Do Trigger Warnings Do More Harm Than Good?

A “sensitive content” screen on Instagram is designed to allow users to avoid potentially disturbing content.

Source: Instagram/ Fair use

If you’ve spent any time on social media, chances are, you’ve come across these types of warnings. A quick “TW” or “CW” often precedes social media captions, and sensitivity screens–another form of content warning that blurs potentially offensive images until users click to uncover them–are now a mainstay on social media. But what does the research say about their effectiveness?

Do trigger warnings work?

It certainly seems like trigger warnings should be helpful. Why not give people a warning that they might be upset by certain content, especially people who may be particularly vulnerable to it?

Shouldn’t that help them prepare for the content, maybe prompting them to use strategies to manage any negative emotions that might come up?

This line of thinking may be why so many people are in favor of trigger warnings. Research suggests that 57 percent of college students are in favor of them and most students report they are “somewhat helpful” to their mental health. And certainly, it may be the case that trigger warnings are helpful for some people—research cannot capture the experience of every individual in every situation.

Trigger warnings probably don't work as planned

But, in general, the evidence on trigger warnings doesn’t line up with what we might expect. Research suggests that trigger warnings neither reduce people’s negative emotions after seeing disturbing content nor do they help people to cope better with that content.

In the study described above, for example, researchers ran six separate experiments with a total of 1,394 people, randomly assigning some to receive a trigger warning before viewing content and some not to. They varied nearly every component imaginable across the experiments—the type of content (video vs. text), the population (college students vs. other adults), the negativity of the content, and the wording of the trigger warning–and the results were consistent.

Trigger warnings did not reduce participants’ anxiety or negative feelings. They made no difference.

General population and people who've experienced trauma

These effects seem to hold both for the general population and for those who have experienced trauma—the very people trigger warnings are often intended to protect. In a study of 451 trauma survivors, participants were randomly assigned to either receive a trigger warning or no trigger warning before reading a passage.

Again, there was no difference in the reactions between groups, even when the content of the passage closely matched the type of trauma the participant had experienced. Unfortunately, trigger warnings did not help trauma survivors to avoid painful memories or brace themselves for upsetting content.

Don’t trigger warnings at least help people avoid content?

Across studies, these warnings do not seem to reduce the likelihood that people go on to view negative content. In one recent study, for example, college students watched a “traumatic film” and then had the option to view images from the film, either preceded by a trigger warning or not. The researchers found that trigger warnings did not increase the likelihood that participants would avoid the images.

Studies of Instagram’s “sensitive content” screens reveal a similar pattern: They don’t seem to deter people from viewing negative content.

This finding may be because, when we’re told we can’t do something–like view potentially disturbing content–it paradoxically increases our curiosity and interest in it. This is called the forbidden fruit effect, and it might be causing trigger warnings to backfire. In other words, trigger warnings may make you more likely to want to view the content.

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Do trigger warnings cause any harm?

Studies suggest that trigger warnings may prompt a “nocebo” effect, where negative expectations of a situation cause more negative outcomes. Participants are told they may feel distressed as a result of viewing certain content, and this leads them to feel more distressed before or after viewing that content.

For example, in one study, participants who were given trigger warnings before reading a disturbing passage reported more “anticipatory” anxiety (when they also showed a belief that words could cause harm) than those who saw no trigger warnings.

Another risk? Trigger warnings may increase trauma survivors’ tendency to see their trauma as central to their identity, which has been linked to increased PTSD symptoms. Trigger warnings also rely on the principle that avoiding upsetting content helps reduce anxiety, but in fact, research consistently finds that avoiding upsetting content can worsen symptoms of PTSD and anxiety over time.

Overall Translation

There are things we still don’t know about trigger warnings. What, exactly, constitutes a “warning?"

Would a simple information label (“this post contains violence”) be different from a warning label (“this post contains violence and you might be harmed by it”)? Or, as some argue, have trigger warnings become so ingrained in the “cultural lexicon” that even a simple information label tacitly implies the idea of a “trigger”?

Are there ways we could make these warnings more effective? Like all research, studies on trigger warnings have limitations, and we may never be able to say for sure whether trigger warnings are ineffective in every case, for every person.

Here’s what we do know, though (summarized in a recent meta-analysis): As it currently stands, trigger warnings do not seem to impact most people’s emotional responses to content. They do not reduce the likelihood that people will avoid content, and in some cases, may increase it. And they increase people’s distress (anticipatory anxiety) before viewing the content.

In other words, they don’t seem to be working for most people, and in some cases, they might be making things worse.