Is "To Warn or Not to Warn" the Right Question?

Source: Kelly Breez, "Untitled" (with permission)

Roxane Gay calls it "an impossible debate." Nonetheless, debates about content warnings (aka "trigger warnings") have been waged on college campuses (and other circles) for about a decade. Do they help or harm? Do they create safety or an illusion of safety? Do they protect or censor?

I've been asking myself how we might move beyond the impasses these either/or questions tend to create. I decided to start by educating myself about the psychological research on content warnings—and consider these in relation to what some influential writers in the humanities have to say on the subject.

How do content warnings—commonly known as trigger warnings—affect the memory of painful or traumatic experiences? That's a question psychologists have tools to investigate. In a study published last month in Memory, Victoria Bridgland and Melanie Takarangi (Flinders University, Australia), the authors, conclude that content warnings may prolong—rather than diminish—distressing feelings associated with memory over time.

Bridgland and Takarangi build on a body of empirical research that suggests such warnings—on television, film, social media, classroom syllabi, and health care settings—create negligible effects and may increase distress, if only slightly. Most of the research offers strong evidence that warnings create slight "anticipatory anxiety" as people prepare to confront difficult material. Bridgland and Takarangi's new study is the first to investigate the longer-term effects of such warnings. That said, all of this research is conducted in laboratories, not the settings or contexts where you'd find content warnings "in the wild." They offer valuable—and sometimes counterintuitive—clues to the relative efficacy of content warnings, clues that may inform teaching practices.

Bridgland and Takarangi's study design involved priming participants to remember a negative experience. Researchers warned some participants that the experience was likely to be distressing and said nothing to others—and repeated the identical procedure during a second session two weeks later. Participants submitted questionnaires about their memories and mental states before, during, and after each session. Those who were not warned reported no diminished distress in relation to the memories in question, while those who were warned reported similar levels of distress after the two weeks.

According to Bridgland and Takarangi, there are two likely explanations for their findings:

1. Content warnings "[d]o not appear to enhance the use of coping strategies" when it comes to the negative experiences they're associated with—and therefore offer little opportunity for healing.

2. With repetition, they increase "event centrality"—the feeling that traumatic memory is central to a person's identity.

3. It is by now consensus in memory research that, in the words of Daniel Schacter, "retrieval cues" that activate memory "yield a new, emergent entity." When we recall a memory, we are primed by present experience. We experience the past through the lens of the present. Bridgland and Takarangi argue that when that lens links new distress to old, it is "capable of distorting how people perceive memories after a delay."

It's startling to consider Bridgland and Takarangi's research in relation to a host of recent studies suggesting that content warnings may not create a feeling of safety or offer therapeutic benefits.

• In one study, Guy Boysen (McKendree University) and his team conclude that "trigger warnings appear to have little impact on affect or learning, but they do increase people's belief that trigger warnings are necessary for sensitive topics."
• A team including Richard McNally, Payton Jones, and Richard Bellett (Harvard) finds that warnings increase "anxiety responses to distressing content" (in passages from world literature), but only slightly.
• In another, they suggest that warnings may have paradoxical effects, particularly for people living with PTSD: They "may reduce stress among people with PTSD by allowing exposure to be controlled"; however, they may also lead to "avoidance of trauma reminders," which "contributes to the persistence of PTSD symptoms."
• In yet another, the same team found that "trigger warnings were not helpful for trauma survivors" but that they "countertherapeutically reinforce survivors' view as central to their identity."

The evidence that content warnings produce "anticipatory anxiety" is strong, but that anxiety is neither severe nor long-lasting. A few conclusions in the psychological literature stand out as more complex, moving beyond the laboratory—and the classroom, for that matter—namely that they contribute to the distortion of memory, enhance the feeling that trauma is central to identity, increase a feeling of vulnerability, and, perhaps importantly, on their own, they fail to offer coping strategies.

And, yet, content warnings in the wild come with contexts and variables.

Writers in the arts and humanities tend to be alert to these. Roxane Gay and Jack Halberstam trace the roots of content warnings to the history of film and television ratings and feminist communities invested in creating a collective feeling of safety—linking them to both censorship and support.

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As early as 2012, Gay argued that content warnings create "the illusion of safety" but that this illusion can be productive. She doesn't believe in trigger warnings, yet she endorses them. In her words, "maybe trigger warnings allow people to avoid learning how to deal with triggers, getting help"—a point very much in keeping with Bridgland and Takarangi's conclusion that warnings don't offer coping strategies and with the Harvard team's concern that they may lead to avoidance, worsening trauma in the long run.

Gay writes, "Television ratings are like airport security—an act of theater, an illusion designed to reassure us, to make us feel like we control the influences we allow into our lives." She's not dismissing warnings, airport security, or warnings. She's explaining how they might work by creating a feeling of safety through illusion. Ultimately, she argues, that feeling of control can be a form of coping. For that reason, she concludes, "Those of us who do not believe should have little say in the matter. We can neither presume nor judge what others might feel the need to be protected from."

In 2016, Halberstam observed that what most repudiations of trigger warnings "take issue with is the projection of the student as a fragile organism with no intellectual immune system and a minefield of a psyche that may explode into pieces at any moment." Again, his point echoes Brigdland and Takarangi and the Harvard team—that warnings may create the sense that students are defined by their vulnerability.

But the core of Halberstam's argument addresses the impasse between "trigger demanders" and "trigger refusers." In his view, both ignore the differences between and among students and fail to account for the differences race and class make to experiences of trauma. He writes, "Both sides ignore the differences between and among students, and all fail to account for the differences that race and class make to experiences with trauma, expectations around protection, and exposure to troubling materials."

Halberstam's conclusion echoes another of Gay's observations, "This is the uncomfortable truth—everything is a trigger for someone. There are things you cannot tell just by looking at her or him." In the wild, as in the classroom, it's not possible to control for or to predict the experiences or needs of a group of people engaged in collective learning endeavors.

In an essay on the evolution of content warnings in fan-fiction forums, Alexis Lothian demonstrates the way such communities generate content warnings collectively. Members of these forums approach warnings as a starting point rather than an end in themselves. As she writes, "The demand to think through warnings policy can be understood (even if it is not intended) as an invitation to open space rather than to close things down. Warnings discourse can be part of the ways we mindfully construct the landscapes of our classrooms, the worlds we build when we craft a semester-long process of ideal intellectual development—knowing as we do that nothing is going to work out quite the way we have imagined once it comes into practice." In other words, content warnings, in the right context, can engender varieties of coping strategies, the kind Bridgland and Takarangi found missing when they were deployed as ends in themselves.

With all this in mind, it makes little sense to argue stringently for or against content warnings.

A supportive environment may make productive use of them. By the same token, another supportive environment may help students—or people in general—cope with difficult material without the use of content warnings. Context is everything.

I'm with Gay. I don't believe safety is guaranteed by content warnings. Safety comes and goes. It must be fostered, and even then, it will falter. The world is not safe, and because of that, we need supportive environments more than we need "safe spaces."

Ultimately, it seems to me that content warnings—and arguments about them—are an intellectual response to intensely emotional realities. On their own, they turn the particulars of traumatic or distressing experiences into abstractions. They can't account for the variability of emotion (or identity, for that matter). They can't protect every person.

The work of creating trust requires supportive relationships. It requires attending to the concrete realities that each individual brings to a group—as well as those that emerge through the relationships engendered by the group. There's no template for those.