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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

Sept 28, 2021

Earlier this year, Brandeis University’s Prevention, Advocacy, and

Resource Center released a “Suggested Language List,” developed by
“students who have been impacted by violence and students who have
sought out advanced 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
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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.

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
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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 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
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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 his Ph.D. in 2021, and
Richard McNally, a psychology professor and the author of
“Remembering 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
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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 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.
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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 it with the understanding that signaling 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.