What do trigger warnings actually do?

PJ Vogt
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You can compare and find smarter credit cards, savings accounts and more today@nerdwallet.com. Nerdwallet finance smarter reminder credit is subject to lender approval, and terms apply there's this complaint about America that you hear in conservative circles, sometimes in private. In liberal ones, too. It's this idea that we've become a country with a strange relationship to victimhood, that being able to say that you are a victim of something can confer a kind of status and power in America, which sometimes is good because people who have been hurt might get the right to ask for considerations and concessions that would protect them in the future. But it also sometimes creates this perverse incentive.

I remember at a party once a housing advocate complaining to me about what she called competing in the oppression olympics. This is a tricky thing to talk about. Perhaps you can hear me trying to be a little bit careful, partly because I myself have never really been a part of any kind of identity group that has claims on victimhood. I mean, there's like aggrieved people who say that men are being oppressed or white people are being oppressed, but those people tend to carry tiki torches or are involuntarily celibate. Not for me.

But there is one group that I have been a member of. I don't know if they're victims, but who don't tend to publicly assemble in the same way.

When I was a kid, a statistically improbable number of people I know committed suicide. I'm not supposed to say committed suicide, killed themselves, died by suicide. My high school and my hometown were a suicide cluster, and I lost a lot of people, some of them close friends. And it put me in a group, people who have lost loved ones to suicide. And it helped me to understand that it can actually be really nice to be a part of a group like that, even a group that is just united by something that hurt them.

When I meet other people who have lost people to suicide, I can at least imagine I understand something about them. I understand the questions that haunt them. I understand what they struggle with. When I meet those people, I actually feel a kind of gratitude for my own struggles, because I have a way to sit with them in their experience that I just never would have had without it. Like a lot of people who lose people to suicide, like a lot of people, frankly, I've had moments in my life where I was suicidal or had thoughts of suicide.

I think that's pretty common. I think we pretend it's not. And then some time ago, I joined a different group, the group of people who have attempted suicide. Obviously, you can tell from context I failed. The appropriate phrase I'm supposed to use is, I did not complete suicide, which makes it sound like an unfinished assignment.

But surprisingly, that attempt was the beginning of a real turning point for me in my life. A funny stat that I think a lot about me being me. I read a lot about suicide after it happened. But one of the things I learned is that of people who try and fail, which is many people, something like eight in ten will never attempt again. Whether it's because you see what it does to your friends and family, whether it's because trying to commit suicide is a very strong signal to the people who love you that you need help and support, and a very strong signal to yourself that you need to make some serious changes.

For whatever reason, people who have had the misfortune of seeing the inside of a psychiatric ward are very likely to never see one again. But it's also meant that for the rest of my life, I think I'll feel like I'm a member of this very strange kind of group. I don't go to meetings. I avoid the message boards still in my head. It's the group I imagine I belong to under a big tent.

The people who've lost loved ones, struggled with suicide themselves or tried it.

I had a conversation with a listener who I consider to be a fellow traveler. She emailed the show with a question. We'd ended up talking last July, actually. But then the conversation had just stuck in my head in a way that I didn't expect it to. Okay, so can you just say your name and where you are and what you do for a living?

Felicia
Felicia. Harsh. I live in Seattle, and I'm a research scientist one. Wait, what's a research scientist one? Mm hmm.

Yeah. What does that mean? So I work in the lab, in a neurobiology lab, and I help out with research. Oh, interesting, interesting. So you are thinking analytically about people's brains all day.

Harsh
Yeah, I'm very analytical, yeah. Felicia had written in because she'd had this unusual experience on the Internet, an unusual experience she'd encountered during a time of deep mourning. In July of 2021, her brother died by suicide. When my brother Chris died, and I was just starting to grieve and things were new. After first losing someone, you know, it's like you don't really know what's gonna be upsetting or, you know, everything is kind of new in a way, right?

Like the world has changed. And so I do have this pretty strong memory of watching a YouTube video, and it's like this youtuber that I love, and she was saying, oh, and there's gonna be a mention of suicide in this video. And, you know, if that's something that you don't wanna hear or experience right now, then, you know, don't watch this video.

PJ Vogt
What Felicia was encountering was a trigger warning, or if you prefer, a copy content warning, a little road sign warning, what was ahead. But Felicia had this unusual reaction, which is that the warning itself made her feel bad. And I kind of got this, like, jolt because I was like, I don't know what I'm gonna feel like. I don't know if I should watch this video or not. I don't know what's coming.

Harsh
And I was really anxious about it. Like, what's gonna happen when she mentions suicide in her video? And so can I ask you, what was the video supposed to be about? I don't remember what the video is about. The creator is Mama Doctor Jones.

PJ Vogt
Who's Mama Doctor Jones? She's in ob Gyn. It was so brief. And I think that's part of what I remembered about it was, wow, this didn't seem like it was worth a content warning. Right?

It sounds like the content warning in the world where one imagines that hearing about the existence of suicide when you're grieving someone dying by suicide is like an extra pain. It's like the content warning itself, it's offensive. You found it offensive? I found it offensive for me personally, because the idea that I've forgotten that. Suicide exists or that, like, hearing that.

Harsh
Someone died by suicide would be upsetting, it's like, no, what's upsetting is that I lost my brother. Like, I know that suicide exists. It happened to someone I love. So did you feel, this is such a weird question to be asking you, but did you feel mad at Mama Doctor Jones? A little bit, yeah.

PJ Vogt
For Felicia seeing that warning, it felt a little bit like the experience you have when youre in deep grief and someone offers you a not very helpful platitude like, ugh, get out of here. Felicia, of course, acknowledges these warnings might not be aimed at people like her, they might be mainly for the benefit of suicidal people. And she doesnt know what kinds of warnings a suicidal person might want or not want before encountering media about suicide. Shes certainly not saying we should, like, delete all the references to suicide hotlines from news articles, but for her, as perhaps part of the audience for the trigger warning, she wonders if theyre misguided because she says, even if she wanted to avoid upsetting material, the material that upsets her would be impossible for a stranger to predict. She gave me an example.

Harsh
The one thing that I do remember that really upset me out of nowhere was there was a podcast and they were discussing, like, a close sibling relationship, just like the person was talking about loving their sibling. And that was the most upsetting thing in that time that I heard at all, just because. And it came out of nowhere. I didn't expect it. And it did make me think, like, boy, even if I was trying to avoid things that upset me, it's not possible, you know?

PJ Vogt
Yeah. And I also don't know that it's useful. I mean, avoiding your grief. There can be something therapeutic in that. But, like, overall, you know, you want to face it.

Harsh
I mean, I know that there are people out there who are struggling with thoughts of suicide and who are trying to keep themselves alive. And I don't know if those warnings are for them. I don't get it. I don't understand.

Felicia
There's a part of me that does. Right. I was actually just talking to a friend last week about this, and her perspective was like, well, it doesn't hurt, you know? And my perspective is more like, maybe it can hurt. And does it actually help?

PJ Vogt
I don't know if I'll put this in, but I will tell you, as a person who's absolutely had those thoughts and really struggled with those thoughts, when I've seen those warnings, they've totally pissed me off, too, because I felt like, do you really think that the thing keeping me on this mortal coil is just not hearing that word? Yeah, exactly. It's like a real trivialization of the mental anguish that I've sometimes had to be like, don't say it around him. Yeah, he'll go. And so, like you, I'm like, I don't know.

I know my experience. I don't know other people's. And I think there's actually some academic research on this, so I will find out as much as I can. Okay, sounds great.

This conversation with Felicia last summer, what it would make me think about was how for the. And I know how silly this phrase sounds. But I cannot find another how. For the suicide community, maybe more than others, decisions just get made on our behalf. Well meaning people, perhaps psychiatrists, perhaps others, just decide stuff, what words we should use, how we should tell these stories in public.

Some of those decisions are evidence based, a surprising amount or not. With trigger warnings in particular. I was pretty sure they hadnt come from psychiatrists. I didnt think theyd come from suicidal people. I knew they arrived via the Internet, but not much more than that.

After the break, we dig into the ancestry of the trigger warning. We meet its mommy and its daddy.

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Felicia
Hello? Hi, Victoria. Hi. Sorry, we're just doing some camera futzing. Oh, that's all right.

PJ Vogt
Okay, that's better. Very moody. That's okay. It is very moody. Are you at home or are you at the office?

Where are you? No, this is my home. My office doesn't have pink walls. This is my house. I was like, what a nice office.

Felicia
Honestly, this is my home. Doctor Victoria Bridgeland. A postdoctoral researcher in Australia, she works at Flinders University's forensic and clinical cognition lab. She studies the mechanics of how trigger warnings actually affect us, not just warnings for suicide, all sorts of trigger warnings. She's been studying all of this since she was a PhD student.

My thesis was on trigger warnings, and a lot of my work has been on trigger warnings. And so that's what a lot of people like to talk to me about, because I'm sort of one of the, I guess, quote unquote world experts. Although some people don't like me calling myself a world expert because I'm young, but even though I have the most number of publications on trigger warnings, but I have had people be like, you can't call yourself an expert because you're just a junior researcher anyway, so that's my spiel. What made you want to study trigger warnings? Like, how did you decide that this is what you wanted to research?

So when we started doing trigger warning research, it was in my honours year, actually. So when I was a very baby researcher just starting out, I think it was either 2016 or 2015. There was so much focus and news articles and discourse about trigger warnings in the media. They're called trigger warnings on college campuses. A cue to students that something controversial, potentially uncomfortable or upsetting is about to.

PJ Vogt
Be brought up in class or by a guest speaker. Stirring debate on college campuses, where some students are calling on professors to implement what are known as trigger warnings. Labels used to flag course materials. This moment in time that Doctor Bridgeland's describing, this is the part of the trigger warnings history that I was pretty familiar with. If you were online in the 2013 to 2014 season of Internet, basically the period before Trump's ascendancy, trigger warnings were a polarizing fight for a few years.

For their supporters, they seemed like a way to be more respectful of people who'd experienced something difficult. So people say that trigger warnings are really great. They help survivors of trauma and people who have mental health problems. They help them basically by, if you see one, you may use it to avoid upcoming content, so you can protect yourself from further harm, or if you see one, you can use it to mentally prepare yourself. And then because you're prepared and something's not going to come as a surprise.

Felicia
You then are going to process that better and you're not going to feel as negative. I worked in progressive media at the time, public radio, where the consensus feeling about these warnings at first seemed to be that they were a little much, maybe, but whatever. There's always someone being a little much. But for conservatives, the trigger warning story back then was just utter, delicious catnip. Look at these nutso college kids, these deranged snowflakes.

There was the other side of the camp in the debate that was pushing back against this side and saying, no, they're not protecting people, they're coddling people. I think we're creating a nation of babies. Just because you've gone through something, be it terrible or not, doesn't mean you can't read a literary text and have something to say about it. I mean, people need to toughen up in schools, too. It was a somewhat exhausting cultural skirmish, but then Donald Trump got elected.

PJ Vogt
The Fox News right mostly moved on to other things.

But in the years that followed in mainstream culture, honestly, it's sort of surprising how quickly trigger warnings went from the mainstream media writing think pieces about whether they should exist to the mainstream media adopting the practice itself. I see them in all sorts of places, warning about all sorts of things. Suicide, sexual violence, but also stuff like homophobia, racism, eating disorders, the deaths of animals, something that precedes most american meals. I got a content warning from HBO a few months ago, which made me smile. It preceded a true detective episode, the dark and disturbing tv show, soberly warning me that the episode might contain material that could disturb me.

Anyway, I was surprised to learn that the intellectual ancestors of the trigger warning actually seemed to predate the entire Internet. Doctor Bridgeland told me this prehistory as she understands it. It's less a chronology, more the story of a bunch of soupy cultural ideas floating around that would later manifest in this practice. One ingredient in that soup was a 1957 legal case that helped cement a principle in medicine called informed consent. So the idea that you should inform people about negative stuff, or you should inform people about something like a medical procedure or something before they actually agree to engage in it, and that was after this landmark court case where somebody wasn't informed of the risks of a medical procedure and they actually ended up being paralysed.

Felicia
And so that was, it was a court case. And then from then on, medical procedures had to have all this documentation to be like, I consent to this stuff and I know the risks. Obviously, the concept of consent and even consent in medicine was not invented in 1957. But those ideas were refined there. Doctor Bridgeland is referring to this case called Salgo v.

PJ Vogt
Leland Stanford Junior University board of trustees, where Martin Salgo sued his doctor and Stanford's board because he'd received a surgery without fully understanding its risks and the surgery had left him paralyzed. After Salgo, there'd be a set procedure and paperwork around informing patients and memorializing their given consent. A kind of consent ritual that a lot of Americans would find themselves exposed to and which some would later come to expect in other places. So informed consent, the idea that we should get a warning before entering into a situation that might hurt us, that's one ingredient in the soup that will produce trigger warnings. According to Doctor Bridgeland, Hollywood is likely responsible for another, specifically because of the Hays code.

So some people know the story of the Hays code. But just in case, before 1934, which is when the Hays code started to be enforced, you could essentially put whatever you wanted to in a Hollywood movie. This was well before our modern rating system. This was an early era of Hollywood that was as free from censorship as the modern Internet. When you read about pre code cinema today, people are liable to talk about how these films from the 1920s and early thirties were free to just depict things that a few decades later would be forbidden or deeply discouraged.

Interracial relationships, drug use, strong female leads. You're afraid of yourself because you know you love me. Oh, am I? Yeah. You're afraid you're gonna take me in your arms.

Felicia
You're afraid you're gonna kiss me. Is that so? Well, why don't you do it? Keep away from me. Why don't you do it?

PJ Vogt
Keep away from me. You don't dare stay here. You don't trust yourself. Do it again. I like it.

Scenes like this were considered pretty racy stuff for their time. And some people did not adore this racy status quo, particularly american Catholics. Facing mounting pressure, Hollywood's trade group, the Motion Picture Academy association, decided to introduce the hays code as a voluntary form of cinema censorship. Under the new code, studios agreed that they would only produce a film if it avoided lowering the moral standards of those who see it. End quote.

Which, of course, made for some relatively boring movies. In the 1960s, independent movies which could disregard these rules, depicted all sorts of nudity and naughty words and began winning viewers over from the boring mainstream studio fair. So now Hollywood had a problem. The big studios didnt want their movies to offend audiences or alarm politicians. But they also didnt want their movies to be so sanitized that they lost their ticket sales to these maverick indie directors.

So the MPAA turned to a radical new idea. Rather than outright censorship, theyd create content warnings. Before you watched a movie, a little blurb would tell you who it might be appropriate for and what might be in it. So your little ten year old snowflake wouldnt be triggered by watching the Godfather. And that's where you get film warnings, because you warn people about the content, and then they can decide whether or not they want to watch it or whether or not they want their kids to watch it.

Felicia
It's been sitting in our cultural zeitgeist, these ideas about informed consent. Then with the birth of the Internet in the late nineties, that's when we see actual trigger warnings appear. They appeared on feminist message forums. One that's frequently cited as potentially the first place they were ever seen is on a forum called Mist magazine. It was a feminist message board, and people would pretty much talk about all their experiences on there, primarily talking about, like, sexual assault, eating disorders, and feminine type issues.

And a lot of users said, I would like you to warn me before you tell me about this. And so that's when they started using these warnings on these boards. There's little indication that the initial push for these warnings was coming from people with any particular expertise in trauma. Instead, the push seemed to come from people on the Internet who were just trying to find ways to be courteous to each other or to avoid causing offense. People who happen to frame their requests around their understanding of mental health concepts.

PJ Vogt
A Buzzfeed News article tracking the evolution of the trigger warning found an early example from 2002, where an anorexic blogger was warning her readers that her live journal blog was pro anna, meaning she was describing being in favor of her disorder, not against it, and warning that her writing could be a trigger for anorexics who were trying to recover. And then, weirdly enough, trigger warnings. One of the earliest ones that I can find using the wayback machine is from 2003, and it's on fan fiction websites. Really? So fan fiction websites started using them a lot?

Felicia
Yeah. And were they, was it for content that could be upsetting to people, or was it like, spoiler alert? It was for content that could be. Upsetting content that was in fanfiction stories, which we know can be very bizarre and disturbing. And so they have warnings on them, and they still use it widely now, like, if you're ever on Tumblr and you come across, like, weird fan fiction, they've got all these lists, huge laundry list of different warnings of things that might upset people.

PJ Vogt
I was familiar with the idea that trigger warnings had begun more as an Internet phenomenon than an academic one. It had never occurred to me until hearing you tell the history this way. In my mind, I was like, there's a lot of discourse, obviously, that comes from the Internet, a lot of it around, like, sort of progressive ideas or ideas about mental health. And so in a way, the idea that trigger warnings came from the Internet made sense. It hadn't occurred to me that.

Another reason it makes sense that trigger warnings develop on the Internet is because for people who are used to film and television, where there's a regime of what is allowed to be broadcast and what is allowed to be broadcast with and without warning, trigger warnings are an attempt to bring some of the expectations we have developed from Hollywood film and say, hey, we're going to rate this content for you. Like, you're going to be able to know what you're getting into before you get into it. Yeah, that's a really good way of looking at it, actually, because obviously the Internet's very user driven, and so people are putting out all this rogue content. It doesn't have any overseeing body. So I guess, yeah, you're going to have to make your own sort of laws out there in the Wild west, especially in the early days of the Internet, when all of this was completely new and people were sharing these kind of things for the first time, and you're exposed to a lot more things.

Okay, so one way you can trace the beginning of trigger warnings is informed consent models. In medicine. You can see it in sort of Hays code Hollywood and the rating system that follows it. In the current incarnation, it starts on feminist message boards and fan fiction websites. And then where does it go from there?

Felicia
From there, we sort of saw the birth of social media in, like, 2005, six and seven. I think it was like Twitter, Tumblr, the communities on there, and the hashtags, use of hashtags, warnings. But, yeah, I think social media just obviously skyrocketed and took it everywhere.

PJ Vogt
After trigger warnings overtake social media, a young generation raised on LiveJournal and Tumblr and Twitter arrives on campus and starts insisting that professors put warnings in front of material on the syllabus. I think there was sort of like three events that occurred around 2010 to 2015. Between that period, there were three key things that happened. So 2013, Oberlin University issued a document to all staff that said that they need to understand what triggers are, avoid necessary triggers, and provide warnings. And then that got a lot of flack in the media.

Oberlin College, famously liberal, turns out to be not liberal at all. It's pretty authoritarian when it comes right down to it. What's a trigger warning? Oh, boy. Trigger warnings have been a major thing.

Theme of this year. Trigger warnings are this idea that if you. I went back to look at this 2013 Oberlin College handbook that had so upset Tucker Carlson. The handbook talks specifically about a classic novel by Chinua Achebe, things fall apart, which it calls, quote, 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.

End quote. The handbook doesn't cite any research or literature saying trigger warnings work, but it does say that, quote, issuing a trigger warning will also show students that you care about their safety. These ideas started gaining traction on other campuses. Then it was 2015. A group of undergraduate students from Columbia University wrote an op ed calling for the use of warnings in the uni, and that also had a lot of backlash.

Felicia
That was another big media splash of, like, students are demanding warnings and all this kind of stuff. What happens to the little darlings when they graduate from college and life doesn't come with trigger warnings? Well, I'm a little. I think we're gonna find out. You know, a lot of other universities followed suit.

So a lot of, like, student boards from various other places were like, yeah, we want them as well. So it was, like, kind of student driven in that way. And then the really spicy one was in 2016. The University of Chicago, the dean published this famous welcome letter, which has the line, we do not support so called trigger warnings in it. If you're an incoming freshman at the University of Chicago and you're looking for trigger warnings and safe spaces, well, the dean of students would like to say, you can go fuck yourself.

PJ Vogt
I don't think he said that exactly. He didn't really say that, but he kind of implied it. And there was a really famous article, the Codling of the American Mind, published in the Atlantic in 2015. And that was really the crystallization, I think, point of this culture war, which centralized, say, microaggressions, safe spaces, and trigger warnings all in the same space, and it really took off. This brings us back to where we'd started this chapter.

By 2015, Trigger warnings had just become a fully polarized issue from the right to the center. Trigger warnings, ironically, were themselves offensive, a sign of a country treating its college students like weird babies. Or if you were on the left and online, you probably either believed in trigger warnings or shrugged and went along with them. Another new kind of etiquette to observe, a small firmware update for online behavior. One reporter I know pretty well who is me, recorded a lot of trigger warnings between 2015 and 2019, certainly on episodes that discussed suicide.

I don't honestly know if I believed these warnings worked or not. I knew some listeners really liked them and some were upset if they didnt hear them and it just felt like a weird thing for me to fight about that. I felt impolite. What I did not do was ask, is there any good research on these things? But in Australia, a young academic was doing just that.

Doctor Victoria Bridgeland in 2016 decides to start actually studying the effects of trigger warnings to learn what theyre doing. Eventually she will conduct experiments and you can hear about the results of those experiments after the break.

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Victoria Bridgeland
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PJ Vogt
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Welcome back to the show. So in 2016, doctor Victoria Bridgeland decides she wants to study trigger warnings in a lab. At the time, almost everyone seemed to agree that trigger warnings were doing something. Advocates thought they were straightforwardly protecting people from harmful material. Critics thought they were coddling the mind, essentially turning us all into mental weaklings.

Victoria and her team were not willing to take any of that for granted. Before deciding what trigger warnings were doing, she wanted to know first, were they ActuAllY doing anything at all? So here was her first experiment. Two groups of people would be shown a series of photos, the same photos to each group, but one group would be given a caption that made the photos boring. The other a caption that made them disturbing.

So picture a photo of passengers boarding a plane. Group one's Boeing starts shipping their new dreamliners to airlines in 2019. That's not a disturbing headline. Group two's caption, I've lost everything. Mother takes photo of sons boarding plane shortly before fiery crash killing all.

Showing these photos to these two groups was the design of the first experiment. Yeah. So there was two reasons why we wanted to do that. A, because of good experimental control. So people are seeing the same photos, but we're just changing the valence or, like, what they're feeling with the news headlines.

Felicia
So if we give people ambiguous photos where nothing is actually going on, are they going to read something negative into it that's not there? So that was one of the questions we wanted to answer. Interesting. And then another big reason we did that as well was because of ethical guidelines. So we wanted to have a study with a really clean, no warning condition.

But in order to do that, like, and get it through our ethical review board, we had to try and do it in a way that we could show something negative that wasn't too negative, because it was too negative, we had to warn them in the consent form. Yes. So what are the obstacles to studying this? Yes. If you just wanted to show somebody, like, a truly horrifying photo, like, you actually would have to warn them.

PJ Vogt
Yes. You can't do it. You can't do that. So it's really hard to study trigger warnings in that way.

So what did you. Fine. I mean, first of all, were you able to sufficiently disturb people with relatively anodyne photos when the context suggested that the photo is, in fact, disturbing? Yeah. So we had, like, a rating scale, and people that were in the neutral conditions would rate things, like, low, and people in the bad condition rated things at, like, seven or eight.

Felicia
So they were feeling more negative than the people that weren't in the negative condition. But we didn't find any differences for whether they were warned or not. So that was all we found was that when people saw our trigger warning, they felt anxious. So they had an increase in state anxiety right before they saw the photos. All the warning did was make people feel anxious at the beginning.

And then when they went to actually view the negative material, they felt the same as people that hadn't been warned. So I do want to interrupt and point out the experience that Felicia, our listener, had, that the trigger warnings made her anxious instead of making her feel better. These experimental subjects were demonstrating the same response. It's just the first experiment, but to me that's interesting. Okay, so what this test would suggest is that if one of the things a trigger warning might do is it might cause somebody to choose to engage with content, but do it sort of like girded or with preparation, this study would at least suggest that the warning doesn't make a difference.

PJ Vogt
Like, you have the same experience whether you're warned or not. Yeah. So it didn't mentally prepare them. Like, we can't see any evidence that they were better prepared to reduce how negative they felt about that stimuli. They felt the same as people that hadn't been warned.

Felicia
They felt as negative as people that hadn't been warned. And that effect of like, not finding a difference across groups has been widely replicated across multiple different types of really negative stimuli. Now, like people seeing actual traumatic films, negative text passages, negative lecture materials, other kinds of negative stimuli besides my ambiguous stuff. So the first conclusion doctor Victoria Bridgeland was able to draw from this early batch of studies was that trigger warnings did not seem to help influence the experiences of the people who encountered them. Or as she put it, they do nothing.

They dont make people feel worse and they dont make people feel better. So maybe theyre a gesundheit, a social gesture that we do to show that we care, even if we suspect or know that its not really doing much.

PJ Vogt
But that still left a question in my mind, which was, this all might be well and good in a laboratory setting where randomly selected people were presented with random material that may or may not disturb them. But that wasn't really testing what we were curious about. The whole point of a trigger warning was supposed to be that it allowed specific people to avoid their specific triggers. How would you even test that ethically anyway, in a laboratory?

I could imagine somebody who is a more firm believer in the efficacy of these warnings. They would say, like, well, you know, the test conditions don't match the real world, because if the traumatic event I had was a car accident, I'm gonna be specifically and highly attuned to photos of destroyed cars. And so unless you're taking a person who has a specific kind of PTSD and exposing them to a trigger that's related to that PTSD, then you know you're testing something more general and that they'd be talking about something more specific. Does that make sense? Yeah.

Felicia
So there actually has been a couple of studies that have matched trauma survivors traumas with the stimuli in the study, and they still don't find a benefit. So for people who specifically, and I have to say, this isn't a crazy study to imagine, but for somebody who's like, I was in a horrible car accident. Yeah, cars are making me flinch. This year, I will sign up for this study. That is going to be traumatic for me because I just want to know, even among those people, if they see a trigger warning, it doesn't help them.

PJ Vogt
The content is still just as disturbing as if they didn't see the trigger warning. Yeah, it doesn't seem to make a difference for those people either. Okay, so trigger warnings don't seem to work in the sense of being told the bad thing is coming does not actually help you gird yourself for it. But there's another way trigger warnings could still be helpful. That concept of informed consent.

We actually do like having some kind of rating system for things parents like, knowing the ratings of the movies their kids want to see. I dont like eating thai food if there are five chili peppers next to it on the menu. Rating systems can give us the option of avoiding experiences we dont want to have. So I wanted to know, what were trigger warnings doing for people who were choosing not to look? Was it helping them?

How do you measure, like, isn't a trigger warning effective for those people who see the warning sign and then don't engage? We don't find a lot of that in any of the studies that have looked at avoidance. We don't seem to be able to find those people that are like, I've had a really bad experience with this, and now I'm deliberately avoiding this type of thing. If you're a person listening to this, a person with PTSD who does avoid troubling material when they're given a heads up about it, who at this point might be wondering, wait, how statistically rare am I? According to a 2021 study, out of 100 people, six will behave the way you do.

Felicia
I think something else to note is that trauma triggers are really weird. Like, they're really idiosyncratic, they're really unique to each person, and they're not always what you think they'd be. So often a true trauma trigger that's going to trigger you to relive or like, have a really bad. Traumatic intrusion is often stuff associated with the event that happens just before the event. So like a warning signal cue, but it's often nothing to do with the actual negative thing.

It could be like the headlights flashed in your eyes and so now when light flashes in your eyes, you have a trauma reaction. Or like, it could be someone's had a sexual assault and the perpetrator was standing next to their bed before they assaulted them. And now when that if they wake up and someone's standing near them, near their bed, they're going to have a full reaction to it. It could be smells as well. Like, smells can be a really powerful trigger.

Random objects. I've seen converse shoes listed as somebody's trigger. Like, you just never know what it's going to be. So I think trigger warnings in that sense is hard to know whether or not it's even going to capture everybody's triggers to begin with. But in a few studies that we've looked at now in terms of avoidance across the board, people just don't seem to avoid negative stuff all that much.

PJ Vogt
So trigger warnings as actual warnings, also do not work super well because people's triggers tend to be highly idiosyncratic. Weirdly, here again, another experience that Felicia, our listener with the analytical mind, had self reported. The patients of suicide didn't upset her. A description of a loving sibling relationship had. There's no content warning for that.

Doctor Bridgeland says there's another reason trigger warnings don't work very well as actual warnings. And this one really surprised me. Although maybe it shouldn't have. Perhaps the biggest problem with how trigger warnings actually work in the real world is that human beings are very curious, and if you tell them something on the Internet might disturb them, it makes people more likely to click, not less.

Felicia
There's this really fun study called the Pandora's box study, where they gave people like, three options across these studies. So they all got the same three options. They could either press a button that would give them, like, a nice sound or a nice image or a nice experience. A button that would give them a negative sound, a negative image, or like a shock, or a button where they were like, I don't know what this is going to be. It could be nice or it could be bad.

Like, which one do you think they chose? They slammed that unsure button way more than the other two buttons, which is like, why would you do that? But it's funny, it sounds, it sounds impossible to imagine, like a crazy quirk of human nature. And then if I told you there's like a thing we invented in real life like that called social media, and it's popular use of people's time and attention, ever. And we've done like multiple studies on this now, and we find that when we show people like a blurred image, about 80% to 85% of people will just instantly click to uncover it.

So there's 15% of people that don't. But importantly, across multiple studies, we found that those people aren't those vulnerable people that we're trying to protect. And in one of our studies, actually, it seemed to be that people with psychopathological characteristics, so like PTSD symptoms or depression, we found in one of our studies that actually people that were more likely to want to look at it, actually had elevated psychopathological characteristics. So it seemed to be going in the opposite direction. Wow.

Which is interesting.

PJ Vogt
Victoria says that while we may want to believe that humans seek out things that make us feel good and avoid what hurts, thats often not the case. Humans engage in what academics have beautifully termed counter hedonistic behaviors. Depressed people seek out sadness inducing material, anxious people ramp themselves up. We humans demonstrate a remarkable affinity for what is familiar to us, even familiar suffering.

Felicia
And in PTSD, which is maybe one of the most interesting types of behaviours, is for a long time people have thought of PTSD, one of the cornerstone Hallmark features or symptoms, as avoidance. So when you think of a PTSD sufferer, you think about them having all these triggers and being sensitive and trying to avoid things that might make them triggered. But actually there's quite a few people with PTSD that engage in self triggering, which is where they'll deliberately seek out content related to their traumatic event, to sort of not let the memory fade and like make meaning out of their negative experiences and find similarities with other people that have had these experiences. But importantly, that behavior is actually associated with like higher symptoms. So it's not, doesn't seem to be helping them.

PJ Vogt
But what you see essentially, is that one of the underlying assumptions that one might have about human behavior, which is that people who are in pain avoid information or material that might make them suffer, that that doesn't seem to be necessarily borne out by research. Definitely not. So it sort of goes counter to the ideas of how a trigger warning might work, because the whole idea of a trigger warning is you should see it and then make a rational decision about either avoiding it or approaching it based on whether or not that would be good for you. But I don't think people are always doing those things. Right.

Felicia
Also, within eating disorders as well, and this hasn't been as widely studied, it is something that I'm hoping to study soon. People with eating disorders often have a high ambivalence about disorder recovery. So they often feel that they want to get better, but they also don't want to get better. And so there's a lot of anecdotal reports saying that they actually use trigger warnings to find content. Like, I've seen it in a lot of interviews, so they're actually using the warnings to find the worst content because that's going to be tagged with.

With warnings on it. Oh, God. So it, like, puts it in a section in which people can find it. Exactly, yeah. So part of the reason that I'd wanted to speak to you is that we had a question from a listener to our podcast who.

PJ Vogt
Her brother had died. He died by suicide. She was finding that when she then saw trigger warnings about suicidal content, it made her feel hurt and angry. Mm hmm. Her reaction of feeling angry and hurt by the warning itself, is that statistically unusual, or have you seen reactions like that in the studies that you've run?

Felicia
We haven't actually studied this before, but it's something that we've been thinking about because we have actually been seeing more and more of this online. So you see this a lot in the child loss space online in terms of miscarriages. Cause a lot of people online find solace sharing their experiences, and then other people will be like, I want trigger warning on this for, like, child loss or miscarriage. And they're like, but I don't want to put that on my experience because it was really horrible. But it was also my experience, and I don't want you to say that my experience is too horrible for you to read or look at.

PJ Vogt
Right. And this came through really strongly. I was on a panel discussion on an australian tv show, Insight. Hi, I'm Kumi Taguchi. On this episode of Insight, Trigger warnings, they're everywhere these days.

Felicia
They tell us what to avoid. And there was a guest on there who had lost a child, and she was really angry every time she saw a trigger warning, the same way that I guess that person was that you mentioned, Rachel, your baby daughter Mackenzie, died when she was seven months old from a rare genetic condition. Do trigger warnings about topics like child loss help you?

No, they actually harm me.

My life for the last seven years has been what other people would find triggering or traumatic, she said. Like, I went through this horrible experience, and I don't know why you think that. You should not have to also sort of see some of the negative stuff that other people go through, and it's not going to be as bad for you as it was for me. Like, I don't want you to turn away. I want you to look and look at what happened to me and look at my pain and learn from it and learn about these types of things.

So I've done a lot of media podcasts, interviews, and people put trigger warnings on my story, and that really hurts me. My daughter doesn't deserve to be covered in trigger warnings. This woman, Rachel, is making a very human request here. Please don't make me feel like my suffering is taboo. Stories like hers about resilience and healing, I think most of us know those stories can be helpful, can be maps drawn by humans who survived something.

PJ Vogt
But it's complicated. We all know there's a difference between hearing a story like Rachel's versus, say, repetitively watching gruesome images or video. And what about when the stakes are at their highest? What about the warnings? We started our story with suicide trigger warnings there.

We know we're supposed to be careful because the assumption is that stories about suicide are uniquely dangerous to tell because suicide, like all human behavior, can be socially contagious. It turns out, though, when you look at that notion more closely, it's actually kind of complicated.

A 1974 study suggested the existence of something called the Werther effect. The Werther effect demonstrates that stories about suicide can inspire suicides in the real world. Its named after a protagonist in this novel where the hero loses his love and then takes his own life. But in this part I didnt know. A 2010 study discovered a different countervailing effect, the Papageno effect.

This is named for a different suicidal fictional protagonist from an opera. He too loses his love. He too contemplates suicide, but he doesnt do it. The Papageno effect describes how in some instances, stories about suicide can reduce the likelihood of suicide among the people who experience them. It just depends on how the actual story is told, how its framed its why the CDC offers members of the media guidelines for how we tell these stories.

Common sense suggestions anybody online could follow, like avoid glamorizing suicide. Dont talk about methods. The guidelines contain no suggestion that the media precedes stories about suicide with any kind of content warning. I can tell you the story of one piece of media that did come with a content warning. In 2017, Netflix released a tv show called 13 reasons why.

Aimed at teenagers. It broke almost all of the rules we have about how to responsibly tell stories about suicide. It depicted the death of its hero in graphic detail. The rest of the story was about how her death got her the revenge on her enemies. She so justly wanted suicide depicted as heroic, even possibly necessary.

Researchers found a measurable uptick in suicides among male teenagers when it came out. Although they were careful to say this was correlation, they couldn't prove causation. I'll tell you one last story about suicide, a personal one that I hope isn't reckless to share. There is a chapter in my life in which I'd left a psychiatric hospital, and for a while, about six months, I remained profoundly suicidal. I did not want to talk about it with my friends because I was worried I would say the wrong thing and be sent back to the hospital.

I was lucky, though. I had a really great psychiatrist during that time. We were working together very closely, and I used to do this thing that I found as effective as it was unusual. I had this pattern where I'd see something often on the Internet that would set me off. I would very much want to die.

I'd call him. I'd tell him how much I was struggling. He'd listen, he'd usually pause, and then he would ask this question. He'd say, the reason you want to do this, is it about something that's actually happened or something you think is going to happen? Usually it was more the latter.

He'd ask, well, then, could you just wait? Just wait until the bad thing has actually happened? And weirdly, I would agree to this. And then the bad thing, either it wouldn't happen or it would happen, but it just would not be as bad as I'd pictured. There's a joke in here, which is that procrastination saved my life.

But the other week, I actually asked my psychiatrist, why did you do that, and why did it work on me? And he paused for a moment, and he dug in his phone for a quote. The quote went, anything that's human is mentionable, and anything that's mentionable can be more manageable. When we can talk about our feelings, they can become less overwhelming, less upsetting, and less scary. The people we trust with that important talk can help us know that we are not alone.

The quote was from Fred Rogers. My psychiatrist said you needed to talk about it. Being able to talk about things is usually what makes people okay. The thing that I think the trigger warning people got right is that the Internet can certainly hurt us in very real ways. And I would like to think that, trigger warnings aside, there might be a way to make the Internet better.

Doctor Bridgeland has a forthcoming study looking at alternatives to trigger warnings, strategies that might actually be useful to people who have seen upsetting material. When she described these strategies, they sounded to me a lot like the kind of processing you do in therapy or even just with a good friend. Yeah. So in the study that we ran, I think we had two different kinds of strategies. We had, like, distraction techniques and more of a reappraisal technique.

Felicia
And I think probably aftercare could be a thing there as well, which we haven't looked at. So by that, I mean, like, as you said, if it does start to ruin your day, what can you do? What can you do to help yourself? I mean, as you talk about, it's interesting, it makes me think that in some ways, yeah, there's absolutely a conversation to have about trauma and traumatic response and resilience and how we heal from things. But it's also like when you talk about, oh, this pandora's box experiment, and people being attracted in ways that aren't always healthy for them to mentally unhelpful content.

PJ Vogt
That is what social media is. And in some ways, the idea of, like, we've made a website that will sometimes please you and sometimes really hurt your feelings in ways that will addict you and keep you coming on the trigger warning would go on. Your decision to go on these websites at all. The warning is almost a way of absolving the platform, or the website or the Internet itself, of responsibility for the thing that we all go to it to do. We go to it to sometimes disturb us and to be addicted in a disturbing way.

And the trigger warning just pretends that that's not the case when the research and my own experience points to the idea that it probably is. Yeah, yeah, I guess we do have individual responsibility for what we consume as well, which is another thing is like, when you're using a trigger warning or expecting people to use them, you're sort of asking somebody else to take responsibility over things that you're selecting. But on the other hand, social media is so pervasive, you can't really go without it. And if you're a young person, like a young teenager or something, that's when it can get really bad. Because I think if you're a big, multi global platform with billions of users and a lot of money raking in, you do have some kind of responsibility to ensure the users who might be these young, vulnerable users are safe.

Felicia
Case in point, the reason why we started looking at these sensitivity screens was because we saw all these press releases after a 14 year old girl took her own life. Her name's Molly Russell, and there was a coronial inquest, and they actually concluded that her consumption of negative content on Instagram was one of the direct causes of her death. And after that, Instagram beefed up all of this warning stuff. They beefed up all of the sensitivity screens, they started removing a lot of, like, self harm content, but it's not hard to find any of this kind of content. So they're trying to, I guess, put warnings on things and take things down, but it's really not doing all that it could be, but it's interesting when.

PJ Vogt
You tell that story. This young woman, Molly Russell. Yeah. It's like the other part of this argument that you see people having about trigger warnings is there's one side that says we should take seriously the emotional harm people feel when they see things that hurt them. And there's sometimes another side that says, no, that's not real pain.

We don't. Let's not all be babies. And you're saying the pain actually is real, and particularly for young people, can have real consequences. It's just the thing we're calling a seatbelt isn't a seatbelt. Exactly, yeah.

Doctor Victoria Bridgeland, postdoctoral researcher at the University of Flinders and the author of a long and growing list of trigger warning studies. The CDC has requested that I tell you that if you or someone you know is struggling with thoughts of suicide, you should call a suicide hotline in the US. The number is 988. If you don't love the hotlines, I get it. Just find someone to talk to.

Anyone. Anything that's human is mentionable. Anything that's mentionable is manageable. And there's a lot of us out here managing. As far as I can tell, we're pretty glad we stuck around.

Victoria Bridgeland
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PJ Vogt
Plan savings with three lines of T Mobile essentials versus comparable available plans. Plan features and taxes and fees may vary.

Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey and Jigsaw Productions. If you got something out of this episode, please rate and review us over at Apple Podcasts. Funny thing to say, but it really does help. We also have a paid premium version of our show. You can find it at search engine show.

We offer all kinds of bonuses, plus you can support the work we do. Thanks to Daniel who just subscribed to Incognito mode. Daniel in his email said he travels and works alone and wanted podcast recommendations. Here's three that we like David Marchese and Lulu Garcia Navarro have a new show called the interview that we're pretty excited about. What now with Trevor Noah is good.

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