What if Trigger Warnings Don't Work?

[Nevilledog]

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The New Yorker
@NewYorker
Since there isn’t evidence that trigger warnings help—and there is now evidence that they might even increase anxiety—some psychologists do not recommend their use.

newyorker.com
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.
2:51 PM · Apr 17, 2022

https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/what-if-trigger-warnings-dont-work

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https://archive.ph/LyxJz


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 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 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.”

*snip*

[Jilly_in_VA]

1. Seems like everything

has a TW these days, and I'm not convinced they do that much good. I am a survivor of emotional, psychological, and physical abuse, and of an alcoholic marriage, among other things. I came out of all that a tough old broad with a pretty salty tongue and a soft heart, and things that are supposed to "trigger" me mostly just piss me off or make me sad. I think being pissed off is a healthy reaction.

But of course, I could be wrong.

[tirebiter]

2. This is a both sides issue

Last edited Mon Apr 18, 2022, 02:06 AM - Edit history (2)

Hearing they were racist made some people feel uncomfortable, so they said, so they want any reference like CRT to just go away. Gotta toughen up.

[LuckyCharms]

3. This is excellent food for thought.

Personally, there has been only one thing that I've read on the internet that just the mere title of almost threw me into a deep depression.

I've seen just about everything there is to see, both in real life and on the internet. But there are two things that I will almost never open on the internet. If I know the content contains anything detailed about animal abuse, I won't open it further. The same with child abuse.

It's not that I completely avoid these subjects, but I don't like knowing every single detail about what happened. If a subject is discussed about something being heinous, inhumane, sickening, etc. and that is as far as it goes, I'm ok with that. But in more explicit cases, I guess some sort of "trigger warning" would be useful to me. I wouldn't really call it a trigger warning though, just maybe some kind of statement of what is contained in the article or video. Or even just the subject, followed by the word "Explicit". Then I would make a decision on whether to view/read it, or not.

I tend to just accept things as they are.

But regarding this one short description of this one thing that upset me more than almost anything else ever has in my life, was something in which a "trigger warning" would have been useless to me. And the title wasn't especially explicit even. It merely quickly described something that happened. But my mind managed to fill in the details for me, and I'm not over it and probably never will be.

I think what I am getting at is that maybe "trigger warnings" are not really what should be used. If only the word "Explicit" was used in the title of something, and I knew what the subject was, I would probably choose to avoid it. I'm not sure if the use of that one word would be considered a trigger warning or not.

But here's the thing. No matter how this is studied, and what the study concludes, there is going to be the need for real, actual trigger warnings, for more than a few people, because I believe that a lot of this may have to do with their mindset at the exact moment that they come across an article, book or video.

[Journeyman]

4. Went to a play, a few years back, where the audience was warned on entry there would be gunfire. . .

It ruined the emotional impact of the production. I knew there would be gunplay, and as the show progressed, it became obvious it would be the climax of the story, so all the surprise, all the drama, was drained before it happened. Whatever lessons could be drawn were diluted, and my experience immeasurably compromised.

I prefer to be taken by surprise in literature, as in life, so the totality of the experience can be registered.

To know in Act I, Scene 1, that Shakespeare's Verona lovers off themselves is to lose a tangible attachment to their plight.

I say this as someone who has seen a fair share of life's worst, and who knows first hand the tragedy unfettered life can dole out. But I accept it, come what may, and hope that even in its most calculated phrases I may learn lessons as I expand my understanding, just as I have gained a measure of enlightenment through all that has happened in my existence.

That's me, however. YMMV.