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Ruxandra Teslo's avatar

interesting! wouldn't a "middle way" be to just call it "note on content"? I think the word "trigger warning" presupposes ppl will be triggered and I personally find it a bit childish for that reason. Content Note would be a bit more neutral. I must say I believe in the idea that exagerating the potential of harm in everyday discourse is making us less psychologically resilient, so I am coming from that kind of direction

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Sam Pratt's avatar

Hi Paul, big fan of your work.

It’s an interesting argument, but you seem to be defending a weak version of trigger warnings. In my mind, the debate was never about whether we should warn people about content that’s universally distressing (e.g., “hey look at this photo of a severed head”). I think it’s often useful to give people information about content, as you do in your syllabus, and I don’t think many anti-trigger warning folks would disagree. For example, no one’s seriously arguing that PG-13 labels on movies are coddling kids.

I think the more interesting debate is whether it’s helpful to 1. Warn individuals with PTSD about potential reminders of their trauma and 2. Warn individuals with no trauma history about potentially distressing (ambiguous but plausibly upsetting) content. In both cases, a trigger warning doesn’t just tell someone what they’re going to encounter but that it could trigger an intense negative emotional response.

Ultimately, whether or not trigger warnings are common courtesy should be premised on whether or not they’re effective. (If you try to help someone but end up doing nothing, or making things worse, you’re not doing them a service). I think there’s good evidence that trigger warnings are unhelpful for individuals with PTSD, as you allude to. I also think there’s good reason to suspect that they’re unhelpful in the second usage. For example, my colleagues have a cool new paper showing that content warnings decrease the aesthetic appreciation of art (DOI:10.31234/osf.io/6h5k8). The same argument has been made against warning people about distressing themes in literature: Telling people how they’re likely to react to difficult content draws their attention away from other themes they could have appreciated/learned from and might just make them distressed when they otherwise wouldn’t have been.

Of course, there’s another way that trigger warnings could be ‘effective:’ they could signal respect and support to students. Or they might just signal the professor’s ideological alignment and compromise their epistemic credibility. Who knows - some of my colleagues and I are prepping a study that will look at the interpersonal signals that trigger warnings send.

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