17 Studies: Trigger Warnings Don’t Work

According to this article in the Chronicles of Higher Education, trigger warnings do not work:

Trigger warnings do not alleviate emotional distress. They do not significantly reduce negative affect or minimize intrusive thoughts, two hallmarks of PTSD. Notably, these findings hold for individuals with and without a history of trauma. (For a review of the relevant research, see the 2020 Clinical Psychological Science article “Helping or Harming? The Effect of Trigger Warnings on Individuals With Trauma Histories” by Payton J. Jones, Benjamin W. Bellet, and Richard J. McNally.)

We are not aware of a single experimental study that has found significant benefits of using trigger warnings. Looking specifically at trauma survivors, including those with a diagnosis of PTSD, the Jones et al. study found that trigger warnings “were not helpful even when they warned about content that closely matched survivors’ traumas.”

What’s more, they found that trigger warnings actually increased the anxiety of individuals with the most severe PTSD, prompting them to “view trauma as more central to their life narrative.” “Trigger warnings,” they concluded, “may be most harmful to the very individuals they were designed to protect.”

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Erich Vieth

Erich Vieth is an attorney focusing on civil rights (including First Amendment), consumer law litigation and appellate practice. At this website often writes about censorship, corporate news media corruption and cognitive science. He is also a working musician, artist and a writer, having founded Dangerous Intersection in 2006. Erich lives in St. Louis, Missouri with his two daughters.

This Post Has 3 Comments

  1. Avatar of Bill Heath
    Bill Heath September 17, 2021 Reply

    The fact that trigger warnings don’t benefit those with anxiety is a symptom. The real problem is a poor understanding of the aftermath of trauma. The Blaisy-Ford v Kavanaugh skipped over the possibility that both Ford and Kavanaugh were telling the truth. Memories of trauma are created differently from other memories and there is no audit trail in the brain because the amygdala creates the initial memory. The memory is then revisited often, each visit corrupting the initial memory, until the trauma victim is unable to form a memory distinguishable from fantasy.

    My wife and two daughters were all victims of childhood trauma, and I can’t help them except to hold them.

  2. Avatar of Erich Vieth
    Erich Vieth September 28, 2021 Reply

    From the New Yorker:

    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 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.

  3. Avatar of Erich Vieth
    Erich Vieth October 14, 2023 Reply

    From the HxA Blog:

    “The collective findings were clear: trigger warnings had no significant impact on affective responses to distressing material or educational outcomes. Intriguingly, while warnings seemed to increase anticipatory anxiety, they did not lead to a higher level of avoidance of the warned content. In some cases, individuals may be more drawn to engage with material labeled as potentially distressing.

    Overall, trigger warnings do not work in the way that advocates assumed. While their intent to help the vulnerable may be noble, in practice, they do not seem like a helpful path forward.”
    https://heterodoxacademy.org/blog/the-illusion-of-following-the-science-in-the-war-over-trigger-warnings/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=bulletin&utm_campaign=231003

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