Repost: Should the literary community still be using trigger warnings?

Science. I promise this is not a tired trigger warning article

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NB: This was originally posted last year, but I am taking off for the holiday. Presented with a couple typos fixed.

I know some people will be angry or defensive about this post, but I’m writing it anyway because I have had thoughts about this for a long time—as have others—but also feel I’m in a unique position to interpret this content. I’m a psychologist. Specifically, my doctorate is in social psychology. My research had a lot to do with political ideology, racism, and American electoral politics, but in the course of such training I spent a lot of time learning about research methods, the human mind, and a few different subfields of psychology. So my thoughts on this are driven from a combination of what I understand about the science and my personal opinion. In contrast, I have observed many people passionately arguing about this topic in the book world with absolute authority that is unearned, which is to say, based on personal opinion or purely personal or anecdotal experience.

Consider the general hypotheses: that writers should use trigger warnings (TWs) because they help people. This is actually composed of two parts—the moral argument about what we should do and the presumed psychological process at hand. The laymen’s assumption is that once the reader sees the TW, they can either 1) prepare themselves psychologically for what they are about to encounter so that they won’t be harmed, or 2) decide they want to opt out of reading the content all together so that they won’t be harmed. This holds the assumption that 1) encountering the unexpected trigger causes harm and 2) said harm should be avoided.

If you’ve ever worked in a scientific field, you know that the process of coming to conclusions is a long and arduous one: sometimes scientists battle it out for years on the same topic. When I first heard about trigger warnings I never thought they made sense, because they seemed to fly in the face of what we know about exposure therapy and how people recover from traumatic experiences. But I kept my mouth shut because the topic became politicized. The clamor about using them had gotten louder—it wasn’t just that some people had a personal preference to use trigger warnings, but the insistence that anyone who wasn’t using them was actively harming other people (no evidence for this is ever presented). Or even that TWs should be standard practice for publishing houses and included on all books (again, devoid of compelling evidence that this is a good thing to do). Just recently, I was listening to a publishing podcast and the host, upon reading a query letter, noted that the querier used a trigger warning for the content, and said, “Good,”—implication being that to not do so is “bad.” The argument became toxic when figures like Lionel Shriver wearing a sombrero and right wing figures bemoaning snowflakes entered the chat, along with people very interested (some in a bad faith kinda way) in the argument about using trigger warnings in educational settings. (I will say that I am interested in this discussion about literature, and not really what should be done in classrooms, but a bit more on the politics of this later.)

It’s odd to me that the pro-trigger warning population of people is the same population who spent the past few years saying on social media that “science is science.” Many things that do not seem to be intuitive are true. Imagine how controversial it was the first time someone said, No, we’ll just take a little bit of this pus from this person with an infectious disease, put it into your body, and then you won’t get this disease which might kill you. Lots of things people “know” aren’t true. Part of what is scary about the world is that often we don’t understand something and have to either put our faith in scientists or become scientifically literate ourselves. Pfizer and Moderna didn’t come out and say, “Take our COVID vaccines, they definitely work.” They released reports. I read them. I was a little anxious about getting the vaccine, but once I read the reports (specifically the methods and results section—wherein the authors explain exactly what they did, and what the statistical findings were), I felt good and ready to go.

A sampling of what the studies actually say

One study of individuals who had not experienced past trauma found no effect of TWs on anxiety, but that among those who believed that words are emotionally harmful, TWs increased anxiety. (Bellet, Jones, and McNally (2018)

A later study included both people with PTSD and without. (This is important because the general argument assumes that we are protecting people who have experienced trauma, and that this has a neutral to positive effect on both people without trauma and people with.) In the experiment people either did or didn’t get a trigger warning before reading passages of literature that included something bad (in some cases the trauma matched what a person had actually experienced.) TWs did not reduce anxiety. Generally speaking, there were not a ton of effects, but when there were, they represented small effects among people with a probable PTSD diagnosis—and in these cases TWs caused increased anxiety. Most concerning, the authors write, “We found substantial evidence that trigger warnings increased the degree to which participants viewed their worst event as central to their life narrative.” This is from a scale that assesses the extent to which they view the worst thing that happened to them as a reference point for personal identity. The reason this is concerning is that centering trauma in one’s life—making it central to your personal identity—is contrary to what we know about how people can therapeutically recover from that trauma. (This is a thing that happened to me, vs this centrally defines who I am.) (Helping or Harming? The Effect of Trigger Warnings on Individuals With Trauma Histories Payton J. Jones Benjamin W. Bellet Richard J. McNally 2020)

Another study Trigger Warnings Are Trivially Helpful at Reducing Negative Affect, Intrusive Thoughts, and Avoidance (not burying the lede here…) showed neither positive nor negative effects for TW, including in populations that had experienced trauma. (Mevagh Sanson, Deryn Strange, and Maryanne Garry, 2019)

This study (which is mentioned in the meta analysis below) actually looked at physiological responses to TWs including heart rate, respiration rate, and skin conductance. TWs increased these types of physiological arousal, regardless of whether or not the person had experienced some trauma or had any particular belief about TWs, “indirectly suggesting that regardless of previously held beliefs or advocacy, students are reactive to [the term TW]. This translates to all students being at risk for increased, unnecessary stress when they see trigger warnings on syllabi or reading assignments.” (Students’ psychophysiological reactivity to trigger warnings Madeline J. Bruce, Sara M. Stasik-O’Brien, and Heather Hoffmann, 2021).

Most important for me was this meta-analysis. A meta-analysis is a study of studies. It uses statistical methods to examine the effects of the independent variable (ie, TWs) as reported across different studies, to include studies that did not get published. (This is to combat the so-called “file drawer” problem, where a study that finds no effect isn’t sexy enough to get published. The problem is that sometimes the reality is that X has no effect on Y.) The authors conclude, “existing published research almost unanimously suggests that trigger warnings do not mitigate distress.”

The meta-analysis found that TWs did not have a meaningful impact on affective responses to negative content. This means that TWs did not prevent people from experiencing negative effects in reaction to negative content by psychologically preparing them. In other words, they did not do what they are intended to do. TWs also did not cause people to avoid the negative content. The analysis did, however, indicate that TWs increased “anticipatory effect” ie, what you feel after the TW warning but before the negative content; this effect size was larger for physiological measures of distress than it was for self-reported negative emotions. This study also concludes that there isn’t strong evidence that trigger warnings cause harm, which is to say that the control condition—no trigger warning—is basically the same as the TW condition.

A less scientific study

Over a course of a year, and definitely while drinking alcohol, I surveyed a small panel of psychologists to ask their opinion of this. These are people I went to grad school with, so their backgrounds vary in terms of field (clinical psychology, learning and behavior, affective neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and social psychology) but we all had PhDs. The general research question: what’s the deal with trigger warnings? What do you think of the science supporting them? Should we use them? Should people rely on trigger warnings to avoid content that matches trauma they have experienced?

In this conversation, it became apparent that I am more “online” than my friends, who were very unfamiliar with the argument within the literary world (ie, using them before books, articles, blogs, social media posts, etc.) but more familiar with it in educational settings. None thought the scientific argument in favor of using TWs was compelling. The one who was most online (they are a person who has been attacked online by assorted nutjobs) said, “the science is kinda shitty, but it’s more about not being an asshole.” The least online of my friends, who happens to be a clinical psychologist, was mystified by several examples I had presented. She more or less said, “why are we talking about using trigger warnings in Tweets if this person is so distressed –they should be in treatment immediately. Are they in treatment??” I think that most psychologists would agree that if a person has experienced something traumatizing, in the real world in most cases they are not going to get advanced warning that something may remind them of that trauma. A veteran can neither anticipate nor prevent a car from backfiring and making a loud noise. A man can get a whiff of cologne of a stranger that matches what his abusive father wore. You never know when you’re going to encounter it and the therapy you’d go through would be about adjusting to the real world.

In the “don’t be an asshole” category: TWs don’t appear to be supported by science, but maybe they are more of a politeness norm? Like a hey, heads up, the book you are about to read contains stuff about child abuse. Politeness norms make sense to me. The aforementioned friend who said not to be an asshole happens to not like horror movies where children are killed. (Not that I personally LIKE children being killed, but that I have no more a response to it than anyone else being killed in a horror movie because everything feels so fake to me. As a father of young children, he feels otherwise.) We are part of a weekly horror movie club and if I know he’s going to be there, I steer us away from things I know have that content. But I’ve never done this under the assumption that what I was doing was a moral good to prevent him from psychological distress and retraumatization—just respecting his preferences, and the purpose of the group is for all of us to enjoy a movie together.

But what if politeness norms could potentially cause harm? (Though there isn’t super strong evidence about TWs harming people, I would like to see more research about that effect in the second study I mentioned—about TWs being associated with increasingly making trauma central to one’s identity. That would be bad and is not intended.) I’m reminded of when the politeness norm of shaking hands in the US then became harmful during COVID—do we continue to do it out of politeness if we have reason to believe it could cause harm?

What is our philosophy of negative emotions and literature?

Which leads me to my next point.. Literature is not necessarily supposed to make you feel better, or even supposed to leave you in the same state you walked in on. In some cases, it’s actually supposed to make you feel negative emotions, maybe even ones you think about for years.  

This gets sort of philosophical, and I will fully admit to not being a philosopher. Assume there’s two types of fictional books: books which are about trauma (Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried) and books are not about trauma, but might contain brief asides that specific individuals might find traumatic (a scene in a Romance novel where a character dies in a car crash). In the latter case, you’re just signing up to be entertained. You’re reading a nice story about a love and come upon something you find unpleasant. The author included this information for some craft reason, no doubt.

But let’s think for a second about books about trauma. Someone who doesn’t know much about Toni Morrison might think that she wrote Beloved to demonstrate the horrors of slavery to white people, presumably with the goal of them understanding where Black people are coming from, or perhaps increasing their empathy towards them. But if you know Morrison, you know she has specifically talked about how she writes for Black people. Beloved is a book about Black trauma written by a Black author for Black readers—the very population who are the most likely to feel disturbed by its content. What was her intent? What does she want the reader to feel? Or maybe she’s not even thinking about readers—maybe it’s simply her own exploration of her own thoughts and feelings about slavery and she invites you in to peek behind her curtain. Tim O’Brien’s Vietnam fiction, where he is sometimes even included as a fictional “Timmy O’Brien” character, always seemed to me to be about him working through his trauma, not about educating me, the reader, a person who never went to Vietnam. It feels like you’re watching him process it in the moment which is why it feels so visceral.

I think about my own intent with different things I’ve written, which varies radically depending on the genre and type of story. One of my unpublished stories (the 11% story mentioned in this post) has ten chapters and each chapter gets progressively worse, from “oh no, something negative is happening,” to “oh my god what is happening,” to “oh no, this chapter is going to be about…” I wanted you to feel the existential terror and bleakness and to look into what I see as a void and see why I don’t believe in God. It’s intended to be a story that makes you feel bad from reading it. (It does, in fact, make people feel bad when they read it, which is why I think no one wanted to publish it.) If you feel bad, did I harm you? Then I have to admit, it was my artistic intent to harm you. Is part of our role as artists to “do no harm?”

Is it wrong, morally, for an artist to evoke negative feelings in you? Does this mean such art is not worth doing? Some art—art that is very didactic, like Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, or Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin—is written very much with the audience in mind. But some art is deeply personal, focused on how the artist interprets, processes, or feels about a particular thing. Some art that is written at a superficial level can be quite good, but when you read something that is absolutely exhilarating or has this sort of feeling of undeniable truth, it’s often this deeply personal type of art. The artist is writing their own truth. The vivid and continuous dream you are being invited into is theirs. They didn’t write it for you. They didn’t write it with your psyche in mind.

And finally, people being shitty.

Related to the overall TW issue are problems that POC writers Carmen Maria Machado and Silvia Moreno-Garcia have previously brought up in response to the notion that trigger warnings should be centralized (put on books like ratings). They have pointed out that TWs can be weaponized for political reasons, particularly against minority groups. (I can’t find the old tweet thread but you can look yourself at the sheer volume and breadth of the trigger warnings about Their Eyes Were Watching God compared to Fifty Shades of Grey.) Someone could slap “infanticide” or any number of warnings about disturbing content onto Beloved, and someone could easily use that as an excuse to attempt to ban it—as the book has already been banned many times. Students should not read Night because reading about the Holocaust may make students upset? (It’s supposed to.) Between the World and Me should be banned.. because it makes white students uncomfortable? (who the fuck isn’t uncomfortable talking about race?)

I hope this article comes to mind the next time you hear people in the publishing business talk about TWs. I probably want to write a whole separate post on the merits of reading for the explicit purpose of making oneself uncomfortable.

Photo by Raúl Nájera on Unsplash