiety of trauma survivors exposed to them. They found that:
While noting that trigger warnings originated in online discussion groups for survivors of sexual assault, the study indicated that they “are now used in educational settings, social media, entertainment, and other venues … [and] have also expanded in scope beyond sexual violence.”
The study, titled “Helping or Harming? The Effect of Trigger Warnings on Individuals with Trauma Histories,” drew its findings from a group of 451 trauma survivors who were randomly assigned “potentially distressing” passages from world literature with or without a trigger warning. After reading the passage, each trauma survivor was asked to report their emotional reactions to the passage.
Accordingly, the psychologists used self-reported anxiety as the main dependent variable in determining what emotional effect, if any, the trigger warning had on the trauma survivors.
The study found “no evidence that trigger warnings were helpful for trauma survivors, for those who self-reported a PTSD diagnosis, or for those who qualified for probable PTSD, even when survivors’ trauma matched the passages’ content.”
While the study explains that it is unclear whether trigger warnings are “explicitly harmful” in themselves, it concludes that they do not help trauma survivors in any discernible way.
“[B]ecause trigger warnings are consistently unhelpful,” the study concludes, “there is no evidence-based reason to use them.”
This study was a replication of a previous study conducted last year by the same psychologists on exclusively non-traumatized participants.
The 2018 study found that trigger warnings increase people’s perceived emotional vulnerability to trauma and their belief that trauma survivors are vulnerable. The study also found that trigger warnings increase anxiety to written material perceived as harmful, but do not affect people’s implicit self-identification as vulnerable or their subsequent anxiety response to less distressing content.
The Harvard psychologists’ findings in these two studies have been supported by additional research.
A March 2019 study conducted by researchers from the City University of New York and the University of Waikato found that trigger warnings had no effect on how much participants were bothered by troubling images and words, even for those with a history of trauma, according to Reason.
But despite the repeated findings that trigger warnings either have no effect on or hurt students, they remain popular with faculty on American college campuses.
In 2016, an NPR survey of non-elite university professors found that just over half of all 800 respondents used trigger warnings in class. Most reported that they incorporated the warnings of their own accord, and not upon student request or due to administrative requirements.
Troy Worden is a recent graduate in English and philosophy from the University of California, Berkeley, where he was president of the Berkeley College Republicans in 2017.
