*WARNING: This article contains a trigger warning*
Please consider this your warning of the trigger warning.
🚨 And this as your OFFICIAL trigger warning. 🚨
A recent analysis of 12 studies has found that trigger warnings do not actually help anyone but instead may lead to a "risk of emotional harm."
Please try not to laugh, as laughing is known to trigger some people.
"This meta-analytic review suggests that trigger warnings … do not help people to: reduce the negative emotions felt when viewing material, avoid potentially distressing material, or improve the learning/understanding of that material," says the paper on the website OSF Preprints. "However, trigger warnings make people feel anxious prior to viewing material. Overall, results suggest that trigger warnings in their current form are not beneficial, and may instead lead to a risk of emotional harm."
I mean, I guess it's the thought that counts...
Oh, the sweet irony.
So, it turns out that warning people about something that may trigger them leads to stress and anxiety without even having to consume whatever the "triggering" content may be.
Those who want to add trigger warnings to everything believe readers should be warned in order to prepare themselves for their own reaction to what they're about to read.
Welp.
It turns out trigger warnings don't work.
The studies show that people are actually more likely to read something that has a trigger warning than something without one.
"In studies where individuals are given a direct choice between options with and without warnings, options with warnings may garner more engagement," the paper says.
So, it seems like all trigger warnings do is make something sound more interesting than it is.
One of the study's authors, a Ph.D. candidate at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, Victoria Bridgeland, said trigger warnings can actually enhance the attractiveness of something; she called it the "forbidden fruit effect."
"If you warn someone about something, it can make it more desirable," Bridgeland said.
Trigger warnings can 1) make a person want to read something more and 2) cause a person stress, anxiety, and negative emotions without even reading the "triggering" material.
Bridgeland said it could be linked to "fear of the unknown or fear of getting told something scary coming up... And before you see it, it's a lot scarier than when you actually see it."
Another author of the study, Payton Jones, a data scientist at Pluralsight with a Ph.D. in experimental psychopathology from Harvard University, said, "Trigger warnings are a cautionary tale, that we should help people, but we should check that we're actually helping first, right?"
Yeah. Before coddling the public and forcing others to use arbitrary language in order to be inclusive and sensitive, first find out if you're not just making things worse.
Enough with the language police, please.
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