Amerika

The urge to remove things that offend, upset, or cause doubt seems to be eternal in humanity. New cumulative research suggests that trigger warnings backfire:

A new Flinders University study has found that nearly 90% of young people who saw a trigger warning still chose to view the content, saying that they did so out of curiosity, rather than because they felt emotionally prepared or protected.

The findings published in the Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry aligned with a growing body of lab-based research suggesting that trigger warnings rarely lead to the avoidance of potentially distressing material.

The study also showed no significant relationship between mental health risk markers—such as trauma history, PTSD symptoms, and other psychopathological traits—and the likelihood of avoiding content flagged with a warning.

Much as censoring speech makes it into a form of information contraband, adding a trigger warning — like those old “viewer discretion is advised” warnings on television shows — signals that there might be something exciting in there!

Tags: censorship, trigger warnings