Harvard expert warns ‘trigger warnings’ could be doing more harm than good

A Harvard professor is warning using the term “trigger warning” may itself trigger the negative reaction it is intended to prevent.

New psychological research suggests that not only do trigger warnings not work, but they could also have the opposite effect in some cases, Harvard Law School professor Jeannie Suk Gersen writes in The New Yorker.

Prof Gersen notes that "trigger warning" was included alongside "killing it" and "take a stab at" in a list of phrases that could trigger victims of violence and should be removed from everyday use.

The "Suggested Language List", developed by Brandeis University’s Prevention, Advocacy, and Resource Center, says that "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,” the reasoning goes.

Harvard University has been at the centre of the "trigger warning war" waged at college campuses across the United States.

And while both sides of that war are seemingly converging at the similar conclusion that trigger warnings should not be used, the reasons are vastly different.

As Prof Gersen highlights from one study at Harvard, people who received trigger warnings felt greater anxiety reading the same passages as people who did not receive trigger warnings. Another study found trigger warnings may prolong the distress of negative memories.

"The perverse consequence of trigger warnings, then, may be to harm the people they are intended to protect," Prof Gersen concluded.

In other respects, she adds, trigger warnings seem to have less impact than their critics, who say they’re a way for students to simply avoid ideas that challenge their beliefs.

"That opposition is part of broader worries about teachers ‘coddling’ students, cultivating their fragility, or shielding them from discussions that might expand their minds," she writes.

That argument against trigger warnings was first laid out by New York University social psychologist Jonathan Haidt six years ago in the book he co-authored, The Coddling of the American Mind.

Prof Haidt writes that the modern usage of trigger warnings originated in the early days of the Internet in self-help messaging boards and feminist forums. It broke into the mainstream and college campuses in 2011 and continued until reaching its peak in 2015.

In a 2015 essay in The Atlantic, Prof Haidt notes a previous New Yorker piece from Prof Gersen in which she described the difficulties of teaching rape law in the age of trigger warnings.

Some students, Prof Gersen wrote, pressured professors to avoid teaching the subject to protect themselves from distress. She compared it to teaching "a medical student training to be a surgeon but who fears he’ll become distressed if he sees or handles blood".

Prof Haidt argued there is a deeper problem with trigger warnings that defy the most basic tenets of psychology: overcoming a fear, phobia or PTSD is best done by exposure therapy, not avoidance.

"Students who call for trigger warnings may be correct that some of their peers are harbouring memories of trauma that could be reactivated by course readings. But they are wrong to try to prevent such reactivations," he writes.

"The expansive use of trigger warnings may also foster unhealthy mental habits in the vastly larger group of students who do not suffer from PTSD or other anxiety disorders," he adds.

"People acquire their fears not just from their own past experiences, but from social learning as well. If everyone around you acts as though something is dangerous — elevators, certain neighbourhoods, novels depicting racism — then you are at risk of acquiring that fear too."