Trigger Warnings Make Gen Z Even More Anxious

At the very point that countries such as India and China are increasingly nationalistic and are increasingly inculcating their youth with militaristic and nationalistic values [Is the BJP altering textbooks to promote Hindu nationalism? By Murali Krishnan, DW, 25^th May 2022], we are infantilising our own people. The newly published The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic Mental Illness, by New York University’s Jonathan Haidt, finds that Generation Z essentially suffer from arrested development. They are super-cautious — they lose their virginity later, learn to drive later, move out later, are less likely to drink, and even become anxious when they must order food in restaurants — because they have been served and mollycoddled all of their lives. There is no more obvious example of this nurse-maiding than “Trigger-warnings.” And the worst thing is that research has found that they don’t actually work.

Trigger-warnings have become so widespread in recent decades that they moved far beyond warning television viewers that “the following report contains scenes which some viewers may find upsetting.” Viewers must now be specifically told that the report contains the pixelated image of a “dead body,” or that a movie includes scenes of, or even discussions, of “suicide.” This ruined an episode of the Korean series Squid Game for me, because it told me how it would end.

Such warnings are also tailored to specific groups, as in: “This article discusses sexual assault. If you are a survivor of sexual misconduct, BYU has extensive resources to help.” Some of them even advise you on what action to take: “If you do not wish to view these works, you may exit through the video gallery at right” [see, A Meta-Analysis of the Efficacy of Trigger Warnings, Content Warnings, and Content Notes, By Victoria Bridgman et al., Clinical Psychological Science, 2023]

Novels now require trigger warnings, because they were written many decades ago, and therefore reflect unacceptable attitudes which may deeply traumatise overindulged modern readers. The British 1924 novel A Passage to India, about colonial life under the Raj, requires a trigger warning, in its US edition, due to “offensive” language and “attitudes of this time” [Trigger warning added to EM Forster’s A Passage to India by US publisher, By Craig Simpson, The Telegraph, August 19, 2023]. Gone With the Wind, similarly, requires a trigger warning, due to its “harmful . . . racist and stereotypical descriptions” [Gone with the Wind is slapped with trigger warning by its own publisher . . ., By Stewart Carr, Mail Online, April 2, 2023].

But do trigger warnings actually work? Do they really psychologically prepare people for something that they might find upsetting and, in doing so, reduce the extent to which they get upset? According to a recently published meta-analysis of the studies on this the answer is, “No. They don’t.” If anything, they make things worse. So, really, they do little more than contribute to a culture of hypersensitivity where trigger-warnings become ever more ubiquitous due to a competitive desire to seem sensitive by including them ever more frequently.

The study — A Meta-Analysis of the Efficacy of Trigger Warnings, Content Warnings, and Content Notes — published in the journal Clinical Psychological Science in August last year should be sobering reading to those who increasingly insist on placing “trigger warnings” on just about everything. The meta-analysis of previous studies on trigger-warnings, led by Victoria Bridgland of Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, really does need to be widely read among broadcasters and publishers.

Advocates for trigger warnings argue that they help people to psychologically prepare for emotionally difficult material — to “brace themselves” — such that they respond less strongly to it. This is known as “Response Effect.” However, according to their results, studies on this matter, overall, find that the trigger warnings have no discernible “response effect.” They do not reduce a person’s negative feelings in response to that which it is assumed may trigger them. The authors summarise:

“A total of 86 effect sizes across nine articles measured the effect of trigger warnings on affective response to material presented after the warning. Effects were coded such that a greater effect size signified that warnings increased negative affect (e.g., distress, fear, anxiety) relative to the control condition. Overall, our random-effects omnibus analysis suggested that warnings had a trivial effect on response affect.”

The authors suggest that the warnings don’t work in the desired way because most people simply aren’t very good at emotional preparation. They need to be given techniques via which they might prepare themselves emotionally; not simply be told that they should do so.

Another supposed purpose of trigger warnings is “avoidance.” If sensitive people are informed that something triggering is about to appear than they can look away from the screen or leave the room. However, the meta-analysis found that people simply don’t do this to any significant degree: “. . . warnings had a negligible effect on avoidance.”

In fact, trigger warnings can induce the opposite effect. The warning makes people more interested in watching the “triggering” content, presumably because they are attracted to the sensational and to the slightly forbidden. In one study:

“Rather than randomizing to a single-warning or no-warning condition, in this study, participants were asked to choose between four article titles, two with trigger warnings and two without. Although this experimental strategy was distinct, standard mean differences could still be computed between participants who received a warning for Article A vs. no warning for Article A and so forth. Bruce and Roberts (2020) found that a given article was selected more often when it carried a warning (a decrease in avoidance).”

According to the authors: “These findings likely reflect the Pandora effect, which suggests that people have a general tendency to approach rather than avoid stimuli that has been marked aversive and uncertain.”

“Anticipatory Effect” is the idea that the warning itself will increase your distress: You will become distressed after hearing the warning but before viewing the triggering content. If this is what happens, then trigger warnings are worse than pointless. They simply upset people who are already prone to easily becoming upset. This is exactly what the authors found:  “. . . warnings increased anticipatory affect, with effects ranging from very small to medium to large.”

Finally, the authors discovered that warnings have no impact on people’s comprehension of the triggering material. Warnings are supposed to foster a “safe space” in which trauma survivors, for example, can prepare for distressing material, thus improving educational outcomes for them. However, the warnings don’t achieve this. They have zero impact on comprehension.

So what is the ultimate conclusion of this meta-analysis? Nobody could put it better than the authors, who are refreshingly direct for academics making their way through such a political minefield:

“Existing research on content warnings, content notes, and trigger warnings suggests that they are fruitless, although they do reliably induce a period of uncomfortable anticipation.”

In other words, they are worse than useless; they induce anxiety in people; they contribute to the culture of anxiety that Jonathan Haidt sets out in The Anxious Generation. This being so, “trigger warnings” are really just virtue-signalling. They are a way of signalling, and competitively signalling as they spread, to the Woke mob that you, too, are concerned about sensitivity and feelings and you are submissive to the mob’s demands.