15/08/2022, 11:36 What if Trigger Warnings Don’t Work?

| The New Yorker

Our Columnists

What if Trigger Warnings

Don’t Work?
New psychological research suggests that trigger warnings do
not reduce negative reactions to disturbing material—and
may even increase them.

By Jeannie Suk Gersen

September 28, 2021

Illustration by Nicholas Konrad/The New Yorker

arlier this year, Brandeis University’s Prevention, Advocacy, and Resource

E Center released a “Suggested Language List,” developed by “students who
have been impacted by violence and students who have sought out advanced
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training for intervening in potentially violent situations.” The students’

purpose, they wrote, was “to remove language that may hurt those who have
experienced violence from our everyday use.” They proposed avoiding the
idioms “killing it,” “take a stab at,” and “beating a dead horse.” I was struck that
one of the phrases they recommended avoiding was “trigger warning,” and that
the proffered explanation was sensible: “ ‘warning’ can signify that something is
imminent or guaranteed to happen, which may cause additional stress about the
content to be covered. We can also never guarantee that someone will not be
triggered during a conversation or training; people’s triggers vary widely.”

Trigger warnings started to appear frequently on feminist Web sites in the early
two thousands, as a way to warn readers of fraught topics like sexual assault,
child abuse, and suicide, on the theory that providing warnings would reduce
the risk of readers experiencing symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, or
P.T.S.D. Their use steadily increased online, particularly on social media.
College students who were accustomed to seeing trigger warnings on the
Internet began asking their instructors to provide them in class. In 2014,
Oberlin College produced a trigger-warning policy as part of its Sexual Offense
Resource Guide, advising faculty members to “understand triggers, avoid
unnecessary triggers, and provide trigger warnings.” It claimed that a trigger,
defined as something that “recalls a traumatic event to an individual,” would
“almost always disrupt a student’s learning and may make some students feel
unsafe in your classroom.” For example, “Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart is
a triumph of literature that everyone in the world should read. However, it may
trigger readers who have experienced racism, colonialism, religious persecution,
violence, suicide, and more.” Oberlin dropped the policy after receiving
pushback from faculty, some of whom argued that the list of triggers was
potentially endless.

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Yet many academics embraced the use of trigger warnings. The philosopher
Kate Manne explained, in a 2015 Times Op-Ed, that “the point is not to enable
—let alone encourage—students to skip these readings or our subsequent class
discussion (both of which are mandatory in my courses, absent a formal
exemption). Rather, it is to allow those who are sensitive to these subjects to
prepare themselves for reading about them, and better manage their reactions.”
She wrote that exposing students to triggering material without trigger
warnings seemed “akin to occasionally throwing a spider at an arachnophobe,”
which would impede rather than enable the rational state of mind needed for
learning. By 2016, an NPR poll of eight hundred college and university
teachers showed that half of those surveyed had used trigger warnings in their
teaching. Since then, trigger warnings have become culturally mainstream well
beyond classrooms: last month, the Globe Theatre, in London, forewarned its
audiences of “upsetting” themes in “Romeo and Juliet,” including suicide and
drug use.

Whatever individual instructors might do in their courses, universities have not

typically adopted official policies on trigger warnings. But the University of
Michigan does provide its teachers a guide to trigger warnings within its
resources on “planning for inclusive classrooms.” The guide urges instructors to
design course content “with common triggers in mind” and offers examples of
“tags” that teachers might provide on syllabi, including “death or dying,”
“pregnancy/childbirth,” “miscarriages/abortion,” “blood,” “animal cruelty or
animal death,” and “eating disorders, body hatred, and fat phobia.” The
university tells teachers that “it is appropriate” to say to students: “If you have
concerns about encountering anything specific in the course material that I
have not already tagged and would like me to provide warnings, please come
see me or send me an email. I will do my best to flag any requested triggers for
you in advance.” When I read this, I pictured instructors attempting to comply
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with this advice by keeping color-coded tabs on individual students’ triggers in

their teaching notes. In the event that teachers “miss flagging content that a
student may identify as triggering,” they are told to “apologize sincerely to the
student, assure them that you will try to do better, and ask for any clarification.”

As a law professor teaching criminal, constitutional, and family law—subjects

that involve topics such as homicide, sexual assault, racial discrimination, guns,
domestic violence, abortion, divorce, and child abuse—I know from experience
that many students have endured very challenging life and family experiences
that may not be apparent to others. As a result, my introduction to any course
includes a statement that it will delve into many of the most controversial and
difficult issues in our society, ones that may personally affect the lives of people
in the class, and that all discussions must be conducted with respect for one
another. I don’t frame my statements as addressing triggers, and I don’t flag
particular readings or discussions, apart from the fact that a course unit may
already have a heading: “Homicide,” “Sexual Assault,” “Segregation,” or
“Divorce,” for example. (Of course, any student with a disability—including
mental illnesses such as P.T.S.D.—may seek appropriate accommodations
through the school’s disability office.) Since trigger warnings began to appear
on syllabi, I’ve been troubled by uncertainty about whether students benefit
from them. Like the Brandeis students, I’ve wondered, Is warning students that
they are about to be traumatized or re-traumatized likely to decrease or increase
the stress they feel?

Because trigger warnings involve assumptions about emotional reactions,

particularly with respect to P.T.S.D., psychology researchers have begun to
study whether trigger warnings are in fact beneficial. The results of around a
dozen psychological studies, published between 2018 and 2021, are remarkably
consistent, and they differ from conventional wisdom: they find that trigger
warnings do not seem to lessen negative reactions to disturbing material in
students, trauma survivors, or those diagnosed with P.T.S.D. Indeed, some
studies suggest that the opposite may be true. The first one, conducted at
Harvard by Benjamin Bellet, a Ph.D. candidate, Payton Jones, who completed

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his Ph.D.
D. in 2021, and Richard McNally, a psychology professor and the
author of “Remembering
“Remembering Trauma,”
Trauma,” found that, among people who said they
believe that words can cause harm, those who received trigger warnings
reported greater anxiety in response to disturbing literary passages than those
who did not. (The study found that, among those who do not strongly believe
words can cause harm, trigger warnings did not significantly increase anxiety.)
Most of the flurry of studies that followed found that trigger warnings had no
meaningful effect, but two of them found that individuals who received trigger
warnings experienced more distress than those who did not. Yet another study
suggested that trigger warnings may prolong the distress of negative memories.
A large study by Jones, Bellet, and McNally found that trigger warnings
reinforced the belief on the part of trauma survivors that trauma was central
(rather than incidental or peripheral) to their identity. The reason that effect
may be concerning is that trauma researchers have previously established that a
belief that trauma is central to one’s identity predicts more severe P.T.S.D.;
Bellet called this “one of the most well documented relationships in
traumatology.” The perverse consequence of trigger warnings, then, may be to
harm the people they are intended to protect.

In other respects, trigger warnings seem to have less impact than their critics
have feared. Some opponents of trigger warnings seem to suppose that they are
a way for students to demand that they not encounter ideas that challenge their
beliefs, particularly on social-justice issues. That opposition is part of broader
worries about teachers “coddling” students, cultivating their fragility, or
shielding them from discussions that might expand their minds. Trigger-
warning studies, however, have revealed that giving trigger warnings does not
seem to result in recipients choosing to avoid the material. Instead, the warned
individuals tended to forge ahead.

If those suffering from P.T.S.D. were responding to trigger warnings by opting

out of reading or discussing the flagged content, then, as McNally has pointed
out, that would be concerning from a mental-health point of view, because the
clinical consensus is that avoiding triggers worsens P.T.S.D. As McNally has

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written, treatment of P.T.S.D. patients involves “systematic exposure to

traumatic memories until their capacity to trigger distress diminishes.” But, of
course, teachers should not undertake to therapize or treat their students—nor
should they act in ways that are known to be counter-therapeutic if they can
avoid it. Since there isn’t evidence that trigger warnings help, and there is now
some evidence that they might even increase anxiety, McNally, Jones, and
Bellet do not recommend the use of trigger warnings. As Jones put it, “From a
clinical lens, you should never do anything that doesn’t work, period, even if it
doesn’t do harm. If it’s not actively helping, encouraging its use would
essentially be engaging in clinical pseudoscience.”

One alternative, suggested by the Brandeis list, is to replace “trigger warning”

with “content note.” Would that be an improvement? Bellet told me that “what
really matters is not so much what you’re calling it as what you’re insinuating
about a reaction.” Jones added that “humans are pretty smart about language,
so, when you say ‘content note,’ if what you really mean is trigger warning,
people are going to figure that out very quickly, and then the advantage of using
a different word is gone.” Moreover, as the Brandeis students note, a person’s
triggers are idiosyncratic and hard to predict; it may be false assurance to think
that a list of stock triggers identified by administrators, faculty, or students
reflects the sensitivities of individual trauma survivors. For example, a person
who suffers from P.T.S.D. might be triggered not by discussions of events
similar to their experience but rather by a smell or a sound.

If, in the face of scientific findings, one lets go of the view that trigger warnings
foster mental health or facilitate learning, what reasons might remain for using
them? It may well be that, at this point, trigger warnings have developed a
spinoff cultural meaning that departs from the aim of providing psychological
aid to those who suffer from trauma. A trigger warning might really function as
a signal to the subset of students who are looking for it that the teacher is
sensitive to their concerns—or at least compliant with their requests—
regardless of psychological benefit or harm. The choice to send such a signal is
of course part of a teacher’s academic freedom. But it is important to undertake

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it with the understanding that signalling compassion for students and trauma
survivors in this particular way may be at cross purposes with helping them,
whether psychologically or pedagogically.

As the scientific consensus on trigger warnings develops further, it’s conceivable

that universities might even begin to worry about liability arising from their
myriad instructors acting in ways that are known not to help—and possibly to
harm—students’ mental health. Perhaps what is called for is a more neutral and
humble stance, in which instructors don’t approach pedagogy as if it were an
adjunct of psychological care. We could accept uncertainty about the psyches of
individuals, disclaim the conceit of exerting control over triggers, and avoid
confident assumptions about anyone’s trauma. That might help move teaching
in a direction that attempts first to do no harm.

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Jeannie Suk Gersen is a contributing writer to The New Yorker and a professor at
Harvard Law School.

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